In a perfect world, all of your benefactors who receive your planned giving mailing will immediately decide it’s a good idea, call their advisor for the go ahead, and then make your institution a gift that changes not only the trajectory of your long-term revenue goals, but your career as well.
Unfortunately, it’s not a perfect world. Of course it’s not.
The reality is that most of your benefactors either won’t read your mailing, and many who do will ignore it. (Statistically, you’re doing pretty good if 1 in 100 actually respond.)
This is why one or even two mailings aren’t enough. You should be mailing 4 times a year at least, and for maximum effect, 6-12 times. (We know this from experience.) All this along with other marketing efforts through other venues (display ads in institutional publications, eBroadcasts, etc.)
What comes next though is, for many professional fund raisers, shocking. Most of those hard won respondents who understand your planned giving message will turn to their financial advisors for advice. And here’s the where your pitch can really go off the rails.
The hard fact of the matter is that most financial advisors simply don’t understand how planned gifts work. In other words, the people your prospects are turning to for advice do not know what advice to give. (Few of course will ever admit that, at least not to their clients.)
Let’s face it, planned giving is just one of the many things a financial advisor needs to know about. And in the scheme of things it’s a relatively small thing. Their training probably introduced the concept, and not much else. Planned giving is typically not in the financial advisor’s wheelhouse.
In order to get your share of lucrative planned gifts, you need to change that. And we can help.
Advisor Sites from PlannedGiving.com is a plug in for your planned giving website that is specifically designed for financial advisors. Your Advisor Site from PlannedGiving.com will showcase the specific planned gifts you are seeking and clearly explain to your prospect’s financial advisor what they do, how they work and most importantly (from their perspective) how they will help their client.
It’s a prudent investment on your part that will show a positive ROI very quickly. In most cases, we can have yours up and running in less than two weeks.
