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How to Ensure That Your Legacy Gift Supporters Don't Take You Out of Their Estate Plans
There must be thousands of ways to practice Engagement Fundraising. Here’s one that’s really fabulous because it zeros-in on an audience that will deliver a tremendous return on your investment— current legacy society members who are still alive.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, located in Washington, D.C., invited their Legacy of Light Guardians (their legacy society) to be further remembered in an anniversary publication that featured the planned gift donors in a beautiful, professional photo and a summary of their story.
This is smart because so many estate plans change in the last few years of a person’s life. If you don’t do something to really seal the deal, you’re likely to get tossed out of the will and replaced (perhaps by a caring hospice nurse). Just imagine if you lose 10% of your gift intentions per year without knowing it. How much is that? $100,000? $1 million? More?
I don’t have anything against hospice. I’m just saying that the easiest thing for you to do is to shore up your gift intentions with excellent stewardship that ensures your legacy gift supporters won’t take you out of their estate plans. Here’s how:
1. Pull the list
2. Send personal invitations (or better yet… call ’em!)
3. Arrange the photography session by asking a professional photographer to take the pictures
4. Interview your supporters (get to know ’em even better)
5. Produce the publication (maybe a printer will donate the printing)
6. Personally deliver a few copies each to your donors
7. Give them out to legacy society prospects
NOTE: Full disclosure… The U.S. Holocaust Museum is one of our clients at MarketSmart (but we can’t take credit for thinking-up this fabulous initiative.)
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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?
Want to help more people make impact by facilitating their acts of philanthropy but feel like too many obstacles keep getting in your way?
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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