More nonprofits are prioritizing legacy giving than ever. 

Here’s why: Research done by Dr. Russell James shows that nonprofits focused on non cash gifts grew 66% while nonprofits only receiving cash gifts grew by 11%.

The best way to grow and create long-term financial stability for your nonprofit is to invite and receive legacy gifts. If you’re ready to prioritize legacy giving for your nonprofit we created this guide for you. 

In this guide you will learn:

1. Three steps to developing a plan that gets better results faster.
2. How to tell donor stories and use “family words” in your communication strategy
3. Three ways you can staff legacy giving work without hiring a new team member

Ready to be one of the forward-thinking nonprofits prioritizing legacy giving in 2024? Keep reading!

Inviting Legacy Gifts Step #1: Develop a Plan

Plans increase your chances of success, especially when you’re starting something you’ve never done before. Whether you’ve never invited a legacy gift, haven’t invited one in a long time, or just have a lot on your plate, a plan for inviting legacy gifts is crucial.

Integrating these three Legacy Giving strategies into your annual fundraising plan will significantly improve your 2024 fundraising success:

Identify

Though anyone could be a Legacy Giving donor to your ministry, a relatively small percentage — 10% or less — actually will be. It’s wise to focus your gift development efforts on the 10% who are most likely to make legacy gifts.

Your best legacy giving prospects have one or more of the following six characteristics:

• Persons with no children. These couples or singles are five times more likely to plan for a charitable bequest according to research conducted by Dr. Russell James.
• Loyal contributors. 80% of bequest donors have made 15 or more gifts during their lifetime. In a congregational setting, this more likely translates to persons who have given 15 or more years. 
• Your leaders. Your very best prospects should be the current and former members of your governing board, long term staff and volunteers, and Legacy Giving leaders – people who have been key stakeholders. 
• Persons who have given noncash assets in the past. Donors who have already gifted stock, made Qualified Charitable Distributions from their IRAs, or directed distributions from their Donor Advised Funds have raised their hands about their ability and willingness to invest in your work from their accumulated assets. 
• Persons age 70+. These persons have lived into their new lives as retirees for a few years, and are more likely to have their estate planning at the top of their mind. 
• Persons who are most likely to be making or revising a will. What makes someone most likely to make or alter their will? Going through a life event trigger. Life events that most often trigger a will or estate planning revision include: 
  • Marriage, divorce or remarriage
  • Birth or adoption of children or grandchildren
  • Death of a spouse, parent, sibling, child or other loved one 
  • Retirement or the buying and selling of a business
  • Serious or terminal illness, or a “close call” experience
  • Receiving an inheritance or another large sum of money
  • Traveling or working abroad
  • Children leave home or another new stage in life
  • Buying or selling a home, or moving to a different state

As you use this list to identify your best legacy giving prospects I think you will be pleasantly surprised by how many prospects you find. Download the Legacy Donor Prospect Checklist HERE.

Segment

Once you have identified your legacy giving prospects it’s time to segment them into logical groups and develop a personal visit strategy for each segment. 

There is rarely a moment in fundraising when time and staff are NOT limited. So the key to successfully segmenting and visiting your legacy giving prospects is integrating the strategies into your current plan. 

If you don’t have time to segment your list and come up with a personal visit strategy, you will see the best and fastest results by focusing on these two groups:

1. Current Major Donors. This is your list of top donors and prospects that you are already planning to visit this year. When you meet with them include the legacy giving conversation during your visit. 
2. Board Members. Your most long-serving, loyal, current and former board members should have the highest commitment toward the organization’s long-term sustainability. Schedule “discovery” conversations with them to see if they’ve ever considered including the ministry in their estate plans. 

Now that you know which donors you’re going to focus on to invite new legacy gifts it’s time to talk about the legacy gifts you already have. 

Steward

How many legacy gifts and legacy gift donors do you currently have? What do those legacy gifts make possible for you today?

When we’re reaching for something bigger or new it’s easy to forget what we already have. This is your reminder to not forget your generous donors who have already included your organization in their wills.

At least 80% of all legacy gift commitments are revocable and can be changed. Since legacy gifts are often 200 times the value of a donor’s annual gift, losing one of these commitments is not a chance your organization can afford to take. It’s important to continue nurturing relationships with current legacy donors and thanking them for their investment while you’re working toward new legacy gifts. 

If you’re having trouble envisioning how you’re going to fit legacy giving visits and stewardship into your annual fundraising plan the Fundraising Plan Package will help you integrate these steps. Schedule a call to see if the Fundraising Plan Package is the right solution for you HERE.

A plan to successfully invite legacy gifts in 2024 will also need to include communications. But we believe it’s so important that it is the second step to inviting legacy gifts.  

Inviting Legacy Gifts Step #2: Communication Strategies  

What is your current communication strategy? Probably an assortment of newsletter updates, annual appeals, and social media posts. You can improve your legacy giving strategy in 2024 by adding legacy giving communication into your current communication strategy. 

A large portion of successful legacy giving is helping your donors feel that it’s a familiar idea they can relate to. We recommend adding legacy giving to your current communication strategy in three ways. 

Tell Donor Stories

Sharing donor stories are powerful because they invite your donors to see themselves in the story and envision making a similar impact. It is appropriate to incorporate stories of legacy gift donors into your impact reports, newsletters, social media, etc. 

