"Why won't they tell us?"

"Why won't supporters share their legacy gift with us?"

Many organizations have real concern about the number of donors who are willing to disclose a completed legacy gift (much less share any details) or share that they are considering a gift.

Of course, the donor has no real reason to tell the charity about a gift or their consideration of one. Some reasons donors have shared:

1. It’s none of their business

2. I don’t want anyone hounding me for more money

3. I don’t care about being in a legacy society or other recognition

4. My attorney told me not to tell (a whole 'nother issue we need to explore...)

But the one I hear more often is one we need to really respect and address:

5. I don’t know what will happen in the future.

We can reassure them that bequests are revocable and they can change their mind. But I don’t think that goes to the heart of it.

I was re-reading that Seth Godin classic “On Marketing” and his discussion of loss aversion. In economics, loss aversion is the tendency to prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains, a cognitive bias that where the pain of potentially losing is twice as powerful as the pain of gaining.

Financial decision-making in particular suffers from this bias. And when we add good old status quo bias as well as the the emotional/family/moral issues involved in estate planning, it’s surprising that anyone actually completes a plan, much less tells us about it!

So when I speak to donors, what I hear under the surface is:

1. What if I make the wrong decision?

2. What if someone I care for is hurt by my decision?

3. It will be a lot of work if I need to change my mind later.

There’s a lot of fear reflected here. Are the tactics and messages you are using to encourage donors to share a legacy gift or their consideration of a legacy gift making this better or worse? Are they making it easier or harder for your donors? From what I see, we're almost always making it worse.

This is why good fundraisers double down on relationship building vs depending solely on marketing to convince donors to share this information. We can (and are exploring) ways to do better in our messaging and marketing, but growing your relationship with your donors makes all the difference.