Using Network Marketing for Bequests: One Charity's Amazing Success Story

I spoke this week with Angela Throne of Texas A&M University (TAMU) Foundation about her successful bequest marketing campaigns. Angela has effectively used network marketing to multiply estate gifts for the Foundation. I asked Angela for insight into her marketing approach and the results.

In the fall of 2009, the TAMU Foundation sent a heritage membership piece to roughly 8,000 people. The four-page color direct mail piece provided an overview of what it means to be a heritage society member, the benefits of joining and included donor quotes. There was a tear-off self-mailer piece donors could complete for membership. From that mailing, the Foundation received 17 responses and booked 4 million estate gifts amounting to roughly 7 million. Three gifts resulting from this mailing are still being actively worked on by Foundation staff.

Subsequent to that mailing, the Foundation featured this piece on its GiftLegacy website, in its eNewsletter and as part of its wills kit. Two years ago, the Foundation began sending donors and prospects a kit to help them complete and update their wills and trust documents. The kit, which has evolved into an estate and gift planning kit, now features a fill-in-the-blank wills guide, brochure on methods of giving, heritage membership piece, the Provide & Protect book and bequest language.

The Foundation has found several ways to offer this kit -- from the homepage of their GiftLegacy website, as a feature nearly every other month in the GiftLegacy eNewsletter, through a blast “offer” email, as a downloadable link from their Facebook page and in the Foundation magazine ads. Recently, the Foundation decided to advertise the free kit using a Facebook advertisement.

This past spring, the kit was featured three ways -- in the Foundation’s print newsletter, eNewsletter and through blast emails. This effort resulted in 648 requests for estate and gift planning kits. In mid-September, the Foundation created another ad campaign and offered the kit in the September eNewsletter. In the month of October, Angela has received 100 requests for free kits.

We can learn a lot from Angela’s network marketing approach. She has discovered that using a variety of different marketing approaches can be effective at producing results. Different people respond to different mediums. Her challenge now is to track the source of results to determine which marketing strategies work best.

The best marketing strategies come from testing approaches, analyzing results and using your results to inform future marketing. To learn more about planned gifts marketing best practices that get results, please call 1-800-858-9154 and ask to speak to a GiftLegacy marketing specialist.