For some time, many of us have worked from the belief that success in planned giving is all about realized gifts. One of my favorite quotes about this idea came from a long-ago conference speaker noting the lack of control we have over this metric: “The best time to be a planned giving officer at an organization,” the speaker began, “…is 10 years after a really good planned giving officer left.”
Certainly, securing planned gifts is critical—and fundamental—to your nonprofit’s sustainability, but planned giving is also about cultivation. Successful programs know that defining return on investment (ROI) is layered.
Does the mere thought of figuring out your program’s ROI provoke sweaty palms? Heart palpitations?
ROI validates—to your board, boss and other fundraising departments—why it’s a smart move to dedicate manpower to planned giving. ROI also justifies to you that what you’re doing matters.
While calculating ROI for the long game of planned giving can be challenging, there’s good news: Enter the National Standards for Gift Planning Success (NSGPS). They are the framework for advancing your program and ensuring accountability to donors and the public. Our Stelter team is also personally invested in these standards. I’ve served on the board of CGP, recently finished up my tenure as the 2023 board chair and am co-chair of the NSGPS Task Force. Lynn Gaumer, JD, CAP®, Stelter’s senior gift planning consultant, has been involved as the vice chair of CGP Leadership Institute, and was just elected to the 2025 CGP board.
So yes, we believe in ROI.
The place to start for ROI measurement tools is the page on Ability and Capacity to Execute.
Leading ROI Indicators
Are you in the habit of tracking leading indicators? These can help you feel short-term gratification in our long-term business.
Some leading indicators to add to your ROI toolbox:
- Your contact plan. Document your marketing touches monthly, quarterly and annually. This includes multichannel marketing efforts, calls and visits (both remote and in-person). How many times are you in front of individual donors in a time span? Remember, frequency makes your marketing more effective.
- Identified/engaged planned gift prospects. Track those who have indicated a general interest in planned giving. Reply card responses, prospect-initiated outreach (calls, emails), and repeat traffic to your legacy society page represent great news.
- Planned gift intentions. How many intentions are you recognizing each year? How many prior revocable intentions are you stewarding? How many, if any, gifts were rescinded? How many new members did you add to your legacy society? These are all important questions to track and tackle to improve your fundraising effectiveness.
ROI 2.0
More advanced ROI measurements provide deeper insight and proof of planned giving success. You can study prospect pools, who’s making a gift, how they’re interacting with your nonprofit and types of gifts.
Strategy 1: Divide ROI into age segments/generational groups. Looking at baby boomers, especially, may be a productive exercise. Why? The largest transfer of wealth will occur among boomers as pass their earnings to younger generations. In the next 30 to 40 years, $30 trillion in assets will be transferred. It’s worth your time to assess how your planned giving marketing and stewardship efforts resonate with this group. (Psst: But don’t overlook Gen X and Millennials!)
Strategy 2: Divide by channel. Include direct mail, email, website traffic and social, plus add in survey responses. How did each channel fare? Where are your donors interacting with your brand the most; where are you generating the most leads? These can help you plan your budget and commit your time.
A Stewardship Note
Stewardship should always be a component of your ROI calculations. This critical communication can be with legacy donors or planned giving prospects and is usually summed up with two words, “thank you.” The work isn’t explicitly gift-oriented and may include impact reports, phone calls, birthday/anniversary cards and face time.
The main point to ponder: Even if you don’t go into advanced reporting methods on your first (or fifth!) time out, start somewhere. Develop key measurements—of dollars, of touches, of movement within the funnel—that show indisputable metrics that your boss, board and team will appreciate. You’ll feel pride too.
I’m a huge fan of tracking data to report return on investment for our planned giving programs. With marketing looking like things that our annual fund colleagues do regularly, it seems like a good place to start. But I always caution against reporting direct marketing campaign results at a single time. Our marketing takes time to root. Our call to action is not a quick trip to the organization’s website to make a donation with a credit card or sign up for a monthly gift. It’s not even counting how many requests for information we received within 2 weeks of the appeal. Because when we report that a direct marketing campaign produced 0.04% return, it hurts us. It hurts our budget and it hurts our standing among the people that count results – our leaders. I have been speaking and writing about this topic for some time. I have proposed, instead, that we track a series of pieces and track them over multiple years. In our field, you can’t just send one postcard and see how it goes. You have to plan for a series of communications and track the effort over time. 12 months, 24 months, 36 months and longer. You’re looking to find the sweet-spot that produces a real return. We need to learn to answer: How long after a direct marketing campaign effort do we start to see the result people care about: funds! (and also, learning what segments are the best to market to) Without a true standard that everyone uses, we’ll be fighting for our budgets and even our positions forever. I don’t mean to be a naysayer, but it’s more than counting one mailing/email/postcard. When we get serious about consistent and ubiquitous tracking, we’ll finally find ourselves on par with our colleagues. It’s how we prove that the PGO that comes 10 years behind us will appear exceptional – but the real task is to make sure that the PGO that comes 10 years behind them and behind them appears exceptional as well! They may get the credit, but I can prove the foundation for the credit.
Katherine, thank you for the thoughtful response and I wholeheartedly agree. The toughest ‘sell’ to leadership is when they try to compare planned giving marketing results directly to annual giving results….it’s two completely different animals. This is why it’s so critical to ensure everyone’s on the same page with expectations for planned giving marketing…especially given that we know, on average, only 1/3 of planned giving donors will ever self identify during their lifetime. I always preach to my clients that they must look at their planned giving communications in two buckets…education (aka ‘air cover’) and conversion (aka ‘identifying hand raisers’). It’s imperative that planned giving marketing programs are built for the long term and not short term results as donors are like us and they procrastinate their planning and so much is about being ‘top-of-mind’ when something changes in their life to give them pause and time to reflect.