Prove Your Legacy Impact: What’s Your ROI?

If you are a planned giving professional, you are probably doing everything in your power to promote legacy giving. But how can you know it’s working? 

Prove the impact of your legacy giving strategy by calculating your Return On Investment. You need to know how much you are spending versus how much you are making in return.  

1. Add up expenses like printing and postage, staff salaries, events budgets, and website costs to determine how much money you spend directly on planned giving.  

2. Add up how many newly reported in-will gifts you have uncovered in the past fiscal year.  

3. The average in-will gift size is $50,000-$80,000 as reported by Giving USA and The Chronicle of Philanthropy. Calculate your pipeline value for the year by multiplying the number of reported legacy gifts by $50,000.* 

Known Legacy Gifts x $50,000 = Pipeline Value 

4. Once you have crunched the numbers for your organization, determine your legacy ROI by dividing the in-will pipeline value by your planned giving budget. This measures the success of your program by telling you how many in-will dollars you are getting from each dollar you invest. 

Pipeline Value ÷ Planned Giving Budget = ROI 

Does your current ROI prove your legacy impact? Is it a number you are proud to bring to your director or your board? We can help! 

*Why do we use an average gift size of $50,000? For starters, it’s simpler math! But it also allows us to be realistic in our estimations. We will always have to make some informed assumptions to calculate ROI, but if we use a conservative estimate, we can always outperform. 

 

P.S. If you are attending the CGP Conference in Orlando, stop by our booth to talk to us about proving your legacy impact at your organization!