Your Legacy Website: How to Help Your Planned Giving Program Respond to 21st Century Donors
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
2 likes•397 views
CAGP Webinar Wednesday, May 25, 2016 (with a giant hat tip to Holly Wagg, whose original session I'm presenting)
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
What's hot
What's hot (19)
Similar to Your Legacy Website: How to Help Your Planned Giving Program Respond to 21st Century Donors
Similar to Your Legacy Website: How to Help Your Planned Giving Program Respond to 21st Century Donors (20)
More from Good Works
More from Good Works (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Your Legacy Website: How to Help Your Planned Giving Program Respond to 21st Century Donors
- 1. Your Legacy Website How to Help Your Planned Giving Program Respond to 21st Century Donors Leah Eustace, ACFRE Good Works
- 2. Leah Eustace, MPhil, CFRE, ACFRE Principal & Chief Idea Goddess leah@goodworksco.ca www.goodworksco.ca blog.goodworksco.ca
- 3. 1) Understand how a donor-centred website is constructed 2) Identify the two main audiences for your legacy website and how to craft the information they’re looking for Learning Outcomes
- 4. Reflection
- 7. "Fictional character that communicates the primary characteristics of a group of users, identified and selected as a key target through use of segmentation data." User Personas
- 8. Sarah is a mother to two young children who juggles the demands of her career and family life, and has time for little else. She’s always cared about the environment. She believes that it’s her mission to create a better world for her children, and that creating that world exists in each and every interaction she has. She doesn’t want her children to grow up in a world that is destroyed by global warming. Jane bikes to work, and she and her husband only own one vehicle – a Toyota Highlander hybrid. She’s an avid reader of blogs that share how to raise environmentally conscious children and she loves tips to make her household greener. She makes all of the purchasing decisions, as well as the donation decisions for her household. DONOR Sarah User Story & Needs
- 9. • Middle-age • Urban • Active leisure lifestyle and fitness minded • Progressive values • Digitally savvy • Environmentally conscious DONOR Sarah Demographics & Lifestyle
- 12. Keeping it Donor-Centred DONOR Sarah Major Donor Direct Mail Donor Monthly Donor Legacy Donor Corporate Donor
- 13. Jacqueline never married and never had any children. She’s always been community minded. On Sunday’s she sings in the church choir, she goes door-to-door canvassing for the local trails association each spring, and she makes sure that her elderly neighbours have the transportation they need to get to their healthcare appointments. Jacqueline always grew her own food, and now the once homesteader is a leader in the urban farming movement. She raises backyard chickens, and coordinates the annual seedy Saturday event. She advocated to city council to support the local community garden. Jacqueline cares about the environment and her community. She believes it’s important to give back, and when she leaves the earth, she wants ensure that the good she’s started can continue. That’s why she’s left a gift in her will to her three favourite charities. DONOR Jacqueline Your Legacy Donor
- 14. • Senior • Urban • Community-minded • Progressive values • Environmentally conscious, particularly around food and non-GMO Demographics & Lifestyle DONOR Jacqueline
- 15. • Senior • Urban • Community-minded • Progressive values • Environmentally conscious, particularly around food and non-GMO Demographics & Lifestyle DONOR Jacqueline
- 16. Role of Your Website
- 18. The key to unlocking a legacy gift is emotion, as opposed to information.
- 19. #1 Focus on Bequests
- 20. #2 Language & SEO
- 22. #4 Think Lifetime Impact
- 23. #5 Common Legacy Objections 1) I have family to take care of 2) I’m not rich and this is something rich people do
- 24. #5 Use Stories to Combat Objections
- 25. #6 Real Person to Contact
- 26. #7 Downloads
- 27. #7 Downloads • PDF with sample codicil language • Legacy brochure or package
- 28. #8 Conversions
- 29. Legacy Website in Action
- 36. What Professional Advisors Want 1)Legal name 2)Charitable number BONUS: Real person contact info
- 37. Other Persona?
- 38. Other Persona? *The Next Generation of Canadian Giving
- 39. That’s A Wrap Leah Eustace 613-232-9113 x100 leah@goodworksco.ca www.goodworksco.ca
Editor's Notes
- Mental exercise I want you to think about your charity’s website. Picture it in your mind’s eye. Now hold on to that thought. What if I tell you this - 65% of donors, 90% of major gift donors visit your website before they make a gift to your charity. Your website is the single most important piece of marketing collateral for your charity (and it’s likely one of the most neglected). to add picture of a world or a snow globe here.
