"A gift in your will" ~ Too much to ask?
File under: When your board says...
"Hell, no!"
It was a record crowd: webinar attendees from 4 continents, 8 countries; most US states (+DC); most Canadian provinces; a potpourri of time zones globally.
All gathered to learn one thing: how to SELL charitable bequests.
One recommended tactic? Send an annual letter to your truest of true believers. In that letter, ask them to consider adding charity to their Wills.
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Push-back came soon enough...
Joy, director of development at a fabulous UK charity, wrote me a few weeks after the webinar on bequests:
My board of directors has rejected this idea, believing sending such a letter to donors is inappropriate.
How common is it for a nonprofit to send such a letter? Is this established practice?
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Dear Joy...
Thank you SO much for getting in touch.
It's probably the most common objection: that it's impolite or inappropriate or insensitive or ghoulish or nasty somehow to raise any topic that's even remotely connected to death.
I'm assuming that's what makes your board uneasy. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
You asked if it's common practice.
The answer is yes: it's common, especially in the UK. It's where I first heard of the practice, actually. The UK's cherished Royal National Lifeboat Institution depends on charity in wills and is frank about saying so. Does that image look like something you're doing because you're dead?
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Let's look at this practically.
An annual letter is the cheapest, easiest, most direct way to solve the chief obstacle in bequest marketing: "Gosh, it never occurred to me to add a favorite charity or two to my Will. What a good idea!"
Researchers found that long-time donors are happy to considermaking a charitable bequest ... yet most hadn't done so. Why? One more time: "It never occurred to me!"
Still: An annual letter is just one way to raise the issue with donors. A donor survey that mentions just how important bequests are to your charity's future also works well. This example comes from Australia, courtesy of Moceanic:
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It's all in how you write the letter.
Some key points about such once-a-year reminder letters:
This is a "YOU'RE LIVING A GREAT, USEFUL, PURPOSEFUL LIFE" letter ... and there's more you might do, if you choose.>>> It's definitely not a DEATH letter. We have to stop thinking of legacy donors as future dead people. Globe-trotting legacy researcher, Richard Radcliffe, frequently shares this mantra: bequests are "Life driven ... death activated."
The letter isn't about bequests really. It's about someone's best self: their values, their interests, their willingness to be a helper and stand for something. This annual letter is MOSTLY about celebrating your tried-and-true best supporters for being who they ARE right now.
In this annual letter you're asking for just one thing: consideration. "Would you please consider adding charity to your Will?" That's the core message. About 55-60% of Americans have a Will; rising to 70% for Jewish-identifing US households. In the UK it looks like half the households have a Will. In Italy, Romania and other countries with strict inheritance laws, charitable bequests seem unlikely.
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You're not asking them to LEAVE a gift.
One more time: You're asking them to consider ADDING "a gift in their Will."
That's the preferred, focus-group tested phrase: "... a gift in your Will."
Dear Joy: Will someone complain about your once-a-year letter? They might; your board did, after all.
But in marketing, complaints are a good thing ... because they trigger a two-way communication.
Nonprofit boards are terrified of complaints. "Can't we be blameless and perfect and pure?" No, probably not ... if you're taking any kind of stand.
Answering a complaint is just good conversation and respectful customer service. Your answer deepens the relationship with the right people. Here's an anxiety-reducing article about complaints from The Better Fundraising Co.
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And now, dear Joy, I'm going to speak personally ... in my disguise as a 75-year-old widower whose household has given a lot to charities for decades....
Households often establish a first Will when they get some early assets: a house, stuff, maybe kids.
Simone and I did our first Will around age 40. We'd bought a house.
Then we updated our Will in our mid-50s. Then another update around age 70. Then my beloved Sim One died, of a massive brain hemorrhage. Our last act together was getting her downstairs for the ambulance. She made it to the kitchen floor, sprawled across a crazy linoleum she'd chosen. She never regained consciousness.
Now I have one more Will update to do: just to tie a bow on things ... because we never had kids and our close relations don't need the modest wealth we eventually accumulated, thanks to good financial advice.
Here's another thing I can report from age 75: people around you die a lot ... from a vast array of physical issues. And they're not always all old: I lost a good friend to cancer two years ago; he was 53. And then there are the truly old, like me: my age-peers talk about death all the time ... it's part of our lives! It's the final chapter, the final challenge.
A gift in the Will helps people write a GREAT final chapter and say phooey to that final challenge.
You're not LEAVING a legacy (i.e., looking backwards). You're ADDING a legacy (i.e., looking forwards).
I hope something here helps!
Again, Joy, truly: thank you ... and thank your board ... for raising this question....
~ tom
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