Planned Giving Fails Without Leadership Trust

I talk a lot about the importance of trust in Planned Giving. 

When a donor writes you in their Will, they’re trusting you to steward their gift. That you’ll continue to meaningfully tackle the issues they care about, even when they’re gone. 

And you need to be worthy of that trust. In how you carry out your mission, report back to your donors, and how you communicate your legacy giving messages. 

Planned Giving is about trust, but there’s an aspect of it we don’t talk about enough.

Today, I want to move past getting donors to trust us and instead talk about the trust leadership needs to make Planned Giving work. 

Planned Giving is about the long-haul, but nonprofit leaders tend to focus on short-term goals. If you’re a fundraiser, you might have experience begging leadership to be patient with major gifts - quoting the average 12-18 months to secure a large gift from a donor. 

In Planned Giving, 12-18 months is fast. It can take a donor years to write a charity into their Will, and you need to steadily build a relationship with them throughout the process (and after!)

If leadership won’t give fundraisers time and resources to grow lifelong relationships, then you won’t be successful in Planned Giving.

But us fundraisers aren’t asking for blind faith. 

Planned Giving is a proven form of fundraising. Pretty much every large household-name charity has a multi-million dollar Planned Giving program, applying best practices that boards of smaller charities unwittingly block. 

So if this works, if millions of dollars are being distributed to charities within the Great Wealth Transfer, why do so many leadership teams block work that will lead to a secure financial future?

It's a lack of trust.

Lack of trust in their staff. Lack of trust in industry experts. Lack of trust in the abundance that can come when you focus on building relationships first. 

And why does this happen?

They could be out of their depth, without enough relevant experience. Their ego could get in the way of learning, or they could have trauma that puts them in flight-or-fight when talking about money.

Unfortunately, I don’t have an easy answer for this issue. 

I’ve published articles on how to convince your board to invest in Planned Giving. I can point leadership teams towards data-backed research, books, and thought pieces by industry leaders. 

But if fundamentally there’s no trust, no progress can be made. And to be honest, I think this is why some charities stay small forever while some grow exponentially. 

It’s possible to get buy-in from reluctant leadership, but it takes a lot of work. I’ve spoken with fundraisers who are ready to work with me after 3 years of educating their leadership team, but I’ve also seen fundraisers throw their hands up and quit because of their board's unrealistic short-term goals.  

So if you’re in that process, if you’re working to gain the trust of an untrusting leadership team - I see you. It’s noble work to fight for a nonprofit’s future. And if you’ve left a charity because of untrusting leadership - I get it. And I applaud you for taking care of your wellbeing and moving on to another organization that can better use your expertise.

The lesson today is this - in Planned Giving trust goes both ways. 

Donors need to trust us, and we need to trust them. We need to trust that our relationships will drive dollars. We need to trust the well-established Planned Giving best practices. Only then can we build an abundant financial future for our nonprofits.

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