What a Pig and an Elephant can teach you about readability
If you have younger children in your life, you might be familiar with the Elephant and Piggie books. It’s a cute series following the silly antics of a cartoon Elephant named Gerald and a Pig named…Piggie (stay with me). My 8-year-old twin boys can’t get enough of them. And to be honest, I’m a pretty […]
That Was Then, This Is Now – Some Thoughts on Legacy Giving 20 Years Down the Road
I’ll never forget reading those poll results way back in 2004. If there was one pivotal moment in my career in philanthropy, that was it! My Good Works partners and I had polled Canadian direct mail donors to probe their willingness to leave charitable gifts in their wills – and found that the Canadian legacy […]
Reflecting on 20 years of legacy fundraising at Good Works
I remember my ‘aha moment’ like it was yesterday. I was at a CAGP event at Saint Paul University in Ottawa. It was June of 2002, and I was listening to a presentation by Ken Ramsay – one of the early experts in Canadian planned giving. As Ken was encouraging the charity fundraisers in the […]
The 5-Word Legacy: what are YOUR five words?
In a bit of insight often attributed to both Hemingway and Banksy (but probably originating from neither artist), there’s an idea that we die three times – not once. The first death occurs when you take your last breath. The second death happens when your funeral or celebration of life takes place. The third – […]
How well do you REALLY know your legacy donors?
In the world of fundraising, a legacy gift is valued as the pinnacle of giving. It is the coveted brass ring for many charities. Because of this, we have a tendency to put our legacy donors on a pedestal. A very high one. We treat our legacy donors as the incredible humans that they are […]
Legacy Giving and Your Donor’s Final Chapter
Think of life as a story. More specifically, think of it as a book – an autobiography to be precise. If you were going to take on the task of writing a book about your life, how would you lay out the chapters? Maybe your chapter outline would start out something like this: Before you […]
Your Donors’ Search for Immortality
Here’s a fact you’ve probably never considered before: we human beings are the only species on earth that lives with the knowledge of our impending death. No other creature in the world has to think about how it might die. Or what will happen to it after it dies. No other creature wonders: will my […]
The Legacy Lift – Your Secret to Increasing Annual Revenues
Over the years, I’ve heard dozens of reasons why fundraisers don’t think that now is the right time to invest in their legacy giving program. Legacy & Planned Giving Inertia Often, the reason for not ramping up legacy gift fundraising is the fear that annual donors will stop giving once they’ve made their bequests. This […]
Put Your Legacy Website to Work: Key Content In A Pandemic
As you’re no doubt experiencing, COVID-19 is impacting fundraising at every level – and legacy giving is no exception. But the impact isn’t quite what most of us expected! After all, we know that legacy giving is all about death avoidance, and that the pandemic was putting mortality front-and-center in donor’s brains. So, we expected […]
Big Fish, Small Fish
We have two big dogs at my house. They eat tons of food. They need to get haircuts (because they’re extremely shaggy!) and occasionally, they need daycare when we haven’t had enough time to play with them. Now, there’s a PetSmart just a couple of minutes from our place that does all those things. It’s […]