The Value of Planned Giving “Handraisers”
CDP and Giving Docs are working in partnership to help public media stations seize the tremendous planned giving fundraising opportunity that exists at a system level. We invited Giving Doc’s President & Co-founder Brantley Boyett, an expert in nonprofit estate planning, to be a guest on our blog. He is also a Senior Fellow at Duke University studying the effects of behavioral economics on charitable giving, and this post on “handraisers” is timely and relevant to public media’s large member files steeped in longevity and frequency of giving.
The return on investment for planned giving programs is hard to measure, as it often requires years of relationship management to receive a planned gift. At Giving Docs, we’ve spent a lot of time trying to find better ways to measure the return on a nonprofit’s planned giving investment in real time. Over the past few years, we’ve been particularly focused on a donor segment known as “handraisers.”
Organizational definitions may vary, but we define “handraisers” as individuals who have openly signaled to an organization that they have interest in leaving a planned gift to that organization. They haven’t taken the steps to document this gift, or if they have, they haven’t notified the organization. Over the last ten years, with a vast increase in survey marketing and online estate planning, we have seen a corresponding increase in what the industry knows as “handraisers.”
Many planned giving directors and gift officers have difficulty justifying their annual budgets as compared to other initiatives that can immediately bring money in the door for the organization. If we can establish a better understanding of the financial implications of adding handraisers to the organizational pipeline, development professionals will be better equipped to articulate why this work is so important in budgeting discussions and beyond.
In an effort to quantify the value of handraisers, we partnered with Nathan Stelter from The Stelter Company to interview dozens of planned giving professionals. We also consulted our behavioral science team at the Duke University Center for Advanced Hindsight. This feedback from professionals and mathematical analysis from scientists led us to a model that helps generate a clear value that handraisers bring to organizations not just in the future, but right now.
The result: our “Value of a Handraiser” calculator.
Essentially, the calculator is a mathematical framework that allows an organization to assign a monetary value to handraisers. We feel strongly that this calculator should be in the public domain, so we have posted the calculator on our website for anyone to use for free.
This calculator remains a work in progress, and it is intended to invite collaboration from colleagues across our industry. We hope to continue to receive input and for users to question our assumptions and bring their expertise to the table to help us make it better. Please reach out to me directly if you would like to chat about this calculator or would like to contribute to its ongoing evolution.
Our research has made it clear that many organizations are very good at tracking handraisers and understanding their general conversion rates, but that handraisers are generally not assigned a monetary value by organizations. Our hope is that by better understanding these conversion rates and applying mathematical principles to the data that we do have, we can begin to help organizations see these large lists of handraisers as a foreseeable pipeline of “Gifts Under Management” or long-term revenue for the organization.
Please take a moment to check out the Value of Handraiser calculator. We look forward to your thoughts, comments and ideas to make this tool as helpful as possible to the entire planned giving community.
If you’re interested in learning more about Giving Docs high-quality online estate planning tools, contact us at cdp@cdpcommunity.org.