It’s been 20 years since Tom Taylor co-founded Legacy Leaders with an early vision to help charities with Planned Gift marketing. Tom then took a ten-year career adjustment into for-profit business where he built a very successful direct-to-consumer phone company, an insurance sales direct marketing group, and a direct-to-patient support company. The same development sales funnels which underlay Tom’s successes, used by all major sales leaders such as Salesforce.com, are now being applied by MajorGiftBuilders to market legacy and planned gifts – to equally great success.
Who in Planned and Major Gifts hasn’t faced the reality that while charities spend millions on the marketing of special events and annual fund, they spend a pittance on marketing major gifts and planned gifts?
The problem is a lack of marketing vision coupled with unfounded beliefs that spending budget today to develop gift intent will not see a payoff for years, or even decades.
The common marketing paradigm for major and planned gifts focuses on finding suspects and handing them off to gift officers to work through a development cycle. An approach that requires little marketing budget and the majority of costs goes to staffing. Close rates are 1-to-4 up to 1-to-10, and time to close is up to five years as it is left to the gift officer to reach out, prospect, discover, motivate and close.
"Like nearly everyone in the planned giving field, I was trained as a gift-planner. My job was to visit individual donors, develop a relationship with them and advise them on how they could leave a legacy to my charity. I had extensive knowledge of gift planning vehicles, how they worked, how donors could minimize their taxes and maximum their giving. I used this approach for nearly three years but only received a handful of legacy commitments each year for my efforts."...Simon Trevelyan...
What is accepted should not be assumed
- Find a for-profit business that fails to find the marketing approach that expands the growth of their most profitable customer segments, and you will have found an imminent bankruptcy.
- Major Gift Builders will help you change your marketing paradigm to a proactive approach that integrates social, digital, mail and phone. Close rates will improve threefold and time to close will be cut in half.
- You will triple your legacy commitments, while uncovering immediate Major Gifts.