As many nonprofits of all sizes now recognize, planned giving represents a significant opportunity to advance their missions.
This form of fundraising provides predictable (and often unrestricted) future funding, strengthens relationships with loyal supporters, and builds powerful social proof among your community. Today’s demographic conditions also make planned giving especially worth investing in, as aging generations are poised to pass down record amounts of wealth to their heirs and favorite causes in the coming decades.
Learning the essentials of planned giving, setting up the right tools, adding material to your website, and promoting your program are straightforward enough tasks. If your organization already has sophisticated giving programs in place, they’ll likely be easy.
The biggest challenge that nonprofits face with new planned giving programs, however, comes when it’s time to switch on the prospect pipeline.
If your organization hasn’t yet made planned giving a priority, where do you focus? How do you know who to target with information about planned giving, and what should you say to them?
Your success in this arena will ultimately come down to two things:
- How well you understand planned giving motivations
- How well you target specific donor segments
Let’s walk through these critical components of a successful planned giving program, including recent (and sometimes surprising) demographic findings that will help you shape your segmentation strategy.
What Motivates Planned Giving?
Before exploring specifics about planned giving prospects, you must understand something much more fundamental—why donors choose to give through bequests and other planned gifts in the first place.
Understanding donor motivations will inform your entire fundraising approach, from research to segmentation, outreach to stewardship.
We can identify three general motivators for planned giving:
- Legacy-building with personally meaningful causes and organizations
- Estate and financial planning via strategic planned gifts
- Tax benefits, both immediate and long-term for heirs
A planned gift donor might be motivated by any or all of these factors. And although giving motivations are often nuanced for all types of gifts, you should remember that the reasons why donors choose to create planned gifts are particularly and uniquely personal.
Your outreach challenge will be to strike the right balance between efficiency and personalization. Cast a wide net to scale your program, but shape even your broadest messaging with a nuanced and sensitive understanding of donor motivations.
From there, you can follow a recognizable development workflow. Learn more about planned giving prospecting, create a prospect research and qualification process, and invest time in understanding the specific giving motivations for the prospects you identify.
Additionally, remember that “planned gifts” are a diverse category. We’ll take a closer look at donor demographics specifically for bequests below, but keep in mind that your organization can also solicit other types of non-cash gifts and non-deferred arrangements. These are typically favored by high-wealth donors interested in estate and tax planning. Cultivate them as you would other prospects, and take opportunities to suggest planned gift structures if you pick up on potential interest.
Who Gives to Planned Giving Programs?
When you think of bequest giving, you likely already have an idea of who an ideal prospect might be. They’re older, fairly wealthy, and have supported your organization for many years. And you’d be right—individuals who fit this description generallymake the strongest prospects. They often have long philanthropic histories and a demonstrated interest in active estate planning and management.
If you screen your donor database using a combination of these markers, you’ll have a solid foundation for your planned giving prospecting process.
But where do you go from there? It’s easy to sort and filter by age, length of relationship, and wealth markers, but how do you add additional layers? What if you don’t have many supporters who fit this ideal description?
Remember that planned giving is highly accessible—anyone can create a bequest. The process of creating one also frequently unlocks added generosity since the gifts are deferred and come from saved assets rather than cash. Expand your conception of who gives through bequests!
Here are a few key findings from FreeWill’s 2024 Planned Giving Report that help illuminate the on-the-ground realities of planned gift fundraising and who you should target.
- Age
- Older donors create fewer but higher-value bequests, $55,806 on average for ages 65-84 and $59,480 for ages 85+.
- Middle-aged donors (ages 45-64) created the most estate plans and committed the most total dollars, 38% of dollars across all age groups.
- Younger donors create the most bequests but at generally lower values, 21% of all bequests but representing only 3% of total dollars for ages 18-24. However, the average bequest value of these young donors has increased in recent years as they grow their careers and, in many cases, inherit wealth. For ages 18-24, the average 2023 gift value of $28,346 increased to $34,789 in 2024.
- Gender
- Women create the most wills (56%) and bequests (60%). The average bequest from a female donor is worth $47,434.
- Men create the highest-value bequests, with an average gift size of $62,426.
- Transgender and nonbinary donors make up a much smaller segment of total wills (1%) but display a much higher rate of bequest creation than other groups (32% of wills created by these donors vs. 15% for men and 17% for women). The average bequest value committed by trans and nonbinary donors has also increased sharply in recent years, up to $40,223 for transgender donors and $70,234 for nonbinary donors.
- Marital status
- Single donors without children represent the highest share of all bequest dollars by far at 49%, followed by married with children, single with children, and married without children.
- However, keep in mind that married individuals are much more likely to create wills in the first place.
- Parental status
- Donors with adult-age children represent large majorities of both all will-makers (69.7%) and committed bequests (75%).
Notice any surprises here? Or any insights that immediately jump out as interesting angles to test in your prospecting efforts?
Take the time to explore this report and others (like Blackbaud’s Status of Fundraising 2024) that break down both big-picture and fine-grained trends. They offer many interesting and often granular trends, such as those relating to pet ownership, location, nonprofit mission area, and more.
Also, consider how these insights can help you improve your messaging beyond the prospecting process. For example, knowing that married donors are more likely to create wills, but single donors tend to commit larger bequests, you could better emphasize the importance of estate planning and financial education to a narrower target segment of unmarried donors.
Building Your Strategy
With a more nuanced understanding of planned gift donor motivations, characteristics, and trends, how do you begin fitting these insights into your overall fundraising strategy?
Consider these potential steps:
- Establish foundational criteria for a baseline qualification process to screen for likely and unlikely planned gift prospects.
- Review your past performance (including any previous planned giving or just general development efforts) and database for trends. Do your most impactful supporters tend to demonstrate any shared characteristics over time?
- Add layers of segmentation based on your findings in your data and using industry resources/surveys. Filter down to identify likely prospects.
- Consider the motivations and readiness of this group, develop messaging, and reach out to them.
- Study your results and keep iterating.
- Fold your prospects and committed donors into an ongoing stewardship cadence. This will be important for maintaining the relationships, potentially securing additional gifts, and ensuring you’re notified if estate plans change over time.
However you approach your planned giving strategy, seek to continue learning—about your own performance, general trends in planned giving, donor motivations, and more. By taking a well-informed, iterative, and thoughtful approach, you can create steady improvements that translate into transformational support for your mission.
