Do you want to make your planned giving program the best it can be?

We do too. That's why we feature current successes our clients are achieving with the planned giving marketing strategies we've developed. We also feature our general planned giving marketing tips that have proven successful for our clients for over 30 years. Please contact us to develop a comprehensive marketing strategy for your organization to achieve maximum results with your gift programs.

• Albany Medical Center "blown away" by latest newsletter
  

  "We just received our newsletters and are just blown away. The six full pages with perforated reply card and full color photos—it looks amazing! We love how you displayed our Web site—including a picture of the home page.

  Thank you so much for all your work. We really appreciate it!

  Thanks again,
  Amy"

• Culver's testimonial to the Pentera product
  

  "We have been using Pentera for our planned giving marketing for many years. We are very happy with the quality of their work and the results we have enjoyed. Here are two examples. Pentera publishes and distributes our quarterly planned giving newsletter called Culver Perspectives. One article in our last issue featured a donor who had seen her rental property appreciate significantly over the years. She wanted to sell and use the proceeds to increase her retirement income, but the capital-gain tax would be extraordinary. One of the readers of Culver Perspectives called me recently and said this is exactly my situation. I want to do what the lady in the article did. He is now working with his attorney to set up a charitable remainder unitrust with a flip provision using two rental condos worth over $500,000, with Culver as the remainder beneficiary."

  The second example involves marketing for IRA direct deposits prompted by the Pension Protection Act of 2006. With Pentera’s help we highlighted this giving opportunity in two newsletters and two inexpensive postcards directed at our alumni over 70 years old. The results were 38 individual gifts totaling over $698,000. Thanks Pentera!"

• Track the success of your marketing campaign with your Pentera-designed Web site
  

  Curious to see if your marketing campaign is driving any traffic to your Web site? Did the last newsletter you mailed out have any impact? With a Pentera designed Web site, the answer is available at the push of a button. Using the traffic monitoring software provided with your site, you can log in and see the spikes in traffic to your Web site based on your marketing activity.

• Northwestern University uncovers prospects with a newsletter survey
  

  Pentera helped Northwestern University to learn more about its newsletter readership—and uncover prospects!—in a recent survey attached to their newsletter. A prominently advertised book giveaway made returning the survey more palatable, and 101 respondents filled in some blanks for the University's gift planning staff.

  Some of the helpful facts uncovered about respondents:

  • 84% read the newsletter
  • 24% save issues of the newsletter
  • 21% share the newsletter with others
  • 13% want the newsletter e-mailed to them
  • 39% are interested in a reunion
  • 22% requested information about making a gift and receiving income
  • 18% would like information about gifts by will or living trust
  • 11% had included Northwestern in their will or living trust—and hadn't notified them!
  • 14% wanted information on their giving society
  • 46% requested the newsletter's follow-up booklet

  Call Pentera to find out if a survey might be right for your planned giving newsletter program.

• eBrochures becoming a "must have" for Web sites
  

  Pentera's eBrochures are quickly becoming a popular addition to our product line. Most people incorporate our eBrochures as a part of their Web site, but they can also be used as a reference library for you to print out and share as you work with potential donors.

  Here's how they would work on your Web site: A potential donor can view the list of titles available and simply select the title(s) he or she is interested in, submit pertinent information such as name and e-mail address, and click submit. Within moments, the eBrochure(s) selected are automatically e-mailed. Meanwhile, you receive an e-mail notifying you of the request so you can follow-up with the potential donor.

• Expanding lists to include younger donors
  

  Northfield Mount Hermon School asked us for help developing an idea to send deferred gift annuity information to young prospects who don't usually receive their three-times-a-year newsletter in addition to informing their usual recipients about charitable gift annuities. Pentera came up with a balanced text that would appeal to both groups in one issue of the newsletter, accompanying a profile of a CGA donor and one of a DGA donor.

  The results? Twenty-six responses, considered by Northfield Mount Hermon School a good number. "And the quality of the responses is very good, and that is also a fine measure," Marv Kelley, senior gift planning advisor, said.

  We asked Marv how the younger recipients rated. He said, "eight of the twenty-six responders are in the younger group—had not received the NMH Planner before this issue. Four of the eight requested the gift annuity literature."

• Our Pentera-created Web site drives in $100,000 gift ...
  

  We have been very pleased with both Pentera's responsiveness to our requests and their suggestions for improving our gift planning Web site. This two-way street was readily apparent when we received our first gift annuity of $100,000 as a direct result of utilizing a gift calculator on our Web site—a Pentera suggestion.

  Jason G. Petrovich
  Associate Director
  DePauw University

• The Children's Medical Center reports their latest newsletter has had a wonderful impact to date
  

  Our latest issue of Children's In Mind has had a wonderful impact to date... three new bequest prospects, with one specific intention received of $250,000. We also received a real estate gift—valued at $1.5 million—to fund a CRUT.

• Uncovering new prospects from your existing database
  

  I found a great way to uncover new planned giving prospects from our existing membership database.

  I visited www.babycenter.com, clicked on the "Baby Names" link and chose "Take a decade-by-decade tour of baby naming throughout history," towards the bottom of the screen. On the site, I was able to view lists of the most popular first names from each decade. I searched our membership database for women with the first names that were featured in the lists from 1910, 1920, and 1930. The result is a list of new planned giving prospects!

