“In most charities, resources invested in prospecting for planned giving donors is wasted.” Speaking as part of a panel to the Toronto Chapter of the Canadian Association of Gift Planners, John Hochstadt, until recently Director of Planned Giving & Major Gifts at Mount Sinai Hospital Foundation, urged gift planners to develop a healthy `prove to me it works’ attitude to the effectiveness of many of our busy-work activities such as brochures, newsletters and planned giving committees. He pointed out that far too often, we run the risk of mistaking administrative practices for gift planning, which in fact only occurs when you are talking to donors.

We don’t work in a vacuum, Hochstadt reminded the CAGP, and there is no one model that will work for all of us. Each situation has its own advantages and constraints, and since there is no one perfect system, “Whatever we do in terms of marketing, it has to be universally acceptable. Leave every conceivable door open.” As an indicator of how crucially important this approach is, he pointed out that 80% of bequest gifts to the Mount Sinai Hospital Foundation come from people previously unknown to the hospital.

Working with the board a challenge

Boards of directors, said Hochstadt, often believe that other people will do what they wont do themselves! You have to convince your board first. Most good gifts don’t happen spontaneously. You have to generate prospects, and the best way is to begin with your own board.

Colleen Bradley, Planned Giving Officer at the Heart & Stroke Foundation agreed that the board and its perceptions has to be the foundation of a gift planner’s program. Although Heart & Stroke researched planned giving for an entire year before hiring her, she found, during her first board presentation, that many members neither understood nor bought into the program. Rather, she said, they wanted money now, were afraid that her planned giving activities would undermine the annual giving program and upset donors and volunteers, assumed that everyone has a will, and wanted to know what financial return they could expect on their investment in her.

Bradley’s solution was to remove these and other internal road blocks by getting the board to buy into a marketing program. For Heart & Stroke, through trial and error, the effective components of the program have turned out to be a newsletter and special seminar program. Responder cards, sent out with every receipt for a year, didn’t work.

Walk before you run

Check-off boxes on direct mail cards, however, did work at Toronto’s Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation, where Malcolm Burrows arrived in the last six months of a major capital campaign, and again found it necessary to examine the context. Here too, the challenge was to look for ways to market planed giving without spending money, and the obvious first step was to ask some basic questions about the market. “How”, asked Burrows for example, “do you market planned giving in a cancer hospital? You can’t just rely on a single source of information and advice. The donors to Princess Margaret are largely self-selected, because cancer has touched them in some way. At a university, donors have a different attitude.”

The result of his research, for Burrows, was, to walk before he ran. He launched his program with a straight-forward bequest-focused effort, and only recently began branching into annuities. He has concentrated throughout on piggybacking on existing programs, many of his leads coming from the returned direct mail cards which he follows up very inexpensively with a letter and information sheet.

This approach allows him to adjust the message on the basis of his growing experience. For example, although he began by focusing on the tax benefits, he found that donors were more interested in how they could help the hospital. In his letter, he promises to call, and does. Most don’t want to talk, but the bequests are coming. When he arrived, the foundation was aware of three bequests, and the count is now well past two dozen.

“Slow and boring works”

A growing strength for Burrows in his work at Princess Margaret is a developing relationship with the hospital staff. While there has not, in the past, been much of a relationship between the foundation and the hospital, there was and is a very strong bond between the staff and the patients. As a result, much of his time is now spent relating to the staff, explaining planned giving, asking for and receiving input and advice, running donor profiles in the internal hospital newsletter, and sending mailings to retired hospital employees. It may not be spectacular, he says, and “it may sound dull and boring, but it works!”

Thus, while Burrows would perhaps dispute Hochstadt’s emphasis on the element of chance in the generation of major gifts, they are obviously in agreement that the best research and the best marketing occurs when you are talking to people.

For more information, call John Hochstadt at 586-8203, or Malcolm Burrows at 946-6560.