Is Engagement All That?

In marketing, I always like to remember that great theories – even those backed up by evidence and research – need to be tested in the wild. And I always remind myself to be open to what the testing and data show - especially if it means I need to change my strategies. Quite often, testing shows a mixed bag of results.

Over the past decade, a lot of planned giving marketing, including marketing I’ve embraced, was based on the idea of engagement. This built on the idea from Dr. Russell James that coupling legacy messages with a “spoonful of sugar” would help donors get over their aversion to thinking about mortality and death.

And certainly, these techniques – long-form lead generation surveys where the legacy gift intention question was slipped in amongst a bunch of non-legacy priming questions; offers of educational publications, “share your story” campaigns, etc., – generate a lot of engagement.

But do they lead to finalized legacy gifts? At this point, I am leaning towards “no.” Or at least, “unlikely”. Or perhaps, “more data needed.”

A week or so ago, the folks at Donor Voice shared a post on LinkedIn: “Engagement Scores: The Empty Calories of Fundraising/Marketing.” (I’m going assume Kevin Schulman wrote that because he’s always gloriously cranky about lazy marketing. Never change, Kevin!)

This caught my eye: “Bogus Idea #2. Engagement metrics cause business outcomes…. There is often correlation with non-financial behavior data and giving data - e.g. sign up for newsletter correlates with giving, taking advocacy action correlates with giving. This correlation should be as surprising as it is useful - not at all.”

I was looking at some client data showing that only 2-3% of engagement-generated legacy handraisers ultimately left the organization a gift, which tracks with other data I’ve seen.

But is it the fault of the engagement campaign, or something else?

1. It may be based on faulty assumptions about donors’ willingness to engage with messages about charitable estate planning.

When we are discussing marketing, we’re discussing population-level trends. What individual donors think doesn’t really matter (as harsh as that sounds)

 As a front-line gift officer, I certainly met with donors who were uncomfortable engaging in discussions about legacies or admitted that they’d put off planning because they didn’t want to think about it.

But our recent Legacy Benchmarking Research with Fastmap showed that “not wanting to think about their mortality” was not even on their radar as a barrier to making a legacy gift.

And in focus groups and other donor qualitative data, people much prefer that we are straightforward about what we’re talking about. As one participant told me, “Don’t beat around the bush! Tell me you want a gift in my will and tell me why.”

Our concerns about not creating aversion with our marketing means that a lot of legacy messaging I see is boring, generic, unclear, or focused only on the “how” of a gift vs the “why.”

2.  The campaign doesn’t prioritize identification of stronger leads:

These engagement campaigns, particularly surveys, are great at identifying donors who “maybe, at some point, might be willing to think about considering a legacy gift.” BUT….this doesn’t consider a primary variable: Timing.

The intention to action gap is a real thing. If the donor isn’t planning to create or update a plan in the next year or so, that consideration will go stale, or be displaced. And once you get beyond 4 or 5 years….you’re starting from scratch.

In addition, priorities change over time. This is why we see a lot of movement of charities included in the last will. The organizations that were most important some years ago have been superseded by organizations that are more personally relevant at the time of planning: the hospital that cared for a spouse with cancer; the local animal rescue where they now volunteer; or organizations/causes that weren’t a priority for both spouses but that are newly relevant once one member of the couple is widowed or divorced.

Our research shows that there are three primary variables we need to focus on: propensity (which is itself a complex interaction of dozens of motivations and barriers, only a few of which are specific to your charity); assets to give (particularly with increasing wealth inequality; and timing (creating or updating a plan soon).

Our marketing goals now are to identify handraisers at the intersection of these three factors.

3. The campaign doesn’t directly connect to the impact of legacy gifts and why the donor should consider the charity, and/or it focuses only on the “how” of a gift.

In our research, the primary challenge donors share is that they don’t understand why the organization needs their legacy gift, what impact it will really have, and how it would be used to help fulfill the mission.

The strength of the “why” case we make – why these gifts matter, why they will have a real, measurable impact, why the donor should choose your charity – is much more important than soothing worries about death.

Other “process” barriers also fall far behind the “why” barriers. You must get the why in place before addressing the how.

One example that I keep coming back to is the traditional legacy survey. The first time I sent one, back in 2013 I believe, I was shocked to find 2,000+ responses land on my desk. And excited! However…

• Did I have the capacity, as a 1.5 person planned giving department, to respond the way I always used to respond to handraisers/leads (with excitement, with personalized outreach, with relationship building)? No.

•  Did I have a plan in place to further quality these leads? No.

• Did I think about whether those leads were more or less likely to move forward with a legacy gift than a handraiser from a campaign that was more specifically focused on the impact of gifts in wills? Also no.

These days, we still utilize lead generation surveys. But they are quite different:

1. They are short – five questions.

2. They focus on donor’s motivations and interest in considering a legacy gift – we don’t hide the lede.

3. They include a cover letter that explains why legacy gifts are important and why we are asking them about this type of giving.

4. Increasingly, they ask about timing.

5. We don’t ask for demographic information that isn’t useful for variable messaging in follow up, that we can get elsewhere, or that might violate privacy.

This leads to several outcomes:

1. Lower costs – because mail is still the primary driver here. Less paper = lower costs!

2. Lower response rate: primarily due to fewer donors who return the survey and indicate lack of interest. But the proportion of highly interested leads is much higher! And it minimizes non-interested responders who just like surveys.

3. The handraisers are more interested and more likely to be currently planning!

Going forward, we will continue to embrace “engagement” style campaigns. But we are revamping/enhancing our clients’ legacy propositions and will specifically highlight the why of a legacy gift, share the impact the donor can have, and place guardrails that help us build a pipeline while focusing on more highly-interested donors.