Planned Gift Marketing

The Opportunity

St. Labre Indian School has a mature annual fundraising program and hundreds of thousands of donors who have helped over the years to provide quality education which celebrates the Catholic faith and embraces Native American cultures. They were blessed by a broad base of loyal supporters but knew the key to long-term sustainable growth would come through non-cash and planned gifts. St. Labre chose Meyer Partners as their planned gift marketing partner to help educate donors about alternative ways to give and solicit these meaningful, transformational gifts.

The Solution

Meyer Partners implemented a multi-channel annual marketing strategy covering topics such as Gifts by Will, IRA Qualified Charitable Distributions and Charitable Gift Annuities. Predictive modeling was applied to the donor file and as many as 500,000 donors were sent each of the 4-6 direct mail packages throughout the year. Corresponding emails are sent with each direct mail package. Quarterly newsletter articles also promote these alternate ways to give, as well as cross promotional P.S. statements in their standard renewal appeals. Meyer Partners also designed a new webpage to serve as the hub for planned gift and asset-based giving information.

The Results

As our program has begun to mature, we see clearly the effect of consistent promotion over time. Over the first five years of intentional planned gift marketing, St. Labre has achieved more than a 6x growth in direct responses to these offers with a budget increase of just 2.5x.