UW Life Marketing from the Central Carolinas, Mile High, and Greater Milwaukee UWs

Bill Hamelau, Director of Legacy Giving at United Way of Central Carolinas in Charlotte, NC, sent me his new marketing piece for United Way Life.  It is still a work in progress, but definitely a wealth of ideas to beg, borrow, and steal.  You can access his document by clicking HERE.  Bill and I talk regularly and he is an excellent resource for good ideas. 

I would also recommend looking at their Legacy Gifts website.  You will find it at www.legacy.vg/uwcentralcarolinas/giving/1.html.  This website is designed by VirtualGiving.com and this was my first time to look at one of their sites.  I am impressed.  Bill's contact info is on the website for more information both on United Way Life and VirtualGiving.

I also ran across the UW Life Guidelines from Mile High United Way in Denver.  You will find them HERE.  They have an excellent website as well at www.unitedwaydenver.org.

Finally, United Way of Greater Milwaukee has a great website as well for United Way Life at www.unitedwaymilwaukee.org/LegacySociety/UnitedWayLife.

I am certain there are other United Way Life websites and guidelines out there.  Let me know and I will upload the info so others can benefit from all the good ideas.

Building Relationships

I found an exceptionally good article today in Inc. magazine from January 2011. Click Here!  If you don't like clicking or the link doesn't work, cut and paste this address http://www.inc.com/guides/201101/how-to-build-better-business-relationships.html. 

Not only does Darren Dahl give great tips on building better relationships, but he gives great tips on how to incorporate these tips in your work routine.  

Bequest Thinking

  Phyllis Freedman is the author of The Planned Giving Blogger (www.smart-giving.com/plannedgivingblogger) and a planned giving consultant. Go to her blog, choose the bequests catagory, and look for the post "New Research Enlightens".  It highlights a presentation by Dr. Russell James in which he describes what is going on in the brain when people consider making a bequest.  Sometime ago, I realized that donors don't wake up in the middle of the night thinking, "I have just got to put a bequest in my will for the benefit of United Way."  Rather it is their passion for impact that wakes them up and the bequest serves as a means.  Phyllis highlights Dr. James' theories about the connections people make between the stories of their lives and a good donor story from someone else who has already taken the next step with a bequest to support their cause. There looks to be quite a few good posts worth reading, so bookmark this one. 

I couldn't resist adding this picture of Lake Erie at sundown from the back of the house in Bratenahl, Ohio where I wrote this post.  I continue to experiment with BlogTouch and so far so good.

Charitable Giving Increases in 2012

I'm writing this morning from the Hampton Inn in Horse Cave, KY on the way to Cleveland OH.  I'm also trying out a new ipad/iphone app called BlogTouch.  There are no guarantees how this will look once its posted.

Found this morning in a report from the website www.givingusareports.org that charitable giving increased in 2012.  The largest increases were to the arts and humanities, the sector which saw the biggest cuts during the recession.  Much of the increase came from corporate support, although there were modest increases in individual giving, largely attributed to uncertainty over the future of the charitable tax deduction.  The Giving USA Foundation publishes an annual statistical report that you can download for about $90 (which I didn't), but you can read a good summary of their findings (which I did) under the news tab.

There is a sister organization, The Giving Institute, with a website at www.givinginstitute.org.  Both sites look to be worth exploring.

The Cart and the Horse

It is ever so tempting to start off your program with the cart and horse in the wrong positions.  You can easily spend all your time and energy writing policies and printing brochures and doing everything to get ready to talk to donors.  I've done it and I can tell you that policies and brochures do not bring in gifts.  So, from everything I've learned from others with far better ideas than mine, the best next step to take in starting your program is to start talking to donors - any donors. 



Start with an elevator speech.  It is your sales pitch and it should take no longer than the time it would take to ride an elevator from the ground to the penthouse.  You can read my current elevator speech by clicking HERE (a reminder that I upload these documents to Google Drive and they are supposed to be virus free).  It is current because it changes all the time in the never ending attempt to make the message better.  I spent a lot of time intially practicing this speech on my fellow UWCA employees and our elevator only goes 5 floors.  I would highly recommend doing the same in your organization.  Once your boss likes what you have to say, call a few volunteers and ask if you can practice with them.  You never know, it could start them thinking about making a Legacy gift. 

 

As your confidence builds, your message will get better and then will come the day when you find yourself standing next to a 20 year donor in an elevator and you will be ready.  More importantly, you will have developed the message that will also work well in letters, brochures, and websites.  Soon you will land your first gift and then you can write retread some policies.

At the Starting Line

You are at the starting line.  Your boss and perhaps her boss have decided your United Way needs an endowment and a planned giving program.  Now they have handed you a new title, reams of recommendations, and a goal of starting it all successfully.  Never fear, you are really in a pretty good place.  Lots of us in the UW planned giving world have already made the mistakes and benefitted from the lessons learned from experience and the teachings of others who have figured out how to start and where to go.

Recently I was re-reading a Kathryn Miree article and her emphasis on the importance of beginning with that essential and eternal endowment question, "Why are we doing this?"  The answer is called your Case Statement and Kathryn points out the need for both external and internal statements.  The internal statement communicates the need to your staff, how an endowment and planned giving program will fit into your resource development efforts, and how the gifts and expectancies will be counted and accounted.  The external statement communicates with your donors the reason they should give to the endowment.  A good external statement should:

• Inspire vision
• Inspire passion
• Be urgent
• Involve the Donor
• Be brief enough to be useful.

We didn't have an internal case statement when our programs were first started in 1991, however I did pull the "Case for Support" as a reminder of our purpose.  It reads

United Way should raise a signficant endowment for the purpose of launching major community initiatives aimed at specific problems in the community.  This would enable UW to select issues, commit to single or multi year funding and attract other partners from the community to collaborate to create real and lasting change.
 

You will also find a good Case for Endowment on the website of  St. Matthew's Parish School in Pacific Pallisades, CA. 

The best way I have found to build your case is to gather a small group of volunteers and ask the questions, "Why should we have an endowment?" and "Why should you give to the endowment?"  With a good external case statement in hand, bring together a diverse group of staff and ask the same questions to develop your internal statement.  Remember, these can change with time, knowledge, and program development.

The last bit of advice I am going to share today comes from the experience of others.  Endowments should not be started to pay the administrative costs of your United Way.  I could write pages on why this is just not a good idea.  Contact me and I will give you several LUW's who made that choice and have found that it is a difficult mistake to correct when you've learned your lesson.

I plan to add several more resources over the next few posts that will help you at the starting line of your endowment and planned giving programs.

 

The Overhead Myth

I'm a pilot, so I had to use
airplanes OVERHEAD to illustrate!

Take a look at OverheadMyth.com.  Guidestar, the BBB, and Charity Navigator have joined together in a new initiative to counter the media's obsession with "Overhead" costs of nonprofits.  I first started thinking about the sense this makes after watching the Ted Talk with Dan Pallotta speaking on "The way we think about charity is dead wrong" (search Ted Talk and Dan Pallotta).  Later I watched the video from the UWW Staff Leaders Conference which may be archived on the UWW website.  Now comes this website and perhaps the conversation will move to a new level.