Make it Transformational: A Blog for Champion Discipleship

A prominent national planned giving consultancy, the Stelter Company, recently released some interesting market research, and among their findings was this gem: “Just one in three aged 30 and older (37%) say they are familiar with the term ‘planned giving’.”

So the nonprofit community has developed an entire industry around a term that the vast majority of their champions don’t understand! 

For the record, planned giving is a sloppy and imprecise sort of catchall term to begin with.  It’s meant to describe any type of gift that requires an inordinate amount of planning, and as such encompasses very different types of gifts, from gifts of real estate, businesses, and other property to income generating gifts like gift annuities, to estate gifts like wills and trusts. 

Inherent in the descriptor is the assumption that all other gifts are “unplanned”.  So the champion who has $50 a month to give, and makes five pledges of $10 a month to five different charities hasn’t planned her gifts?

This is the same problem nonprofits have with the term “major gifts”.  The $50 giver is, by this definition, a minor giver from the organization’s perspective.  But if a champion who can afford to give $50 a month, gives $50 a month, isn’t that a major gift from the perspective of the champion?  Nonprofits don’t have the gall to call people minor donors, at least not publicly, but nearly all of them have internal language for major gifts, and they aren't referring to the $50 donors.

Predictably, the planned giving community has misdiagnosed the problem and is scrambling to think of a better term that will be more widely understood. 

I’d like to suggest that this is not a communication problem.  This is a problem of orientation, where the nonprofit has placed itself in the center and the champion on the fringe, to such a striking degree that the nonprofit community is using language that the champions don’t understand, and even worse, would take offense if they did. 

The foundational problem facing traditional planned giving is its inability to reframe planned giving as an activity whose primary purp ose is not to advance the organization, but to grow the champion and to permit the champion to influence others in the cause.