6 Reasons Why Planned Gift Marketing Budgets Are So Small

Michael Rosen and some others contributed to this article on my group on LinkedIn (Smart Planned Giving Marketers). I thought the information was very smart and thought I’d share it.
Here are the reasons why planned gift marketing budgets are so small:
1- Tension
Every dollar invested in planned giving is a dollar taken away from current mission fulfillment.
2- Misunderstanding
Organizations often do not understand planned giving (let alone planned giving marketing) so why would they invest in something they don’t understand?
3- Risk adversity
There is little or no incentive for taking a risk to push for greater investment in planned giving within an organization. Let’s face it, the revenue that results will be enjoyed by someone else 10, 20 or 30 years into the future.
4- Lack of a way to measure effectiveness
Response rates keep going down and most planned giving marketing firms (not mine!) even try to hide their results because they are usually so poor.
5- Lack of benchmarks
I’ve seen some Universities spend over $100,000 (even several hundred thousand dollars) per year to market planned gifts while others only invest $10,000 or so. But I’ve never seen a benchmark study on this so no one knows what the average is.
6- Lack of solutions
There’s never been much that really worked well. The current list of planned giving marketing vendors really don’t understand serious marketing. What they call marketing is pathetic (except for MarketSmart, of course).  ; )