Most of us have more work than we have time for. Prospecting, donor calls and donor visits, stewardship, donor reports and updating activity records, marketing, department meetings, gift/estate administration, leadership and board reporting, all compete for our attention. Success does not rely on getting it all done, however, it does relies on getting the right things done. That’s where planned giving marketing can have its challenges. Marketing programs often suffer in the execution, but it’s not so much a failure to execute – it’s a failure to execute the right things. And this applies to organizations with a dedicated planned giving staff, as well as organizations in which planned giving is part of the overall fundraising function.
Organizations that have a planned giving staff tend to obsess over brand and copy at the expense of other things that are equally if not more important, such as list selection, prospecting, research, and stewardship.
Organizations that don’t have a planned giving staff offer all sorts of explanations for why they can’t consistently promote their planned giving program, citing limited time, lack of priority, and conflict with their annual giving program, to name a few.
In either case, if the focus were on the appropriate goal, task, or habit, then planned giving marketing wouldn’t have to be all consuming, intimidating, or overwhelming.
Some readers may be familiar with the story of Paul O’Neill, the former CEO of the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) and how he transformed that organization by focusing on one thing, worker safety. His vision for the company was to make Alcoa the safest company in America – zero injuries. Wall Street thought he was crazy and the stock dropped dramatically. Within a year, Alcoa’s profits hit a record high and by the time he retired in 2000, seventeen years later, the company’s annual net income was five times larger than before he arrived.
O’Neill believed, and scientists now know, that some habits have the power to start a chain reaction, changing other habits as they move through an organization. These are known as keystone habits and they can influence how people eat, play, work, live, spend, and communicate. Keystone habits start a process that over time transforms everything. What’s critical is understanding that the success of these keystone habits doesn’t depend upon getting every single thing right (read marketing copy), but instead relies on identifying a few key priorities and fashioning them into powerful levers. The habits that matter most are the ones that, when put in motion, will shift and dislodge other patterns.
For example, we all know that the weight loss industry is a highly success business sector brimming with solutions to help people lose weight. The simple answer is to eat less and to exercise more and yet as a society we continue to search for the magic bullet. In 2009, a group of researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health published a study about using a different approach to weight loss and asked a group of sixteen hundred overweight people to write down everything they ate at least one day per week. Over time people started recording their food intake and many started to keep a daily log. The participants who kept the daily logs started to see patterns in when they ate and what they ate that, prior to keeping the records, they hadn’t recognized. Others used their journals to start planning their meals. This keystone habit of food journaling created a structure that helped other habits flourish. Six months into the study, people who kept a journal lost twice as much weight as those who did not. This habit provided a system to think about food in a different way, similar to O’Neill’s focus on worker safety at Alcoa.
So how does all of this relate to marketing? Here are examples of keystone habits that could make the difference in your planned giving program.
Every Donor Preparation Strategy– Make planned giving part of every donor call/visit preparation – if you are prepared to discuss a planned gift with each donor, the topic is more likely to come up in conversation.
Monthly Presence – Give planned giving a monthly presence, whether it’s through a targeted mailing, a small advertisement in the organization's newsletter, a button or p.s. in an email blast, an advertisement in a program, or a callout from the leadership at an event.
5 Planned Giving Prospects – Identify five planned giving prospects and take one action every day – a call, a note, research, an introduction from someone who knows the prospect. At the end of the month qualify the 25 prospects for moving forward or moving out of the portfolio, repeat next month.
Use the Buddy System – Help your MGOs close larger gifts by creating more blended gifts.
Which one of these keystone habits could radically shift your planned giving program?
The Power of Habit. (2012). Retrieved February 16, 2016, from
http://charlesduhigg.com/the-power-of-habit/
Submit a Comment