TL;DR:
- Most small and mid-sized nonprofits skip planned giving because they believe they’re too small, too inexperienced, or too under-resourced. None of that holds up.
- You can launch planned giving in three steps: identify your top prospects, start with gifts in wills, then cultivate and solicit.
- Your best prospects are your longest-giving donors, regardless of gift size. Query for longevity and consistency, and leave lifetime totals out of it.
- Skip the brochures, the web page, and the twelve gift vehicles. Wills are enough to launch.
- Early progress shows up as prospects identified, meetings held, and asks outstanding, not dollars received.
Planned giving has a reputation problem at smaller nonprofits. It sounds like something universities and hospital systems do, with a dedicated officer, outside counsel, and a glossy brochure explaining charitable remainder trusts. So it sits on the someday list year after year while donors who have given faithfully for two decades quietly write wills that don’t mention you.
On a recent episode of The Responsive Lab, host Scott Holthaus talked with Tony Martignetti, who has spent roughly three decades in planned giving and has focused on making it approachable for small and mid-sized nonprofits since 1997. His new book, Planned Giving Accelerated, strips away the intimidating jargon and complex financial vehicles of traditional legacy giving to show small- to mid-size nonprofits how to launch a functioning bequest program in just seven days.
On the podcast, they covered why the “we’re too small” belief sticks, what a realistic launch looks like, and how to tell whether it’s working before any money shows up. What follows is how to launch planned giving at your nonprofit without hiring anyone, buying anything, or learning estate law.
Why Small and Mid-Sized Nonprofits Skip Planned Giving
“We’re Not Big Enough”
The book behind this conversation works through six myths about planned giving. We’ll cover two of them here.
Somewhere between 90 and 95% of the nonprofit community feels too small to be successful at planned giving. That’s conventional wisdom talking, and conventional wisdom is frequently wrong. You don’t need to be an attorney. You don’t need to hire one. You don’t need a gift acceptance policy, a recognition society, or a web page before you begin.
What you need is already sitting in your database and your existing donor relationships.
“Planned Giving Is a Death Conversation”
This is the objection that keeps fundraisers from booking the meeting. Nobody wants to sit across a table and bring up someone’s mortality.
The framing is backwards. As Tony put it on the episode: “Planned giving is a conversation about life. The life, sustainability, and longevity of your nonprofit work in your community.”
That happens to be the one thing you and your best prospects already agree on. They’ve given for twenty years because they love the work. You raise money for it because you love the work. The conversation starts there.
The Three-Step Planned Giving Launch
The whole launch is three steps, and they map to the first three chapters of the book. Everything else is optional and can wait.
Step 1: Identify Your Top Prospects
Your best planned giving prospects are your longest-tenured donors, as opposed to your biggest.
What to Query For, and What to Leave Out
Query for longevity and consistency. Fifteen years of giving, twenty, twenty-five, sometimes thirty. Then deliberately exclude the fields you’d normally reach for first:
- Total lifetime giving
- Average gift size
Gift size is irrelevant here. A donor’s lifetime total tells you nothing useful about whether they’ll include you in their will, and leaving it in the query will surface the wrong people.
One nuance on gaps. A donor who missed a couple of years and came back still counts. Twenty-five years of giving buys a lot of grace. The line is whether they’re currently lapsed.
Who Actually Makes the Ask
Each top prospect also needs a real relationship with someone at your organization. Staff or volunteer, it doesn’t matter which. You’ll recognize them by behavior: they take the call, they answer the email, they show up when they’re invited.
That person has the conversation.
Step 2: Launch With Gifts in Wills
This is where launches get complicated.
Teams convince themselves they need to promote everything at once. Charitable gift annuities, life insurance, qualified charitable distributions, IRA beneficiary designations, donor-advised funds, remainder trusts, lead trusts. All of that belongs in an appendix, and realistically in years three to five, once you have a program worth expanding.
Launch with wills only.
The reason is practical. Everybody knows what a will is. Everybody knows roughly how one works. Everybody knows they need one. Simple is the point when you’re working with limited budget, capacity, and bandwidth.
Step 3: Cultivate and Solicit Your Top Prospects
Some prospects are ready for the ask at the first meeting. Others need a cultivation meeting or two first, even though they qualified on giving history. You’ll know which is which from the relationship, the same read you’d make in any moves management process.
