Should you build Planned Giving in-house?
I was on an assessment call with a Development Director the other day.
She has a team of four fundraisers and was trying to figure out if she needed external support for Planned Giving.
She asked “why can’t we do this in-house? We spend money on our fundraisers’ salaries, so it seems wasteful to spend on a consultant to do our Planned Giving work.”
I appreciated her candour! I told her “well, obviously if your existing staff can do this work well, save the money and have them do it. But let’s talk about if that’s the best path forward…”
Then I asked her 3 questions and we made a decision together. If you’re in a similar position, I hope this will be helpful for you:
Do you have Planned Giving expertise on your team? (Defined as someone who has at least 2 years of experience taking a leadership role in growing a Planned Giving program at another charity). For her, the answer was “no”. So I followed up with:
What transferable skills does your in-house team have? At minimum you need:
Someone with excellent fundraising copy writing skills.
Someone who is a quick learner with a brain for strategy.
The answer to this was “yes”, which was great news! Their fundraising team is strong. That means if they dedicated the time to learning Planned Giving, they might be able to pull this off in-house. But the next question is key:
Does your fundraiser with Planned Giving expertise, or your fundraiser with transferable skills, have capacity to take on this work? This means the fundraiser has less tasks and responsibilities than is needed to fill up their 35-40 hour work week. If not, can some tasks be delegated or neglected?
How much time should you allocate? If you want to see meaningful Planned Giving progress within the next 12 months, a Planned Giving expert would need one day per week. The fundraiser with transferable skills (but no expertise) would need two days per week (and some investment made into their professional development).
This is where a lot of Fundraising Directors trip up - usually their staff is at full capacity, sometimes even working overtime and barely keeping their head above water. Adding Planned Giving to a full plate and expecting progress is magical thinking. If Planned Giving has forever been on your “to-do” list, this might be why.
Fundamentally, this is a lesson in management. Staff time isn’t “free” - you’re paying for those 40 hours (even in a salaried role), and you have to choose what gets done in that time, and what doesn’t.
It might not be worthwhile to invest in hundreds of hours of staff time for a fundraiser to learn Planned Giving and create a new program.
Not only does hundreds of hours mean thousands of dollars in staffing costs, but someone without Planned Giving expertise might spend time on ineffective strategies that leave 5-7 figure gifts on the table (and they might not even realize it).
Instead, it can be much more cost effective to hire a Planned Giving expert to create a complete (and effective) program for you, then coach your team to run it in only a few hours per month.
In the end, this Development Director concluded that my done-for-you Planned Giving service was a good fit for her.
If you want to see if this would work for you too, book your free assessment call today. This is a no-pressure conversation to assess your Planned Giving, find solutions, and see if we’re a fit.