Gift-in-will campaigns may also be known as Legacy, Bequest or Planned Giving campaigns. In the Dataro Platform, you will see ‘Gift-in-Will’ or ‘GiW’ to refer to these campaign types.
What is a Gift in Will / legacy gift / planned gift?
Legacy giving involves premeditated contributions that allocate a portion of an individual's assets to a preferred charitable cause after they die. Typically, these contributions are outlined in wills or trusts, specifying the organization designated to receive the donation. Individuals may utilize various financial tools like pooled income funds or annuities for legacy giving.
To execute legacy giving, individuals simply designate the chosen charity as the beneficiary of their bank statement or pension account. Once the will is executed, the donation is enacted, enabling the donor to establish an enduring philanthropic impact, hence the term "legacy."
Why are Gifts in Will important?
Financial Stability: Legacy gifts provide a vital source of funding, which can help plan and execute long-term projects and programs. They can be small or transformational.
Diversification of Funding Sources: Legacy giving diversifies funding sources, reducing dependency on any single revenue stream.
Long-Term Sustainability: Legacy gifts enable the ability to build an endowment or reserve fund, ensuring their sustainability over time, even during economic downturns or fluctuations in donations.
Impactful Programs: With the assurance of legacy gifts, charities can invest in impactful programs and initiatives that may have longer-term benefits but require sustained financial support.
Expansion of Services: Legacy giving allows charities to expand their services, reach more beneficiaries, and address emerging needs within their communities or focus areas.
Building Relationships: Engaging donors in legacy giving fosters deeper relationships between charities and their supporters, creating a sense of partnership and commitment that can extend beyond the donor's lifetime.
Honoring Donors' Legacies: Accepting legacy gifts honors the legacy and values of donors, recognizing their lasting impact on the causes they cared about.
About Dataro’s Gift-in-Will Model
Legacies are very rare in any charity data set, accounting for less than 0.05% of gifts. A critical aspect of the success of any machine learning system is that the event being modelled occurs with sufficient frequency to accurately estimate the relationship between the model factors and the outcome. That’s why most in-house attempts to model rare events such as bequests are likely to produce inaccurate predictions.
Dataro overcomes this difficulty with models trained on much larger data sets, allowing our models to find patterns that would otherwise remain hidden.
Objective: Identify which donors are most likely to confirm a legacy / bequest in the next 12 months,
Output: Gift-in-will Rank (1 = most likely)
Model Definition: Has at least 1 previous contribution and confirms a bequest / legacy gift in the next 12 months.
Building your campaign
Here's how you'll do it step by step:
- Log into the Dataro app
- Go to Donors & Audiences > Audience Builder
- Click "Filter" in the top right corner
- Add a filter for "Gift-in-Will Rank” [insert your planned campaign size]."
- Add any other filters you required (e.g. age, contactability, etc).
- Click "Save filters." Now you have a list of the best qualified donors.
- Update the columns to include Gift-in-will Rank, along with any other helpful attributes, like last gift date and age
- Click "Save audience" and name it something recognizable
How to use Dataro in your existing Gift in Will (Legacy) program
You may already have your own list of potential legacy prospects - i.e. your pipeline!
HINT: run a comparison to see how many of the top Dataro selections overlap with your own pipeline (or ask your data team to help you with this step). By doing so you will identify:
- The prospects Dataro selected that you already know about - we've confirmed these are good prospects and it is a good idea to keep on building those relationships.
- The 'extra' prospects Dataro has found in your database that are likely to leave a legacy.
- For prospects that aren't on your radar already, you can plan and start your stewardship journey. Repeat this process as often as you like, but we recommend at least quarterly. In this way you will constantly be updating your pipeline with new prospects and making sure you’re not missing potential legacy donors!
Gift-in-will Stewardship Activity Planning
Most nonprofits will already have an established Legacy funnel.
- Prospects - Donor has made no indication that they’re likely to leave a legacy gift but they have been identified as a prospect by Dataro or other means
- Inquirers - Donor has requested more information whether through a social media campaign, a survey or other means
- Considerers - Donor has ticked a box on DM pack/Survey or had a conversation with Relationship Manager and have indicated they would consider leaving a legacy gift
- Intenders - Donor has indicated they will update their will to include your organisation when they next make an update
- Confirmed Legacy / Pledgers - Re-confirmed - Donor has confirmed that your organisation is in their will
- Realised - legacy gift has been made
Gift-in-will Best Practices
Your campaign size will depend on your objectives, budget, and the type of campaign. For awareness campaigns to prospects, you may run a very large campaign. For more expensive channels, you may run a much more targeted campaign. Dataro’s rankings allow you to ‘scale up’ or ‘scale down’ your campaign to suit your needs.
It is perfectly acceptable to run legacy activities alongside other types of fundraising campaigns.
- We recommend trying to understand the motive for giving from your donors, so that you can make that connection with them. An example method below:
- First step = insight into interest
- Tick box ‘want to learn more’
- Always offer form to fill out
- Free gift-in-will kit or "how to include us in your will" kit
- Journey:
- Send out mailer, give them option to respond
- If they respond, put them on a stewardship journey
- Tip - use Dataro’s contact view to understand more information about your donors giving history, average gift size, total giving
Tip: What % of my donor base has a DOB?
One of the biggest predictors for the gift-in-will model is age, which is an important aspect of building your legacy program. Lots of fundraisers simply don't know what percentage of their donor base has a date of birth.
Use Data Inspector to see what % of your database has a date of birth listed. Update your data collection practices to include date of birth, where appropriate. A few creative ways that you are able to collect this data include:
- Encouraging birthday fundraisers through initiatives such as donate your birthday - work in collaboration with other teams
- Asking as part of your donor survey - and acting on that information with a birthday card or other acknowledgement
- Simply asking and letting them know that you want to celebrate their birthday
Dataro Age & Gender Inference
Age & Gender Inference enriches donor records in the Dataro Platform with an inferred age and gender for every contact. Age Inference is a model that leverages publicly available government data and Dataro’s fundraising data to estimate the age for each donor in the database. Age is rounded to the nearest 5th year (e.g. 26->25, 48->50). This field can be particularly useful for segmenting targeted Gift-in-Will outreach audiences.
Inferred Ages & Genders appear as highlighted purple text in Contact View & Audience Builder in the Dataro Platform.
What types of campaigns can use the Dataro Gift-in-will Model?
- Direct Mail & Email Surveys
- Target your mailer to the most-likely Gift-in-Will candidates
- Informational mailing slips
- Only add additional items for those donors likely to confirm a Gift-in-Will
- Phone Campaigns
- Highly-targeted calling campaigns to the most likely Gift-in-Will confirmers. For example, if you’re sending a direct mail campaign to 5000 donors, make it multi-channel by also calling your top 500.
- Online advertising
- Build an audience using your top prospects as the Seed audience so you can acquire more interested & intending legacy givers.
See how other nonprofits have used Dataro's Gift-in-Will model to grow their legacy giving programs in our case study library!