FreeWill Newsletter

Fall is here at FreeWill – National Estate Planning Awareness Week is next week, while Stock Monday and the year-end giving season are just around the corner. We’re excited to share some valuable learnings from National Make-A-Will Month, updates on how we review your bequest commitments, and an opportunity to meet our team in person!

Your learnings from Make-A-Will Month

This past August was National Make-A-Will Month! Your outreach — and donors — did not disappoint, with a stunning total of 16.8k estate plans created and $61M in bequest commitments driven directly by our partner’s outreach during this campaign.

Here are some highlights and learnings from our top campaign of the year so far:

Emails that were educational performed best and led to the highest bequest rates.
→ Your takeaway: Continue incorporating donor education into your bequest email appeals.
Sharing the bequest tool with internal staff can boost results. Outreach to internal staff had a higher gift generation rate than non-email outreach such as social posts and e-newsletters to broader audiences.
→ Your takeaway: Build an internal staff email into your next FreeWill campaign!
Partners repeating the campaign for the 2nd+ time were even more likely to receive a gift.
→ Your takeaway: Repetition builds an educational foundation that is critical to driving estate planning and bequests.

We’ll leave you with a helpful reminder: the more people you send an email to, the more likely you are to receive a gift! Emails to at least 5k people had higher than average gift generation rates. We recommend casting a wide net – our resource on Defining Your Planned Giving Audience is a great place to start.

Let’s keep the ball rolling with National Estate Planning Awareness Week (NEPAW), which is just five days away!

Exciting updates to gift validation

As many of you know, bequest commitment information is put through a comprehensive review process before appearing in the Partner Portal. After several rounds of updates behind the scenes, we recently launched a change to our validation algorithms that will help us surface gifts to you faster and with even more accuracy.

This change includes logic that will highlight additional gifts to you when donors make changes to wills that we previously excluded from your Portal. Now, these will undergo another review, and commitment details will populate in your Portal if applicable!

If you notice more gift notifications or start seeing additional gifts surface in your Partner Portal, especially those with an older creation date, this is largely thanks to the FreeWill Marketing Team’s successful re-engagement efforts and their ability to shift user behavior and get draft estate plans completed and shared with you in the Portal.

CGP 2022: Will we see you there?

Lauren Winther-Hansen

Marley Hall

FreeWill is a proud sponsor of the 2022 CGP (Charitable Gift Planners) Conference in Reno, Nevada, coming up October 26-28. Partner Success team members Marley Hall and Lauren Winther-Hansen will be on site, along with co-CEO Patrick Schmitt and others. If you are attending, please stop by Booth #43 to say hello! You’re also invited to join us for cocktails on Thursday, Oct. 27 from 7- 9pm PST at the Peppermill Resort, Florence Suite. RSVP here to let us know you can make it.

Stock 101s and 201s

Upcoming partner training

Are you new to an organization that accepts stock gifts? Or is your organization ready to amp up your marketing efforts in this area? These courses will touch on the importance of these asset-based gifts and how to market them to your donors in easy and effective ways. Click the links below to access the upcoming schedule for each class and register for the date/time that works best for you.

Stock 101

Multiple dates and times available

Stock 201

Multiple dates and times available

We’re officially launching our New Partner Portal later this month! On October 25th, we’ll be highlighting new features that will streamline your workflows and help you leverage all of your FreeWill tools to achieve your goals. Keep an eye out for an email on October 25th, showcasing your Portal’s new capabilities and how your organization can use it effectively!

LOOKING FOR ADDITIONAL RESOURCES?

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