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How to Use Facebook to Promote Planned Giving
Amy Goldman (Vice President, Planned Giving – City of Hope) is the fearless leader of one of the most talented and hardest working planned giving teams I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. And, I’m not just saying that because she’s a client.
Here are some reasons why Amy is awesome:
1. She is not afraid to try new things – Amy experiments and learns from those experiments.
2. She understands the marketing funnel – You have to build awareness for planned gifts, generate leads, cultivate leads, close gifts and steward them! She gets all that.
3. She uses social media to help build awareness and generate leads for planned gifts – That’s what I really wanted to bring to your attention in this post.
Planned giving decisions (as well as all major giving decisions) involve, to a large degree, conformity to societal norms (otherwise known as the bandwagon effect).
In other words, if people like you are doing it, you’ll do it… and/or if your friends are doing it, you’ll do it.
Amy knows this. Amy understands this. So Amy uses the greatest tool ever invented for helping to bring about conformity to societal norms – Facebook!
How does she use Facebook to promote planned giving?
Amy lets my team compile great stories for City of Hope’s social media team (a whole other “silo”) to post online. These posts share amazing stories about amazing people with other supporters (not necessarily donors). Mostly these stories are about people who have (1) planned a gift and (2) are still alive.
Stories about living (not dead) donors are especially powerful because they:
- Celebrate the decision
- Help build awareness for planned giving among supporters
- Promote planned giving as a societal norm (something others are doing so they should do it too!)
- And, have been proven to be more effective than stories about people who are dead (which makes sense because stories about dead people just plain remind donors about death… and no one wants to think about death!)
Take a look at one of these posts below.
Shortly after it was submitted it received 20 comments and 225 “likes”! That’s good stuff and it didn’t cost Amy, City of Hope or their donors/investors one penny!! You should do what Amy is doing. Just share stories about living planned giving donors. It’s that easy.
NOW THAT’S MARKETING SMART and THAT’S ENGAGEMENT FUNDRAISING! GO AMY GO!!
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SEE ALSO:
Should you create a separate Facebook page for major (and/or planned) gifts?
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Feeling like your job is getting harder because donor expectations have changed and competition for the charitable dollar is growing?
Finding that the old orthodoxies and conventions espoused by so-called experts in online echo-chambers and at conferences don’t work anymore?
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Then this book is for you.
Engagement Fundraising was developed from the perspective of a donor who discovered firsthand that the impersonal, spray-and-pray approaches of his beloved charity were not only offensive but also wasteful and ineffective. So he took action. And now, you can too.
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Scheduled the tweet on this one. Great connection between storytelling and the funnel.
Great ideas!