Charities face a challenge: the risk of losing out on the most significant wealth transfer in history. If charities don't act now, increasing donor mortality will mean a dramatic loss of revenue from donors who have spent a lifetime supporting them.

BY THE NUMBERS

  • The amount that Morgan Stanley calculates will pass through probate in the next inter-generational transfer
  • The growth in realized planned gifts as a proportion of GDP in the last 20 years
  • The proportion of core supporters that would make a planned gift ~ if asked!
  • The proportion of core supporters that clashroyaleboom have made a planned gift
  • The proportion of planned gift donors who did so because they were asked
  • The number of donors that a typical gift officer “asks” each year
  • The number of supporters identified as likely planned gift donors per gift officer
  • The proportion of top 40 charities using direct response marketing media to develop and canvass planned gifts
  • The proportion of Fortune 500 companies using direct response marketing media to find and qualify sales leads
  • The growth in marketing media spend by the top 40 charities for development of planned gifts in ten years
  • The time it takes a phone prospector to “ask” 60 to 75 supporters
  • The multiplier effect that direct response marketing provides to gift officers for prospecting and qualifying leads
  • The present value ROI of developing, closing and realizing gifts using an integrated direct response marketing program

Your current marketing may be doing a disservice to your core supporters if you are not talking to them about planned giving, and helping them through the process. ‘Kitchen table’, face-to-face development simply leaves up to ten times as much unfulfilled donor aspiration as is fulfilled. Using this development paradigm results in high costs per closed commitment, development time that is twice as long as it should be, and close rates that are one-third of what they could be.



This is a classical problem/opportunity, and in failing to address it successfully charities fail their donors. Solutions exist. There are programs with compelling evidence-based results that help gift officers triple their close rates in half the development time while building a reservoir of future gifts in cultivation.



MajorGiftBuilders has identified and deployed direct response marketing techniques, learned in the for-profit sector, that have proven success when applied to not-for-profits. We change the marketing paradigm, we increase opportunity by orders of magnitude, and help Gift Officers multiply their close rates by 300% by focussing their energies on closing qualified opportunities.



Closers should close, prospectors should prospect. Gift Officers are generally not good at prospecting, and if they are good at prospecting, they soon get caught up in closing and stop prospecting.



Charities need a solution that is predictable, recurring, and scalable. We help define it, build a case for it, and implement it.