It’s officially the best month to plan ahead (for your organization!)

It’s Make-A-Will Month 🎉 — the perfect time to spotlight the Bequest product!

Last year, our partners raised $64.4 million in bequest commitments through outreach, making up nearly two-thirds of all dollars raised through partner outreach in 2023. As we near the end of this month, let’s remember that it’s more than just an opportunity to generate bequest commitments; it’s an opportunity to provide an essential service to your supporters—because of your outreach, over 17,000 people were able to create a will last year.

While you prepare your emails, be sure to explore these exciting updates to help you plan ahead for your organization’s end-of-year communications!

DAF Day

October 10th is the first-ever DAF Day! Sponsored by Chariot, DAF Day is a new kind of giving day that reframes how Donor-Advised Funds are used — and who uses them. FreeWill is participating in DAF Day as a fundraising platform and encouraging all of our Smart Giving Suite partners to educate their donor base and increase awareness of the value DAFs offer to donors and nonprofits.

Starting in September, short integrations will be available on the Marketing Library to help you advertise DAF Day leading up to and on October 10th! Please contact your Strategist if you have any questions about DAF Day or other End of Year marketing tactics.

🧰 Product Corner

New: How to identify Mirror Wills in Portal!

On the Portal Legacy Gifts list page, you can now identify when gifts are from mirror wills by looking for the house icon, and seeing the name of the other donor on the gift. Learn more about Mirror Wills, how to identify them in Portal, and how this can impact your stewardship strategy in this brief video.

Invite new users and manage their permissions directly in Portal!

The all-new Manage Users page in Partner Portal provides tools to add or remove members, and customize their permissions. By default, all new Portal users have access to Contacts, Requests, Gifts, Dashboards, William AI-powered Writing Assistant, Learning Hub, Marketing Library and the Partner Resource Hub. For users who do not need access to sensitive donor information, you can toggle Individual Donor Information to "OFF.” Check out this article for a helpful how-to guide!

Introducing Reported Donor-Advised Funds

Smart Giving Suite partners now have access to our expanded donor-advised fund reporting capabilities with an exciting new feature available in beta. Through new partnerships and technology, FreeWill will now be able to report to you on your donor-advised fund grants from numerous donor-advised fund custodians. Learn more about reported donor-advised funds in this brief video.

Portal Updates on Associated Gifts

Looking to focus your gift analysis on bequests committed after the start of your FreeWill partnership? You can now hide Pre-partnership gifts with a new filter and identify the date of the original gift.