  To test the accuracy of this, I looked at my current list of planned giving donors and compared it to babycenter's most popular first name lists. 25 percent of my current donor base have first names that are featured in the list from 1930, and 9 percent have first names that are featured in the lists from 1910 and 1920.

  Chandra Towers Blatt
  Assistant Manager, Planned Giving
  Wildlife Conservation Society
  Bronx, New York

• IRA-PPA 2006 Success Stories using Pentera's strategies to get the word out—postcards and target mailers
  Congress enacted legislation as part of the Pension Protection Act of 2006 (PPA 2006), which offers individuals the opportunity to make gifts from their IRAs and exclude the amount of their gifts from gross income.
  
  We created timely marketing materials to allow our clients to tell their constituents about this opportunity. Read about a few of their successes:
  
  University of Wisconsin Foundation received 73 gifts in 2006…
  
  
  • 73 gifts received in 2006, totaling $1,296,015
    
    
  • 4 gifts of $100,000 each (maximum allowable)
    
    
    
  DePauw University reports gifts flowing in daily, ranging from…
  
  
  • Gifts from $250-$20,000 flowing in one or two a day
    
    
  • $400,000 from just 4 gifts
    
    
  • 25 gifts in so far, totaling $823,000
    
    
    
  The Ohio State University has received 51 gifts to date…
  
  
  • 51 gifts received to date, totaling over $1,030,000
    
    
  • Gifts range from a couple hundred dollars to the maximum contribution permitted under the law
    
    
    
  "We believe a lot of our success with the charitable IRA rollover gifts is a direct result of the postcard created by Pentera, which we mailed early after the legislation was signed into law. Our donors have commented that the material in the postcard was very clear, concise, and most helpful. We are thrilled with the number of gifts we received as a result of this new giving incentive."
  
  
  Amherst College reports 7 gifts so far with many more in the works…
  
  
  • 7 gifts confirmed, totaling $267,000
  
  
  • 2 of the 7 were the maximum of $100,000, paying off pledges earlier than scheduled, which provides a good cash flow for Amherst
  
  
  Colorado State University has received over $400,000…
  
  
  • Over $400,000 received on IRA rollover gifts since mailing Pentera's postcard
  
  
  
  
  The window of opportunity for IRA gifts under PPA 2006 closes at the end of 2007. Do not miss this chance to inform your donors!
  
  Click to view our postcard and target mailers.

• Indianapolis Zoo relates, "Pentera's IRA-PPA 2006 materials elicited responses and contributions far greater than imagined"
  Thanks to the providence of Congress, the Indianapolis Zoo and several of its friends have benefited greatly from the Pension Protection Act of 2006. For those qualified individuals who were facing compulsory distributions from their IRA, PPA 2006 afforded a welcome avenue to redirect unneeded income toward philanthropic endeavors.
  
  Within days following the enactment of PPA 2006, Pentera offered the Zoo a variety of mediums to convey this news, including an outstanding topical postcard that the Zoo mailed to a select audience. Shortly thereafter, the Zoo received several telephone and e-mail inquiries from postcard recipients to obtain further information. Before the conclusion of last year, the Zoo received five IRA gifts totaling in excess of $100,000.
  
  Not only does the Indianapolis Zoo greatly appreciate its generous and caring donors, it is also extremely grateful for the friendly and professional services provided by Pentera. It was enlightening to learn that each IRA donor was contributing his/her IRA gift in response to the Zoo's postcard and subsequent planned giving newsletter, which is also produced by Pentera.
  
  The Indianapolis Zoo is excited to collaborate with Pentera again in 2007 to plan further opportunities to share this valuable message.
  
  Respectfully,
  
  J. Edward Sandifer
  Planned & Major Gifts Officer
  
  The San Diego Zoo has enjoyed great success with its new gift annuity program. The first CGA was issued in March of 2005, and ten annuity agreements totaling over $750,000 were issued during the 2005 fiscal year. Two more gift annuities totaling $250,000 were issued in 2006, bringing the grand total—in less than a year—to over $1,000,000.
  
  "The success of our charitable gift annuity program to date has to be, in part, related to the fact that we have had a very successful pooled income fund for 20 years," says Pam Whitaker, gift planning manager for the zoo. "People were already used to the idea of making a gift that would produce income for them before we started our gift annuity program."
  
  Pam has noticed a trend in the amounts of the gift annuities: "We have heard that while the market for CGAs used to be more in the $10,000-$25,000 range, today there are more and more in the $100,000-$200,000 range."
  
  For instance, the bank that manages the zoo's gift annuity account brought zoo officials a $400,000 gift annuity and is working with them on a life-estate gift annuity with the same donor.

Summertime, and planned giving ain't easy. At least it isn't at Scott & White Memorial Hospital, where Planned Giving Director Glen Cosper says the months of June, July, and August are traditionally slow in terms of receiving gifts.

"Usually in the summertime we're pretty dead," says Glen. "But the card worked great."

"The card" was a 3.5" x 8.5" postcard prepared by Pentera that Scott & White sent out in the summer of 2003 to promote new gift annuity rates. Shortly after the mailing, the hospital closed four gifts and had several other proposals outstanding.

The format was so successful that Scott & White did a postcard about the tax advantages of year-end gifts in late 2003 and another gift annuity postcard mailing in 2004, in addition to its regular newsletter mailings.

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