Who Will Come Through for You in the End

Who Will Come Through for You in the End

 

Prospecting for estate donors sometimes feels like filling in your March Madness bracket. You know who’s in the field, and you have your suspicions about who will make it to the finals. You might just go with your gut on who you think will make it to the finals. But you never know when a Cinderella team is going to come out of nowhere. 

You know your major donors. You think you know who is going to include your organization in their estate plans. Your director or your board want to see concrete results. But how can you know for sure? Do you have to just go with your gut? Do you guess at the final outcome? 

It’s time to find a better solution than hopes and dreams. Here are 3 things you can do to avoid a painful disappointment in the donor “finals”: 

  1. Inspire them. Give them a pep talk. Remind your loyal donors (big or small) of what really matters—their desire to make a difference in the world for years to come. 
  2. Coach them. Give them a game plan. Let them know you are available to help them find solutions for their individual planned giving needs. 
  3. Challenge them. Pass them the ball. But don’t step out of bounds; approaching donors about legacy planning should come as the next step in a carefully navigated path down the court. 

You can develop your own ways of doing these things with all of your donors on your own time. Or at Canopy, we can do this for you with our messaging, automated mail-back dialogue that yields an average 13% response rate, and post-survey data analysis that shows who would be the best prospects to contact. We help uncover those “hidden major donors”—the Cinderella teams that seem to come out of nowhere. We’ll make sure your bracket is a winner every time.