PSA: Story Telling and Planned Giving Marketing

How to use stories to increase the rate of respond in your planned giving marketing.

Transcript: 

JEFF: Just as a practical example. One of my favorite success stories is from a public college in PA. They were working to transition annual fund donors into planned givers.

They were enabling them to name their scholarship if they were able to document that they would endow it with a bequest after their annual giving ends.

What we did was, we profiled someone who was about to graduate. She had gone to school on an endowed scholarship. She held up a sign wearing her cap and gown, thanking the family who endowed her scholarship.

And we asked the question: how would you name your scholarship?

It was remarkable, because our client got responses, such as, “I never knew this was possible. I didn’t know I could name a scholarship. What do I have to do? Sign me up!”

So, again, the content didn’t revolve around what the tax advantages of making a planned gife were or the specifics of how the gift would work.

What we focused on was the impact and how the donor could have a say to what the impact was.

That got a lot more feedback and generated a lot more leads than an exchange of information about a particular gift vehicle.

GREG: Yeah, and I want to second that real fast. I had that same experience as a front line fundraiser.

Where had a program where you could fund  the scholarship in one of three ways, that I referred to as a sliding scale: an Annual Fund gift, a Major Gift to Endow, or a Deferred Gift, a planned gift that could be set up in your estate.

And just being able to articulate that to people. To say, “Here’s an impact that you can make by making this type of gift.” 

And people just responded and responded and responded. 

I would take those people who responded to our marketing at the time or who would be more open when I called.

And it just started to get them excited about the impact they could have. We were phrasing it in a way that was more open minded for them. And it took off. It was a huge amount of fun.

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