Just this month, we passed a major milestone at FreeWill: We raised more than $500 million in committed bequests for charity thanks to more than 50,000 generous folks using our free online will-writing tool. In addition to making sure they had a plan in place to continue to support their loved ones, they made a plan to support the causes they care about, too. $500 million is a lot of money that will help these charities do a lot of good in the world, and, in many cases, it’s money they wouldn’t have received otherwise.

Because of limited time and resources, non-profits generally only solicit planned gifts from wealthy major donors, but our tools make it easy to reach out to all donors — and supporters who have consistently given smaller gifts over the years are often very happy to include the causes they care about in their wills, especially when they’re prompted to do so while writing their will for free! A regular annual gift of $100 might never put a donor on a planned giving officer’s radar, but a bequest of 5% or 10% of that donor’s estate can be a surprisingly large gift.

Multiply that by more than 50,000 generous will writers and that’s how we got to $500 million! And we’re not stopping there. We already have our sights set on a new goal: $1 billion before the end of 2019.

Before we get there, though, we wanted to share three key tips that we picked up from our first $500 million:

1. Don’t be afraid to email your list. It might seem obvious, but you don’t get anything without asking for it. Our partners who proactively emailed their supporters about their partnership with FreeWill were significantly more likely to receive high numbers of bequests via our platform than those who did not. That said, we understand that working a planned giving ask into your organization’s editorial calendar can be difficult, and our team is here to help you build out a strategy that works best for your organization and your supporters.
2. Consider your supporter’s interests before your own. While some of your online community will be interested in leaving a bequest to your organization in their wills, the vast majority will need a little bit of gentle convincing. Your message should be warm and friendly, and it should speak to the importance of having a will in concrete terms that relate to the overlap in your supporters’ and your interests. For example, one of our partners who works in the animal rights space highlighted that, if you have a pet, you need to have a will in order to make a plan for their care. From there, it’s only a short leap to using your will to make a plan for all animals’ care by leaving a bequest to the organization.
3. Be prepared to break down walls within your development department. Digital fundraisers and planned giving officers may both work in the development department, but their work often takes them in very different directions — and their success is measured in very different KPIs. Traditionally, digital fundraisers work in volume; they send email to thousands of people at a time and raise money by collecting hundreds of small-dollar donations. Planned giving officers, by contrast, cultivate personal relationships with a small handful of high net worth individuals who could potentially leave their organization a bequest in the millions of dollars. These divergent approaches and responsibilities have occasionally presented hurdles to our partners when they begin working with us — the planned giving officers don’t hold the keys to the email list and the digital fundraisers are under pressure to raise money now now now, not some time off in the future. Our most successful partners have broken down the wall separating these two roles and, as an organization, realigned each of those fundraiser’s personal goals to include success in the digital planned giving space.

Want to learn more? Visit our non-profit partnerships page and request a demo. We’d love to talk to you.