Creating a Planned Giving Pipeline: From Friends to Family

It almost sounds too good to be true. In three years, Second Harvest Heartland grew their pipeline:

• from 100 known estate givers to 280
• from 0 to 1,000 planned giving prospects
• from a $6.8M planned giving pipeline to $22M

So how did they do it, and how can you do it, too?

Kelsey Tyler, the Planned Giving Officer at Second Harvest Heartland (one of the largest food banks in the United States) joined Abigail Bruins from Canopy Resources at CGP to share what we’ve been able to do together:

1. We found the target demographic.

There are three good starting points when it comes to finding your next legacy donor and building a prospect list.

• • We focused on the 12-12-12 rule: Donors who were on file for at least 12 years, have given a gift in the last 12 months, and have given at least 12 gifts of any size. Don’t get too hung up on the numbers here. The important thing is to look for your most loyal donors, which will be those with longevity, recency, and frequency. Instincts are good, but data is better. Use data to find loyal donors with high affinity.
  • Some other donor data points we’ve used are gift amounts, people who have volunteered or been part of some other affinity group, or maybe individuals with special connections—former staff, long-time board members, etc.
  • Try not to get distracted by other factors like net worth, age, or other factors. These factors may be important to consider, but focusing only on those will allow a lot of great prospects to slip away.

2. We surveyed the donors in that target demographic.

If you can afford it, use a printed survey in the mail, it outperforms digital every time. But if you can’t afford that, you can still survey digitally.

Canopy used 15 years of historical data to create surveys that told us which donors would be the most likely to consider an estate gift to Second Harvest. We ask questions like “How did you get involved with Second Harvest?” “What part of their work is most important to you?” “How do you prefer to give?” We’ve learned which combinations of answers create a profile of the most likely donor.

We sent the initial survey. They got a response rate of 21% the first year, averaging 13% over 3 years. Those who respond to the initial survey get a thank you letter; those who identified themselves as estate givers got a thank you specific to that.

At 90 days, we send a check-in letter with another open-ended question, and at 180 days we send a second check-in letter. This might seem like overdoing it, but we find that some people add an estate gift later in the cycle that you would never know about without the checkins.

3. Second Harvest used the data.

Second Harvest added around 35-40 new handraisers each year we did the survey. Canopy would automatically send a thank you letter to these people, and later, Kelsey would contact them personally as you’ll see in the estate donor stewardship section below.

Canopy prepared a list of the best new prospects based on what we’ve learned about donor responses to particular questions. Suddenly Kelsey also had a huge pool of planned giving prospects. Here are the steps she took to work toward converting them to known planned givers:

• • She made sure the information that we collected moved into the Second Harvest database so everyone on their team could access important data.
  • Second Harvest updated their website to make sure it was “planned giving friendly”. You can do that with an internal design team or with an external web vendor—just make sure it isn’t too technical. Donors just need to know the basics. Canopy offers a simple website resource.
  • Kelsey’s team created a digitized gift intention form, which allows donors to connect with you on their terms when they are ready, rather than having to mail in a form.
  • She added planned giving PS’s and blurbs wherever she could. Bite-sized messaging can go a long way.
  • She made information available about creating wills. If you’d like, you can download a basic will guide from Canopy here.
  • As for actual donor conversations, Kelsey has loved the one-on-one conversations that she’s had with the top priority prospects that Canopy identified. Canopy provided a list of questions and answers that she can use to start a conversation or continue an existing conversation, with various suggestions on how to talk to donors who gave specific answers to different questions.
  • It quickly became apparent in conversations that these donors loved Second Harvest, they wanted to hear from Kelsey, and they need more basic education than she thought. Financially savvy donors still needed more education. She created a “menu” to help guide the conversations and fill them in on other options they might not know about.

4. Second Harvest stewards the estate donors.

When they self-identify as “in-will” donors, those individuals received a handwritten thank-you from Kelsey that included her contact info as a resource, but no other asks at that point. A month later, she would send a copy of the gift intention form asking them for more details about their plans, and she called with an offer to have a more personal conversation.

For broader group stewardship, Kelsey hosts one or two legacy society events each year where members are invited to join in a food-packing volunteer session, followed by a conversation with either the CEO or another program leader for an inside look at the work.

She sends an annual thank you that specifically mentions their estate commitment, because many of these estate donors are also annual donors, volunteers, and gala attendees, so she wants to thank them explicitly for that planned gift.

Canopy’s survey was also able to give Second Harvest the donor and impact stories that were shared in the open-ended questions—a new portfolio of possible testimonials.

So that’s it. That’s the process that has helped Second Harvest find so many new estate givers!

Does it sound like more work than you can handle? That’s why Canopy exists—we can keep the planned giving conversation going in the background with a wide swath of your donor list, keeping you free to have the important, one-on-one conversations with your prospects and known planned givers. Contact us today!