Stories That Appeal to Planned Giving Prospects (PSA 10)

Stories That Make Donors Engage (… so you can have more conversations about planned gifts)

Practical Solution Announcement 10

JEFF: Hi everybody, this is Jeff Stein from Planned Giving Marketing. And, as always, I’m joined by my friend Greg Wilson. Greg is the Senior and Major Planned Giving Officer at Good Shepherd Rehabilitation Center in Allentown, PA. This is another in our series of PSAs: Practical Solution Announcements focusing on helping you market your planned giving program more effectively.

I have ranted myself over the past several weeks, particularly with the appeals from colleges. My alma mater, my wife’s alma mater, and now where my kids go to school keep sending us marketing, “We need money. We need the money. We need the money.”

You keep asking for money and I have no idea why you need the money.

You were in the middle of the semester. You have money in the coffers. Why do you keep asking for money for the kids? My kids are at home! I’m feeding my kids. Right? What’s going on? I don’t mean to look at it very, very selfishly, but you keep asking for money and I have no idea why you need the money.

I spoke with one of our clients in higher ed who we have a great relationship with, and I feel comfortable saying, “You’re a well-endowed college. You crank out very, very successful alumni. Your fundraising efforts are very, very strong, yet here you are generically asking for money for the kids. I’m not feeling it. I don’t get it.” Is this the best way to talk to planned giving prospects?

And she reveals, “You know it’s kind of hard to realize these things when things are going normally. But when things aren’t going normally, you realize the number of kids who work at on-campus jobs as a means of supporting themselves. You don’t realize how many kids are on campus who are otherwise homeless… Or the kids who have traveled from foreign countries who can’t afford to fly back and forth halfway around the world.”

When you put it that way, stories asking for money don’t seem so off-putting anymore. As a matter of fact, she gave real tangible examples of how the university could really use help taking care of kids. Yet, those stories never make it into the planned giving marketing. They never make it to the messaging. I think it’s because organizations are coming to the realization that things are very, very different now than they were under normal circumstances.

This is going to be up to us as fundraisers and marketers to make our donors aware of what’s really going on, and to appeal to their emotions to get them to help us in ways that we never asked them to help us before.

GREG: Yeah I think so. It’s at that intersection of being evergreen and yet specific stories kind of deal. If your marketing focuses more on your mission, it’s easy to just to into … hey, how is the new normal of today impacting our mission and how does it change our mission delivery.

Marketing’s job is to get my target list smaller.

You could now say, you know, in our case–again to pick on Good Shepherd in a good way–like this is Good Shepherd. This is our mission. This is how the mission delivery has changed because of what the new normals are. So I don’t have 500 people to call; I only have five people that I need to call who I know I’m going to have a good conversation with who will then lead to a gift.

Some of the calls that I’ve had over the last couple weeks… they have self raised their hand and have said, “You know what, I know you guys are going through a lot of challenges right now. What can we help with and what can we do?” But unless there is that planned giving marketing message that is going out and saying, “This is Good Shepherd’s mission and in this case, things have changed in how we deliver that,” no one is going to know to raise their hand.

JEFF: I would say it’s marketing’s job to plant the seed in the donor’s head that there is a problem that their philanthropy can fix. And I would take it one step further to say that the more specific you can get about any one particular problem, the better chances you have of ringing the bell with that donor.

Going back to your letter “by committee”–the one that gets so watered down that, in the end, it says nothing in particular. You run a greater risk of being completely generic than being incredibly specific. Specificity works in two ways. It gets the people to take action … and it helps other people to think about specific ways they can take action.