Category: Planned Giving

For nonprofits, the challenge of sustaining operations and funding mission-critical initiatives is ever-present. Many organizations focus heavily on annual giving campaigns or a handful of fundraising events, leaving a critical opportunity untapped: a dedicated planned giving strategy. Integrating estate planning into your fundraising plan can unlock a steady stream of future contributions, ensuring long-term financial stability and deepening donor relationships.

Nonprofits face an ongoing challenge in maintaining consistent funding to support their missions. Annual giving, while essential, often fluctuates due to economic conditions, donor preferences, and unforeseen events. These ebbs and flows can create operational disruption and jeopardize long-term plans. To counteract this instability, nonprofits increasingly recognize the importance of planned giving programs—a sustainable approach to securing future funding. However, implementing such programs can be daunting without the right tools and expertise.

Your database is the lifeblood of your organization! Inside your database is the key information you can use to target those most likely to leave you in their estate plans helping you fulfill your mission.

For many nonprofits, planned giving can be a lifeline for financial stability and growth. Yet, many organizations lack the resources to establish and maintain a vibrant planned giving program. With limited budgets, hiring a full-time planned giving officer often feels out of reach. However, bringing on a dedicated fractional planned giving resource offers an innovative solution to this challenge.

Planned giving is a powerful, yet often underutilized, strategy for nonprofits to secure sustainable funding and to smooth the ebbs and flows of annual gifts. If you are a nonprofit currently offering complimentary donor tools like online wills, QCD giving portals, letters of intent, gift notification forms and the like, your donors need to be reminded that they exist through a programmatic promotional outreach plan.

Is a $10 donor to a peer-to-peer event the same as the donor that funds a research project at $1,000,000? No, they likely have different reasons for giving. The peer-to-peer donor is likely giving because one of their friends asked them to while the research donor is giving because they want the project they support to change the world. Different reasons necessitate different treatment.

Lifelegacy is a leading provider of online estate planning for everyone. We work closely with nonprofits nationwide to help them leverage and grow planned giving as part of their fundraising strategy. We suggest that nonprofits incorporate the following activities to drive awareness, activity and gifts prior to National Estate Planning Awareness Week.

Don’t be afraid to ask! It is easy to be intimidated by the concept of asking a donor for a planned gift. But don’t be! After over twenty years of fundraising, I have noticed an interesting trend. After the economic downturn of 2008, portfolios have recovered but minds have not.

There is an underlying sense of fear about the economy. A planned giving ask is a great way for the donor to retain financial flexibility while planning for impact.