Planned giving marketing firms should stick with what they know best.
Companies like to boast about what they do. Many also like to do far more than they should. In the planned giving space, it’s common to see “marketing” firms promising their clients everything under the sun.
Need planned giving marketing materials? Got that.
A website? Sure.
Consulting? Why not.
Legal advice? Of course. Would you like fries with that?
It’s gotten absurd. Specialization is no longer a novelty—it’s the baseline. We live in a world of specialists. Even our morning coffee comes with a backstory and a narrow focus.
Yet for some reason, planned giving marketing firms keep trying to be everything but marketing. I don’t get it. If my Porsche needs brake work, I’m not taking it to Bob’s Body Shop and Burger Joint. I want a mechanic who specializes in German-made, high-performance cars.
When I founded this firm in 1998, it was a boutique firm specializing in planned giving marketing. We’ve grown a lot since then, but that growth has been entirely within our specialty. That has always made sense to me.
So instead of boasting about what we do, let me be clear about what we don’t do.
- We’re not a software company. Software doesn’t attract prospects or close planned gifts. At best, it supports a strategy. On its own, it’s a commodity.
- We’re not a consulting firm. Consulting is a specialty in itself, and there are plenty of excellent consultants who do that work well.
- We’re not a law firm. You do not need to be a tax law expert to raise planned gifts. Planned giving is a people business. If you love people, you’ll raise more money than you ever imagined.
- We’re not a tax law news ticker. There are plenty of places to follow the never-ending stream of tax law updates. Since that noise is unnecessary for planned giving marketing, we’ll pass.
- We’re not an electronic mass mailer. We don’t generate generic content and distribute it to the nonprofit next door. That’s not marketing—it’s recycling.
- We’re not a newsletter company. When we started nearly two decades ago, planned giving newsletters were already fading. Most go straight to the trash. Yet dinosaur development vendors are still churning out newsletters and charging nonprofits handsomely for them.
If you’re looking for the products and services listed above, we’re probably not a fit.
But if you want a specialty shop focused exclusively on planned giving marketing, look no further than PlannedGiving.com. This is what we know. It’s what we’ve done since the beginning—and what we continue to refine every day.