How the Conversation Actually Goes
Open the way you’d open any donor meeting. Ask how they’re doing. Share what’s new at the organization, including any breaking news worth passing along.
Then pivot to the long term. You’re focusing on sustainability. You’re talking with your most loyal, longest-tenured donors, and you want to thank them for it. Come prepared with the year they first gave, which you should be able to pull from your database before you walk in.
Then ask: Would you consider including us in your will?
And stop talking.
You just asked someone to consider something, so give them room to consider it. Thirty seconds. Maybe a full minute. If you’re over a meal, take a drink, take a few bites, relax. Then let them come back with their answer.
What to Measure Before the First Planned Gift Arrives
The realized dollars might be ten, fifteen, or thirty years out.
Measure activity instead. Reasonable early fundraising KPIs for a new program:
- Top prospects identified. Three or four is a real number for a small shop. Twenty-five or thirty is fine for a larger one. The ceiling is whatever your team can personally manage, since these people get individual cultivation and solicitation.
- Cultivation and solicitation meetings held.
- Asks outstanding. Three donors actively considering a bequest is a result in this case, as opposed to a pending item.
- Commitments received. Solicit three, get two yeses and one still thinking, and you have two planned gift commitments inside your first six months.
Prospects you can’t manage personally become tier two. Those donors get print and digital treatment rather than personal meetings.
One thing the metrics won’t capture: following up is your job. You keep the conversation moving until you get a yes or a no, because you’re the professional fundraiser in the exchange.
How to Steward a Planned Giving Commitment
Someone says yes. The temptation is to log it and move to the next name.
Consider what they just did. They put your organization in the same document as their spouse, their partner, their children, their grandchildren. Your mission has a spot next to their loved ones.
Respond accordingly.
In the room: thank them sincerely and specifically. If you know the donor well enough that a hug wouldn’t embarrass either of you, hug them. If not, a warm handshake and real gratitude do the job.
After the meeting: send a handwritten note. Then have your CEO send one too. Handwritten notes stand out precisely because so few people write them anymore. If your CEO isn’t comfortable with handwriting, a more formal letter of thanks works.
In your database: flag or tag the record as a planned giving donor. Whatever your convention is, apply it consistently, the same way you’d maintain any other donor stewardship plan.
Ongoing: treat them as insiders. If you already send a behind-the-scenes update to major donors or board members, add these donors to it. Nothing confidential or proprietary, just the communications that signal someone is on the inside. They’ve invested in your long term, so they’ve earned it. That’s low-lift stewardship, since you’re including people in things you already do.
Getting Planned Giving Off the Someday List
The launch takes a week, not a fiscal year of planning. Read the first three chapters, identify a handful of long-tenured donors, decide you’re only talking about wills, and book the first conversation. You could start Monday.
Then celebrate each step as it happens. Four prospects identified is four more than you had. One cultivation or solicitation meeting with a top prospect means you have launched planned giving.
If the blocker is your data rather than your nerve, that’s a solvable problem. Pulling a clean list of donors by giving tenure, tagging planned giving prospects, and tracking cultivation across a small portfolio are all core to how a nonprofit CRM should work.
Get a demo of Virtuous CRM+ and see what your own database can already tell you about your longest-tenured donors.
Planned Giving FAQs
Do We Need an Attorney to Launch Planned Giving?
No. You don’t need to be an attorney or retain one to launch a planned giving program focused on gifts in wills.
How Many Planned Giving Prospects Should We Start With?
As many as you can personally manage. Three or four is a legitimate starting point for a small shop, while a larger team might manage twenty-five or thirty. These donors receive individual cultivation and solicitation, so capacity sets the number.
Should We Exclude Donors Who Have Lapsed?
Exclude donors who are currently lapsed. A donor with twenty-five years of giving who missed a year or two and came back still belongs on the list.
What Do We Do About Gift Annuities, Trusts, and QCDs?
Leave them out of the launch. Add them in years three to five if you want them. Wills are simple enough that everyone already understands them.
How Do We Know Planned Giving Is Working Before Gifts Are Realized?
Track activity: prospects identified, meetings held, asks outstanding, and commitments received. Two commitments in your first six months is real progress, even though the dollars may arrive decades later.
