Who are your best planned gift prospects?

Planned Giving Score. Planned Gift Likelihood. RFM.

You can’t attend a conference or even open your email these days without being bombarded by companies offering to screen your CRM and help make your donor outreach more effective and efficient.

While they typically hook you with wealth screening to uncover major gift prospects, you’ll often be offered other services, like identifying potential planned gift donors.

No shade to these companies, but to me, this is just another example of needless overcomplication in planned giving.

In my opinion, you don’t need to pay for fancy number scores to figure out who your best legacy gift prospects are. Like most things in planned giving fundraising (and let’s be honest, life), the answer is surprisingly simple.

What’s the #1 thing that makes someone a good planned gift prospect? Connection.

If a donor is extremely connected to your organization or its mission, they will be a top planned gift prospect for you.

Of course, with only 24 hours in each day, it’s impossible to go through each donor in your CRM to determine their level of connectedness. This is why we use other indicators that tend to show how connected someone is to your organization.

You’ve likely heard the phrase, “vote with your wallet.” We spend money on the things and causes we care about. For this reason, we start with giving history for determining connectedness. If a donor has been giving to your organization consistently for a number of years (regardless of the amount), they should be at the top of your list.

You also undoubtedly know of the donor engagement trifecta: time, talent, and treasure. So, beyond giving history (treasure), you can also look to long-term volunteers (time) and those who have consistently furthered your mission in other ways (board service, donor introductions, etc.) for your top prospects.

You might be thinking: But what about age? Or different life circumstances? Or any of those other factors that I’ve heard relate to planned giving?

Data points like age and life stage can be most useful for timing. We know that people who are retired, whose children are financially independent, and/or who are nearing the end of life are more likely to be engaged in estate planning or already thinking about what will happen with their wealth after their lifetime. So, this tends to be a good time to approach these donors about planned giving. However, just because a donor is in their 80s doesn’t mean they will be a good prospect. You need to see the connection, too!

The only outlier to this rule to keep in mind is donors without children. Although most legacy givers do have children and/or grandchildren, those without children are generally more likely to include gifts to charity in their estate plans. So, even if they’re not currently as connected as other donors, they should also be high on your list of planned gift prospects. The time you invest in deepening their connection to your mission will be worthwhile.

Of course, just as with wealth screening, identifying your top planned gift prospects is just the first step. Strategic marketing efforts can allow donors to tell you that they’re interested and ready to talk about gift planning. And of course, nothing beats discovery work through phone calls and visits to truly determine if someone is likely to include you in their will or other estate plans.

Want to learn more or just chat about your planned giving program? Schedule a time to connect with me and get started. As with planting trees, the best time to invest in your planned giving program was 20 years ago, but the second best time is today!