Why Your Small Nonprofit Needs Planned Giving – and How to Quickly Launch

Have you heard about the great wealth transfer? It’s already happening! From 2024 to 2025, bequest revenue grew 19.7% (unadjusted for inflation), according to Giving USA. In current dollars, adjusted for inflation, it’s a 16.6% increase.

What does this mean for your nonprofit?

It means a planned giving program is no longer optional – even for small- and mid-size nonprofits. If you want to be sustainable, embracing planned giving is essential to your mission.

I want you to forget about anything you’ve believed, or maybe even been led to believe, about how an organization like yours can’t see success in planned giving.

Myth

The conventional wisdom sounds like:

• It’s only for wealthy donors
• It’s too complicated
• We need expertise, like a lawyer or consultant
• It means offering lots of gift options
• Planned giving will hurt our other fundraising
• We’ll have to talk to our donors about death

Reality

The reality is Planned Giving is:

• Perfect for modest donors who make small gifts
• Easy, accessible and affordable, when launched correctly
• So simple, you don’t need an expert or expertise
• Focused on gifts in wills at launch
• 75% likely to increase your other giving[1]
• About life — the life and longevity of your nonprofit

3-Step, 1-Week Planned Giving Launch

My Martignetti 3-Step, 1-Week Planned Giving Launch focuses you on only what’s essential to start your program. It’s as easy as 1-2-3:

Step 1: Identify your top prospects
Step 2: Launch with gifts in wills
Step 3: Cultivate and solicit your top prospects

You don’t need a campaign, a press release, an event, a website, or even a webpage. You don’t need a 4-color brochure, a B&W brochure, influencers, targeted emails, lawyer meetings, testimonials, a board committee, a gift acceptance policy, or social media.

When you focus exclusively on Steps 1 through 3, you bring a planned giving fundraising launch within reach for your small- or mid-size nonprofit. Let’s take a closer look.

Step 1: Identify your top prospects

These are your most loyal, committed donors — the folks who’ve been supporting your work for decades, in many cases.

They likely also have a strong relationship with someone in your office or on your board. They take the calls, reply to the emails, attend the events.

That means you have everything you need to identify your top prospects: the giving histories and relationship histories in your CRM database. You don’t need to pay for a wealth screening or age overlay.

If you have ages in your database, I recommend selecting folks who are 55-60 and over.

That’s roughly the ages where people start thinking about wills as a method of giving back to the causes that have been important to them and their loved ones. In later years, if you want to identify younger long-term donors as top prospects, you should. But for the initial launch phase, stick with those most likely to make a bequest commitment sooner rather than later.

If you don’t have age data, you’re not at a disadvantage. Don’t go paying for that age overlay! Rely solely on giving histories and you’ll be fine.

How many top prospects should you select?

That completely depends on your capacity for personal meetings and conversations with the folks. If you can manage only 2-3 top prospects, celebrate that you’ve identified that many. You’re advancing your planned giving program! If you can take on 15-20, please do. What’s critical if you’re at the small end is that you don’t despair. Stand proud! Celebrate your selections and move to Step 2.

Step 2: Launch with gifts in wills

There are many reasons why I recommend gifts in wills — charitable bequests — as your sole promotion and marketing focus at this stage.

First, they’re the most popular planned gift, by far. Think of the largest planned giving programs in the U.S. and I assure you at least 75% of the gifts in their programs are gifts in wills. I’ve seen it as high as 90% in some organizations I’ve worked with. They’re the low-hanging fruit, so they’re the place to start.

Second, they have no lifetime cost for your donors. That’s reassuring to a lot of people. They can make a planned gift commitment and not feed their concern about possibly exhausting their assets while they’re living.

Third, charitable bequests are easy on your marketing budget. Because they’re widely understood by American adults, you don’t have to expend marketing resources explaining nuances. Compare that with charitable gift annuities, the qualified charitable distribution or even life insurance.

Finally, the average charitable bequest in the U.S. is $35,000, conservatively. That’s a major gift at every nonprofit I’ve worked with, and probably at 95% of all nonprofits nationwide.

Step 3: Cultivate and solicit your top prospects

Planned giving prospects deserve your personal attention.

But it will probably be less time-consuming and difficult than you imagine. Because, remember, you don’t have to explain a lot of gift vehicles people don’t understand. And, it’s truly not a conversation about death. This is where lots of fundraisers get hung up. Don’t! Please let me debunk this tired, old myth for you right now.

Planned Giving is a conversation about life. The life, sustainability and longevity of your work in your community, for decades and generations to come. And the life and legacy of your donor’s values as well.

Talk with your donors about shared values and love of your work.

That’s the one thing you’re guaranteed to have in common with these long-term, loyal donors. You know they love your mission, vision and values because of their giving history. I know you love these things too, because you’re fundraising for them. That’s your common bond.

Depending where each relationship stands, you’ll either take a cultivation step, or you’ll comfortably solicit.

Your meetings will center around your shared desire to sustain your work for the long term. Whatever else might divide you, the values you both hold dear bind you, transcending age, politics, geography, education, religion, gender, and other identities.

Those who meet with each prospect are the ones who have the strongest relationship with each.

1-Week Timeframe

Those are your 3 steps. What about the 1-week part of launching?

Within a week, you can have your first top prospect conversation.

Forget all those obstacles I debunked earlier. None of them are real, so none should get in your way.

Just start talking to committed, loyal donors about gifts in wills.

The first time you do that, you’ve started planned giving at your nonprofit.

How do you lead into your top prospect conversations?

Talk about the one thing you know the two of you have in common:

The love of your work, the values expressed through your work, and how important it is that your vision and mission continue in your community – for the generations to follow.

They love your work – you know, because they’ve been supporting it for many years, or even decades.

You love your work — of course.

That shared love is the focus of your cultivation and solicitation conversations with your planned giving top prospects.

Stop putting planned giving on your “someday” list. Your donors are ready. Your community needs it. Don’t start someday. Start Monday.

Today’s guest post comes from Tony Martignetti, and is adapted from his brand new book: Planned Giving Accelerated: The Cut Through the Sh!t, No-Nonsense, Practical, Step-by-Step Guide to Start Legacy Giving Fundraising at Your Small to Mid-Size Nonprofit Simply in One Week with Bequests (The title may be longer than the book. Did you need a nap?). This no-fluff, practical playbook for executive directors, fundraisers, and board members at small- to mid-size nonprofits is available at Barnes & Noble and Amazon.

[1] Professor Russell James, Texas Tech University https://pentera.com/blog/planned-gifts-increase-annual-gifts