Awareness campaigns are a great way to help donors further understand the importance of legacy giving on a one-to-many scale. While Canadian charities work to establish gifts in Wills as a meaningful way to contribute to future generations, awareness campaigns are a natural first step for many.
What do charities stand to gain from awareness campaigns?
When charities are first starting to narrow their focus on legacy giving, they often begin the journey with a number of awareness strategies. At the most basic level, these tools all work to establish new segments of donors based on loyalty and interest to identify the donors who should be targeted with legacy giving communications. Once the new segments of donors are identified, new communications strategies around legacy giving can be deployed in attempts to convert the increased awareness into real gifts in Wills.
In the space of gaining awareness, there are plenty of third-party options available for charities to level-up their legacy giving communications. Through consultants and agencies, these activities often include surveys through mail or phone, email sequences, and more recently, national awareness campaigns for charities to be one of many partners listed. These types of campaigns enable charities to warm their donors up to the idea of legacy giving, educate them on the benefits of it, and include relevant information on how to remember the specific charity in their Will, life insurance policy, RRSP, etc.
At the very least, charities can gain exposure to new audiences, with the hope that these donors will eventually leave a legacy gift to the charity.
The problem that charities often run into at this stage is inertia. Put simply, very few factors will actually have an impact on when an individual or couple take the final step of creating their Will, and they may still be years out of creating or updating that Will when they request information from a charity on legacy giving. Only by providing a solution for donors to create their Wills with little hassle and a compelling offer can charities truly maximize their investments in legacy giving.
How to maximize ROI on legacy awareness campaigns
While the space of legacy giving awareness may be crowded with consultants and agencies, there’s little emphasis put on how to actually convert awareness into gifts in a Wills.
For many charities, the journey stops at the call to action, since few provide a way to solve the inertia issue. Beyond the industry standard of the donor requesting a legacy giving brochure or kit, charities stand to gain so much more by providing a compelling offer such as a service that can help them create a Will.
While they may have taken meaningful steps forward with the increased awareness of their legacy programs, return on investment can only come from the gifts in Wills themselves. For this reason, charities stand to gain a lot more from their investment by closing the gap on line of sight into future income. If charities can scale through legacy giving and provide a meaningful experience for their donors, they can then use that visibility into diversified future income to make bolder, long-term bets as an organization.
Since surveys and awareness campaigns provide such powerful information for charities to capture intent from, it’s a shame that more charities don’t try to close the gap with an offer to create a Will. If the call-to-action is requesting a brochure, charities then lose sight of the donor unless they track and follow up with each donor on the status of their Will. Since charities are mindful of maintaining a positive relationship with donors, all charities stand to maximize their ROI by providing tools that can help their donors cross the bridge from intending to leave a gift in their Will to actually committing to that gift.
Small charities have even more to gain from tools like this, since they may not have a team member solely focused on legacy giving. By augmenting the time of the team member responsible for legacy giving through offering a suitable Will option for most donors, team members can then have more meaningful and timely engagements with donors who have more unique estate requirements.
The Willfora Solution
Willfora gives charities the power to maximize their ROI on awareness campaigns by offering a customized service for any donor to create or update their Will for FREE. With a Charity Page, Willfora can tag donors who visit the charity’s landing page and customize their Will-creation experience to prompt for a gift.
We find that the experience also aligns with the goals of both the charity and donor. While the charity wants to drive consideration for a gift, a donor is offered the opportunity to save hundreds of dollars on creating a Will. Since the Will-creation experience happens with a third party in this scenario, charities can run better arm's-length campaigns while not being too involved in the process as to negatively impact the relationship with the donor.
Converting intent to commitment is only part of the journey though, as Willfora’s technology can provide valuable gift data to help charities both track future income and continue the conversation with donors after a gift has been made.
Charity pages can even be integrated into any digital campaign (ie. email marketing, social media, web) to tag UTM codes. With this feature, charities can now identify not only when a gift has been left to their organization, but which communication the donor originated from.
For a demonstration of how Willfora tags and prompts for gifts, please click here.
If you are a charity that wants to superpower your legacy giving program through a Charity Page or Sponsored Charity listing, please contact us to book a demo