- Unpacking web design This is charity DoGood. Their website used to look like this. When they designed this site back in the early 2000s, it was used as a showcase to share and distribute the information about their cause that they determined to be relevant. THIS IS NOT GOOD.
- Now they’re redoing their website and it looks like this. This was a user-driven design process because they used data, stakeholder consultation, etc to inform both the design and the content. This is a site that puts their users first. THIS IS AWESOMELY GOOD. http://www.theguardian.com/voluntary-sector-network/2013/jul/29/marketing-personas-nonprofits-fundraisers http://www.pedalo.co.uk/user-personas-and-why-they-are-important/ So how do we move from this to this. How do we design this site, and not this site? How do we ensure that our website is donor/user centred and not entrenched in the needs of the organization?
- User personas One of the approaches we use is user personas "Fictional character that communicates the primary characteristics of a group of users, identified and selected as a key target through use of segmentation data" Personas are key because they drive all functional and creative decisions. To keep our process lean, we devise macro groups of users so we can avoid focusing on what makes each of the segments different, but instead, what are their commonalities. Demographics Lifestyle User story User needs What does this look like in action https://econsultancy.com/blog/62645-five-tips-for-charities-to-rock-their-digital-marketing
- Unpacking Donors All charity websites should have a donor persona. DONOR Sarah is a mother to two young children who juggles the demands of her career and family life, and has time for little else. She’s always cared about the environment. She believes that it’s her mission to create a better world for her children, and that creating that world exists in each and every interaction she has. She doesn’t want her children to grow up in a world that is destroyed by global warming. Jane bikes to work, and she and her husband only own one vehicle – a Toyota Highlander hybrid. She’s an avid reader of blogs that share how to raise environmentally conscious children and she loves tips to make her household greener. She makes all of the purchasing decisions, as well as the donation decisions for her household.
- Demographics and Lifestyle Middle-age Urban Active leisure lifestyle and fitness minded Progressive values Digitally savvy Environmentally conscious http://cdn1.hubspot.com/hub/53/Donor_Persona_Template.pdf http://www.johnhaydon.com/2012/08/16/how-create-user-personas-for-your-website/
- Legacy Website There are two ways to approach this. You may need to develop a microsite. You’d do this if you have a really poor website that you can’t make work, you’re running a specific legacy marketing campaign and you need a place to drive your donors from a specific URL that you provide. For most of us, we want to fold our legacy materials into the existing website infrastructure. This means you have to work with both the strengths and weaknesses of your existing architecture, it may require some creativity, and it likely won’t have a huge (if any) budget line item attached to it – in terms of new expenditures, but yes, it will require staff time.
- Go Back to Your Donor Persona Often your typical donor may look like this, but your legacy donor is actually someone more like this. We like to call her Jacqueline.
- DONOR Jacqueline never married and never had any children. She’s always been community minded. On Sunday’s she sings in the church choir, she goes door-to-door canvassing for the local trails association each spring, and she makes sure that her elderly neighbours have the transportation they need to get to their healthcare appointments. Jacqueline always grew her own food, and now the once homesteader is a leader in the urban farming movement. She raises backyard chickens, and coordinates the annual seedy Saturday event. She advocated to city council to support the local community garden. Jacqueline cares about the environment and her community. She believes it’s important to give back, and when she leaves the earth, she wants ensure that the good she’s started can continue. That’s why she’s left a gift in her will to her three favourite charities.
- Demographics and Lifestyle Senior Urban Community-minded Progressive values Environmentally conscious, particularly around food and non-GMO
- AUDIENCE CHECK IN – Am I right in saying this is where you’re focusing most of your marketing activity? Anyone doing anything different? This is where most of us are currently focusing our legacy marketing activities.
- Role of Your Website Your legacy donor has likely been giving to you for years, has been actively engaged in your organization, or their life has been in some way touched with your work. Given their affinity, and their age, your website is likely only to be used to support the gift decision they’re already made. It’s the one place where they’ll (or someone else) will look for specific supporting information or documentation. It’s also the place that we can use to attract new donors…but we’ll come back to those folks later. It’s our job to make it donor-centred.
- Biggest Mistake The biggest mistake that charities make is focusing all of the web copy on the how-to-make a gift (actually this is a common issue that extends to all donation information). At a very high level they review all of the various giving options like a menu. But they neglect the why, what the gift will achieve, and despite all of that how-to information, they miss the very specific technical information that needs to be required to actually make the gift. The donor isn’t coming to you as the charity to tell you that information.
- The key to unlocking a legacy gift is emotion, as opposed to information.
