Not long ago, one of the fundraisers Angela Woo Sosdian oversees at the Nature Conservancy turned to her and declared, “This is gift-planning nirvana.”
That’s by design. The environmental charity, founded in 1951, spotted demographic trends decades ago that prompted it to retool its fundraising for the future. It began investing heavily in planned-gift fundraising back in the early 1980s, even before it started focusing on attracting major gifts, Sosdian says.
The charity’s board decided to expand the fundraising staff, invest in its professional development, and do a more sophisticated job of managing investments donors make in annuities, trusts, and other gifts. It also put more resources into marketing its gift-planning opportunities.
Today, 20 percent to 25 percent of dollars given to the Nature Conservancy in a given year come from planned gifts, including bequests that have been settled, Sosdian says. Those gifts have totaled more than $100 million in each of the last five years.
A lot of organizations cut back on planned-gift fundraising during tough economic times, preferring to focus on getting more dollars in the short term, Sosdian notes.
“The Nature Conservancy has never done that,” she says. “There’s been a commitment toward [planned giving], and that has paid off. You have to build that basic support and that pipeline.”
Building a Culture
Sosdian, a 37-year veteran of the Nature Conservancy and its executive director of gift planning, manages 65 employees, including back-office staff, marketers, and stewardship specialists.
The charity, based in Arlington, Va., but with dozens of offices around the country and the world, sends its planned-gift fundraisers to conferences, pays for their membership in professional associations, and trains them extensively. Just as important as the tangible support is the culture the organization has shaped over decades, Sosdian says.
“Gift planning is valued,” she says. “There are always challenges — gift planning and major gifts being siloed, for instance. But when I talk to people at other organizations, there seems to be less of that here. There’s more integration here. Our board talks about gift planning. It’s woven into the organization pretty well.”
That culture took time to develop, she says. Gift-planning teams used to be organized geographically, supporting fundraising efforts from the Nature Conservancy’s far-flung offices. But nearly two decades ago, the charity reorganized to build teams around different types of donors. One team, for instance, works on simple bequests and modest annuity gifts. Another focuses on principal and major donors, who may have more complex assets to give and tax issues to solve. The nonprofit has created an in-house donor-advised-fund program to help give those supporters more options.
The Nature Conservancy also started to offer a more sophisticated training to help fundraisers understand how individuals, especially wealthy people, hold assets. The training is mandatory for all of the charity’s fundraisers, Sosdian says.
“We learned the hard way over time not to do the typical planned-giving training,” she says. “It would go in one ear and out the other.”
The training is intended to help fundraisers from all specialties generate leads for planned gifts. Fundraisers are told “what cues to listen to. Cues about life transitions — aging parents, retirement, children leaving the home. What questions to ask. Whether to continue the conversation or bring in a gift planner.”
Legacy Journeys
Donors to the Nature Conservancy tend to be older — their average age is 68 — and many are at a stage when they are thinking seriously about their legacy. “It’s a good demographic for planned giving,” Sosdian says.
Naturally, land gifts are among the most popular donations for the conservation nonprofit, but it receives a variety of assets, including cash, annuities, and appreciated stock.
The charity, which raised $626.9 million from individuals, foundations, and corporations in 2016, is in the midst of a campaign that’s slated to end in 2020. The overall goal is $4 billion in outright gifts, with an additional deferred-gift goal of $1 billion. Along with the dollar target, the gift-planning department is seeking to increase the number of supporters who have included the Nature Conservancy in their estate plans.
By the end of 2017, Sosdian says, the organization had collected 8,287 bequest commitments toward a goal of 13,000 and $716 million in deferred gifts.
Since 2003, the charity has worked to build community among its planned-gift donors through a program that reinforces its mission. Members of its Legacy Club — about 25,000 people who have committed to making bequests — are given the opportunity to join other supporters on “legacy journeys” to places where the Nature Conservancy works. Participants pay a fee to attend all-inclusive jaunts to places like Georgia’s Little St. Simons Island, the Sierra Nevada mountains, and Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.
Bob and Linda Granzow, both 63 and retired, respectively, from the U.S. Army and a civilian Defense Department job, joined the charity’s Legacy Club in 2005 with plans to donate their homes in Arizona and Montana. Enthusiastic travelers who’ve been to all seven continents, they’ve taken a number of legacy journeys, notably to the Galápagos Islands in 2012. (Says Bob Granzow about that trip: “The fact that evolution was so blatantly obvious was kind of fun.”)
The couple love the small scale of their tour groups, which usually comprise 16 to 18 people. “You know you’re with people who share a lot of your same values,” Linda Granzow says. “You won’t agree on everything, but you’re with people who believe in climate change.”
“I was impressed with the conservancy before we took these trips,” her husband adds. “But these trips are like icing on the cake.”
Reaching Loyal Donors
Like a lot of nonprofits, the Nature Conservancy is ratcheting up efforts to reach out to its most loyal donors in a more personalized fashion, marketing the idea of gift planning to them.
“Partly it was initiated by looking at the baby boomers, looking at the demographics,” Sosdian says. The charity has about 370,000 donors who are boomers. A pilot program in California, launched in 2016, which aims to raise pledged bequests from donors, had a response rate close to 6 percent — higher than other types of fundraising, such as direct mail, which has a response rate of around 2 percent. This fiscal year, the Nature Conservancy plans to expand the “loyal donor” program to 20 more states, hiring fundraisers specifically for the effort.
“This is an experiment on our part,” Sosdian says, “but I feel it’s worth the investment.”
Corrections: A previous version of this article said the Nature Conservancy received $100 million in planned gifts over the past five years instead of $100 million in each of the past five years. It also mistakenly said the response to its effort to raise pledged bequests increased from less than 2 percent to nearly 6 percent. The response rate was 6 percent, but the 2 percent should have referred to the response rate for other types of fundraising, such as direct mail.
