Edith Windsor and Thea Spyer entered a long-term relationship in the mid-1960s and made their home in the state of New York. In 2007, the couple was married in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. In 2009, Thea passed away, leaving an inheritance of around $4.3 million to her spouse Edith.
One of your roles as a fundraiser is to match a donor’s charitable objectives with a plan that achieves those goals and supports your organization. Here are some phrases to incorporate into your dialogue with planned gift prospects during the important stages of discovery, cultivation, and solicitation.
Planned giving software makes it very easy to estimate the benefits of a particular gift plan over its expected life. Just plug in the facts of the gift, make some simple assumptions about future investment returns and the duration of the arrangement, and voilà, out comes a presentation that describes the projected benefits of the plan in convincing detail.
The trend of the ultra-low IRS discount rate introduces some risk to charitable gifts – specifically, it increases the likelihood that some gifts won’t pass tests that have been deemed important. Additionally, the current 1.0% rate could pose a particular problem if it persists after September 30 and the 1.2% look back is no longer available.
Last week, PG Calc published a white paper entitled “The Cultivation Funnel: Using Content Marketing to Move Prospects from Awareness to Close.” The Cultivation Funnel presented in this paper illustrates the journey of a planned gift prospect and, ultimately, a planned gift donor. In this paper, Marketing Consultant Ann McPherson introduced a previously underrepresented element – permission marketing. This concept was brainstormed and has been consistently championed by Seth Godin, an author, blogger and marketing expert. Ann provides the details behind permission marketing and how it relates to the transition from "push" and other interruptive marketing tactics (teleprospecting, unwanted direct mail, and spam email) to “pull” tactics (providing meaningful and relevant content, sharing expertise on a given topic, and sharing resources) as ways to cultivate interest in making a planned gift to a particular charity. Ann acknowledges in this paper that focusing your marketing efforts only on individuals who have provided permission to do so may seem counter-intuitive – won’t you catch more fish with a wider net, so to speak? Download this white paper to explore the concept’s relevance to planned giving marketing.