- #1 Gifts in Will / Charitable Bequests Given 95% of legacy gifts in Canada are gifts in wills, this needs to be first in foremost. If I had to focus my real estate on one how to area, this would be the one. It should always be first, if not up on your primary navigation, and if not the only one. If you want data to back this up, look for your long tail searches in your Google analytics.
- #2 Language and SEO All web copy should be jargon free. And let’s face it, planned gift/legacy gift is definitely fundraising jargon. Put your hand up if you use “planned giving” or “legacy giving” in your materials Guess what? Legacy giving= building named after them How do donors find you/navigate your site? The phrase donors are looking for is “Gift in Will” or “Bequest”. So make sure that appears on your navigation and in your copy. To make this information searchable for googling, you want to make sure these words or meta data appears in three places – 1) Metadata; 2) Page title; 3) Heading tags Why google? In AFP’s What Canadian Donors Want Survey, 30% of donors report that use google or other search engines to find out information about the charities they support.
- #3 Think Autobiography Unlike donations which are triggered by an empathic response, legacy gifts come from the autobiographical portion of the brain. This comes from the work of Russell James which focuses on what happens in a donor’s brain when they make this type of gift. Making a gift in your will is about what the donor leaves behind. It’s about their meaningful life events, their experiences, their values and their life stories. It’s about the footprint they will leave on this earth. The best legacy copy, whether on a website or in a letter, starts with taking the donor on this journey. Check out Feb 2014 Gift Planning in Canada article by Simon Trevalyan.
- #4 Think Lifetime Impact Like any type of gift, donors want to know what type of impact they will make. Often this is harder with legacy giving because we like to have unrestricted funds. We also may not be sure what kind of work, or what kind of priorities our organization will have in the far future. Obviously the more specific you can be, the better. But you don’t have to be overly complex. The key objective is that your donor want to know that there will be a need for their gift in 50 years from now, and that it’s a cause your organization can fulfill. The adage “donors have needs, charities don’t” have never been more true when thinking about legacy gifts. Your charity is simply a conduit to fulfilling your donors needs. You represent a cause they care about. Legacy engagement is about how your donor’s values can continue on in the world.
- #5 Two Most Common Legacy Objections 1) I need to provide for my family/children/grandchildren 2) I’m not rich and this is something rich people do You need to address this in your copy, or do that by including 1-3 stories of other donors who have left a gift in their will to your charity.
- #6 Real Person to Talk To Should a donor wish to reach out and talk to someone, please make it easy for them. While we often like to defer from having contact information on a website in a place other than the contact us form or staff directory. There’s no cost because this info is dynamic and can be easily changed. In the least, let your donors know the name of who they can contact and give them the phone number, email and mailing address of that person. Even better, provide a picture and a little introduction to yourself. Make yourself a real approachable human being. Don’t make your donor dig more than they already had to to get this information from you in the first place.
- #7 Downloadable Info As digital people, we don’t really dig downloadable information. It just really goes against all good usability and design practices. For the typical web user, it’s not a good thing – it’s messy. But if there’s any demographic that will want to “print” the website, or having something in their hands to take along to their advisors, it’s this generation. So here’s where we break rules.
- You should have one downloadable PDF with sample codicil language. And if you have a brochure, or a concise package of all these materials that you’ve repurposed for your website, you can also have a PDF of that document.
- #8 Conversion Funnels But you also want to track leads. Or, what we call a conversion funnel. You want to structure your page(s) in some way so that you can have people Create a form so that people can request more information from you. This survey here from WWF is a good way to do this.
- SO IF YOUR LEGACY DONOR ISN’T NECESSARILY COMING TO YOUR SITE WHO IS?
- Professional Advisors Advisors need two pieces of information, and only two pieces. And, they don’t want to dig for it either.
- Legal name. Charitable number. They may also want to talk to a real person, so they love it when you make that easy for them, because they may have questions and want to talk to you. This should be in your legacy section. And they’d love it if you’d include it on your contact us page as well.
- Another Legacy Donor Persona Given the prevalence of the internet, the even greater opportunity is that the next generation of donors (boomers, gen x and gen y) now have access to all this information. Wills are created when there’s a life change. Marriage, kids, grandkids, travel, global moves, death of parents, vacations are all events that will inspire this group of donors to create/change their will. That happens on average every 15 years. You have about three chances to be included in a donors will. But what’s so astounding to me “21% of donors who have made a planned gift have never donated to charity before” What Makes Them Give: 2012 Stelter Report. Yes, it’s the last will you want to be in. But our UK counterparts are marketing to a younger generation.
- And this is why your website matters and why it’s going to revolutionize how we do planned giving.
- Thank you slide!