Services
PG Finder
The plain, unvarnished truth is that traditional wealth screening tools simply do not work in planned giving. Wealth screening tools look for stock ownership, real estate, boats and luxury items, board memberships, and swanky addresses as indicators of wealth. They are extremely useful as a way to screen for major donors for capital campaigns, but wealth has absolutely nothing to do with identifying planned giving donors. In fact, I would argue that it is a CONTRA-indicator.
Net worth, age, geography, etc have almost no predictive value alone. The only indicator worth anything at all is LOYALTY to the organization. Why? Because only people who are truly and consistently loyal to an organization will be willing to make the organization a member of their family in the long run by including them in their wealth transfer plans. A planned gift is NOT a gift from income. It is a gift from PRINCIPAL. It is an asset transfer. When someone makes a planned gift, it is equivalent to making the organization a member of their family. That's the level of loyalty required.
And here is our discovery: The best indicator of loyalty is consistent patterns of giving in the annual fund. Nothing else matters. Not volunteer time. Not wealth. Not past capital gifts. Once this loyalty pattern is identified, all other factors--such as demographic information, wealth indicators, long-term volunteers--can be folded back in as additional factors that have incremental value in predicting whether someone is going to be a PG donor. But alone, these factors are worthless. They only have predictive value when placed against a loyal giving screen.
That is why our approach has a 91% predictive value. No one else uses this approach. Yes, some are beginning to see the importance of consistent giving, but they do not analyze these patterns to the extent we do. If you produce a 15 consecutive years giving report, it will only produce about 45% of our PGFinder™ list. That is because our analysis of giving patterns is much more sophisticated. And why is this predictive value so important? Because, once you identify your PG prospects with that degree of accuracy, then you can market to them consistently over time and maximize your results.
Sam Caldwell, President
The Planned Giving Company