When telling donor stories you want to keep three things in mind:

1. Ask early. Shortly after a donor makes their gift, invite them to share their story. Promptly requesting a story allows the experience to be fresh for the donor to share; they will likely be more excited to share their story and have more details to express. 
2. Be efficient. Efficiency includes knowing how you plan to use a donor story and making it easy for donors to share their story. Your donors are most likely busy. Having a short and simple process to collect their story and share it with others will make the experience repeatable and more pleasant for you and your donors. 
3. Include an invitation. The reason you’re telling the story is to guide donors to make a similar gift. If the story inspires a donor to give, make sure it is easy for them to take the next step by including an invitation and link to give. 

You can find inspiration reading some short and compelling examples of donor stories on FreeWill.

Use Simple “Family Words”

I snuck out the back of the room during my first planned giving seminar — yes, me! 

The presenter was explaining a tax regulation that had just gone into effect and I felt like a fish out of water. The lengthy words being used as casually as “thank you” and “annual appeal” flew over my head. All I could think was, “If I don’t leave I’m going to completely give up on my fundraising career!” So I left. 

Unfortunately, this is an all too frequent (and unnecessary) response to legacy giving. According to planned giving expert Dr. Russell James, fundraisers need to talk about legacy gifts in terms that donors understand, which are terms you understand! Dr. Russell James calls these “family words.”

Here are three of the most common planned gifts donors make, described using “family words.” Feel free to add these words and descriptions to your own repertoire:

• Give Later. Give later gifts are the most common legacy gifts — 80-90% of legacy gifts are give later gifts. Give later gifts are assets donors can control during their lifetime and plan to give at death. These are usually given through will or a beneficiary donation. 
• Give Now. Give now gifts provide immediate income to receiving organizations but they are invested to provide future revenue. These include donor advised funds and endowments that can make distributions to nonprofits in perpetuity.
• Give and Receive. These gifts allow the donor to make a gift now, personally receive an income, and then provide a remaining gift typically at the end of the donor’s life. When we hear about charitable gift annuities or charitable trusts, these are the types of gifts that provide an income.

When talking about legacy giving in these simple terms, you have everything you need to introduce legacy giving to your donors in a way that they will appreciate and understand.

Use Content From Other Experts

Creating and making official a legacy gift is complicated. But, in most cases, that’s not the job of a fundraiser. 

Your job is to introduce legacy giving and help your donors imagine the impact they can make through a similar gift. Once a legacy giving conversation has started you can connect your donors with experts to walk them through the details. 

For donors who want more information before being connected with an expert you can:

• Share links to articles from trusted sources or your website’s giving page.
• Request use of content from trusted sources, print the content, and hand it to donors during visits. 

Bottom line: Don’t reinvent the wheel; lean on the content of other experts. It’s okay for you not to understand everything or know all the terms. Someone probably does and has written about it. Share their expertise. 

If you would like specific steps to adding legacy giving into your communication strategy our clients found that our self-paced online course Legacy Giving Basics made taking action easy and effective. 

Inviting Legacy Gifts Step #3: Staff Your Legacy Giving Work From the Outside In

By now you might be thinking, “I’m onboard with legacy giving and I see how this would integrate into our current plan, but I don’t have a full-time planned giving person or even a full-time director of development!” 

Good news: You don’t need a full-time planned giving professional or even a full-time director of development to start this work. You just need to start. 

Here are three ways to start inviting legacy gifts in 2024: 

1. Enlist Two Champions. You only need two people to get started... perhaps YOU and a dedicated, influential Board member. Having a companion for this journey is in the best interest of you and your organization. Two people will better share the load, contribute a broader skill set, and bring a wider network of relationships. Most importantly, two champions ensures some continuity of leadership when one or the other is passing through a challenging season of life or moves on to a new opportunity. 
2. Engage Professional Advisors. Develop a network of gift planners, estate planning attorneys and financial planners who advise your donors. Establish relationships with community foundations and church body foundations who can complete and administer any complex gifts.  
3. A Legacy Giving Coach. The fundraisers I have watched be most successful inviting legacy gifts for the first time are those with a legacy giving coach. Inviting legacy gifts can feel scary even if you know all the right things to do. Legacy giving coaches are valuable not just because of the instruction and experience they offer, but also the confidence and accountability they provide. You can learn more about our one-on-one and cohort legacy giving coaching for faith-based nonprofits HERE. 

Legacy gifts can positively impact the nonprofit you care about in significant ways. Starting small, as best you can, sooner rather than later matters and makes a difference!

It’s Time to Invite Legacy Gifts

The fact that you’ve made it this far tells me you are serious about positively transforming your organization’s future with legacy gifts. And it’s something you are absolutely capable of doing. So I want to leave you with two pieces of encouragement:

1. Starting is the first step. Start sooner rather than later. And don’t be afraid to start small. Even a small start is a start. Pick one thing you can do this week to move you closer to inviting your first legacy gift and schedule it on your calendar. 
2. Small consistent progress will get you further than one big burst of effort. Scheduling one to five hours of time a week to work on legacy giving will get you further than you can imagine. Investing in legacy giving for just one to three hours a week could provide you with the opportunity to have more than 25 significant legacy giving conversations in one year. 

If you would like to spend the few hours you have for legacy giving work on the most important things, my team and I would be honored to help you. Schedule a call to discover next steps HERE.  

The article was co-authored by Brenda Moore, CFRE and Samantha Roose.