You Can't Survey Your Way To Robust Legacy Revenue

You Can't Survey Your Way To Robust Legacy Revenue

These days, you can’t go to a conference without seeing a session about how legacy surveys will transform your planned giving program; perhaps you’ve just started implementing survey campaigns, or you’ve already been surveying for many years.

Some organizations have amassed tens of thousands of leads: donors who share in these surveys that they would consider a legacy gift. They often make the assumption that more leads = more legacy revenue.

But that's not true.

Bequest revenue has been flat for decades. About 7 or 8 percent of people over fifty include a charity in their estate plans. Yet our research shows that 40% of these supporters are considering a legacy gift and only about 20% actively reject the idea. Where’s the disconnect happening?

We have a real conversion problem.

Here’s a dose of reality:

1. You have no idea if creating a huge pool of prospects is advancing your legacy program – or your organization’s mission at all.

2. Lots of gifts come from outside your donor file.

3. You don’t have the capacity to follow up in any meaningful way – and you don’t know what meaningful follow up would look like anyway.

4. Every single one of those “considerings” is also considering other charities as well and every single one could decline to choose yours.

5. You don’t have any idea who else the donor is considering or what the strength of their consideration is.

6. You don’t actually know how to rise to the top of the consideration pyramid.

There’s nothing wrong with legacy surveys – I use them with most clients and will continue to do so (although I will never stop telling organizations to stop spamming their donor files with them). But if that’s all you’re doing, you’re losing a big piece of the puzzle.

Most legacy surveys are created to generate as many “handraisers” as possible, not to learn more about what could truly influence their ultimate legacy decisions

1. A targeted, single charity legacy survey does not offer a view of the current legacy landscape.

2. There is inherent self-selection bias – these are people who like surveys.

3. You can’t really maximize responses – you’ll run out of money and mail is expensive these days!

4. Most importantly, you get no insight into the competitive market for legacy gifts.

Are these surveys useless? No, not at all. But you need a broader strategy to validate and complement these campaigns. And as a marketer, I want client-specific data, not general information or theories that have never been tested in the wild.

We’re trying to solve this problem using deep dive market research and focusing on the concept of competition.

The US Legacy Competition Index and Annual Charity Benchmarking Project, from Fastmap and Mal Warwick Donordigital is based on feedback from 10,000 charity supporters over age 50, surveyed in March 2023. The baseline questions: what charities do you support (and support is defined more broadly than donating)? And who have you included in your estate plans or would consider including in your estate plans?

Why market research?

1. It’s charity-agnostic - we avoid the bias inherent in audience-surveys.

2. It focuses on competition – understanding your competition is the critical missing piece of data when trying to truly evaluate your bequest and prospect pipeline. If donors on average consider 4 or 5 charities, how do they choose the one that wins the competition and gets in the plan?

3. It helps uncover the non-transactional factors that influence decisions – and how those factors might be different among different types of supporters.

4. If you understand your competition, the factors that matter to supporters, and how you are doing with respect to your competitor charities, you can create messages and campaigns specifically tailored to move your best prospects forward.

5. You stop wasting money on ineffective campaigns.

6. You can identify evolving donor needs and interests, and changes in the industry landscape.

For a fraction of the cost of yet another survey campaign that adds to your prospect pool without offering any insight into how to convert those prospects, we can generate truly useful, actionable data and insights that will not only help you identify your most likely prospects, but create the types of messages and campaigns that will actually increase your legacy revenue and help you make the cut when those donors get to the point where they have to choose.

Be in touch! You can also download the launch report here: https://www.fastmap.com/how-to-guides/

#legacies #plannedgiving #research #fundraising #competition