guest post // How to Steward Meaningful Relationships with Legacy Donors
Legacy gifts—charitable contributions allocated for a future date, typically through a will or trust—can feel like a masterclass in delayed gratification for your nonprofit’s development team. You’re grateful when donors make their commitment, but your organization might not realize the actual gift for several decades. What’s the best way to honor the gift and steward the donor over this extended timeline, without letting the excitement of the pledge fade?
Maintaining the initial momentum of the pledge requires a proactive, structured approach to relationship building. In this guide, we’ll explore how your development team can effectively recognize, communicate with, and manage data for these long-term partners to ensure their planned gifts are ultimately realized.
Why a proactive plan to steward legacy donors matters
Planned giving requires your team to shift its perspective. Legacy gifts operate on a different rhythm from the rapid cycles of annual campaigns or even the laser focus of a capital campaign.
The timeline stretches across decades. And while you might typically imagine that donors are in midlife or close to retirement, FreeWill’s guide to planned giving notes that even donors in the 18 to 24 age bracket are establishing legacy gifts, with an average value of $42,679 for that demographic.
To bridge the years effectively, you’ll want to develop an approach that secures the donor’s original intent while protecting your nonprofit's future revenue pipeline. A proactive plan is essential because managing these long-term gifts requires you to:
Manage a completely different timeline. Planned giving demands a distinct cadence of patient, consistent relationship nurturing to prevent the donor from quietly lapsing, unlike the fast-paced urgency of annual funds.
Honor the donor’s entire giving history. Legacy commitments are the ultimate culmination of a supporter’s lifelong journey with your organization, requiring stewardship that honors their entire historical footprint.
Guard against natural attrition. Regular, meaningful engagement serves as an anchor, continuously reaffirming their decision and mitigating the risk of attrition as personal financial priorities inevitably shift over the years.
Consider implementing an annual intent check as part of your stewardship routine, in which your development team members gently confirm that the donor’s wishes remain unchanged while discussing recent programmatic impacts. This proactive step prevents unwelcome surprises during probate and gives supporters a recurring opportunity to increase their planned gift as their wealth grows.
Implementing strategies for relationship building
Maintaining a connection over decades requires a delicate balance between providing meaningful updates and avoiding communication fatigue.
Your development team needs a practical framework that integrates seamlessly into their existing workflow while still delivering a personalized experience that transforms donors into active advocates. The goal should be for the legacy gift to be the capstone of their championship of your organization, rather than the only impact.
You can deepen these vital relationships by implementing the following strategies:
Establish a tiered communication matrix that maps specific outreach types—such as tailored text messages, personal phone calls, handwritten cards, or exclusive event invitations—to the estimated value and age of the planned gift.
Schedule dedicated legacy touchpoints throughout the year, like sending an anniversary card commemorating the exact date they joined your legacy society or sharing advance copies of strategic plans.
Create living tributes that honor their legacy now, like inviting legacy supporters of a pediatric research hospital to shadow a lead scientist for an afternoon to help envision their future impact.
In all of your messaging and relationship-building efforts, you’ll want to communicate respect for the significant commitment the donor has already made. While you might encourage legacy donors to participate in other engagement activities, like potentially serving on the board or contributing during the quiet phase of a capital campaign, you should always consider their pledge for the future in your outreach.
Managing operations behind the scenes
A solid operational foundation is the key to bringing your stewardship strategy to life. A single planned gift will likely outlast the tenure of multiple development officers, so flawless back-office management ensures that the relationships cultivated today transfer seamlessly to future leadership.
To safeguard these critical future contributions, your organization should prioritize these operational practices:
Establish rigid protocols for documenting every interaction, preference, and family dynamic to ensure no critical context vanishes during inevitable staff turnover.
Practice proper data management by regularly auditing your database fields. Ensure you’re tracking the specific details of each planned gift vehicle—such as charitable remainder trusts versus simple bequests—alongside contact information for the estate attorney.
Mandate regular alignment meetings between major gifts and planned giving departments so a supporter does not receive a poorly timed capital campaign ask immediately after finalizing their estate plans.
A practical tip for ensuring a smooth transition is to assign a secondary relationship manager to your most significant legacy portfolios. If the primary development officer departs, this secondary contact has already established rapport with the supporter, eliminating potential friction during what might be a vulnerable transition period.
Scaling your efforts for the future
As your legacy society expands, managing individual relationships completely manually will quickly become impossible. To scale the program, leverage data analytics and tailored planned giving software that allow your team to amplify its reach while preserving the intimacy that legacy supporters expect.
Build a scalable framework for your legacy giving by focusing on these operational shifts:
Forecast future capacity. Map your projected planned giving revenue against long-term organizational goals to accurately inform executive leadership on future endowment capacities.
Build predictive donor models. Analyze engagement metrics from your existing legacy pool to identify behavioral trends, allowing you to automatically flag recurring mid-level supporters with a high propensity for making an estate commitment.
Automate stewardship workflows. Deploy automated workflows within your CRM that trigger personalized task reminders when a legacy supporter reaches a significant milestone, like a major birthday or a high-water mark in cumulative giving.
Standardize team habits. Lock in dedicated time for legacy giving outreach, such as dedicating the first hour of every Friday morning exclusively to sending low-pressure, stewardship-focused communications to planned giving prospects.
Don’t forget to provide a great user experience for potential and current donors exploring your planned giving program. Regularly audit your digital stewardship footprint to ensure your online legacy portal remains highly accessible for an aging demographic. Simple adjustments, such as increasing default font sizes and ensuring screen-reader compatibility on your planned giving landing pages, drastically reduce friction for older supporters updating their estate details.
Building a reliable legacy gift program demands continuous attention, dedicated operational support, and a deep appreciation for the donor’s overarching journey. By treating planned giving as an ongoing partnership rather than a finalized transaction, you can unlock the long-term funding necessary to make a lasting, generational impact.
This guest post was written by Patrick Schmitt.
Patrick Schmitt and co-CEO Jenny Xia founded FreeWill at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business in 2016. FreeWill’s charitable giving platform makes it easier for nonprofit fundraising teams to unlock transformational gifts, and to date has generated over $6.6 billion in new gift commitments for thousands of nonprofit organizations. Patrick hosts FreeWill’s popular webinar series, educating thousands of nonprofit fundraising professionals each month about planned and non-cash giving strategies.
Before FreeWill, Patrick was the Head of Innovation at Change.org, where he helped grow the organization to 100 million users in four years. Prior to that, he ran email marketing for President Obama and served as Campaign Director for MoveOn.org.