It’s official: legacy giving is on the rise. Bequest giving grew nearly 20% in 2025, making it the fastest-growing of the four major sources tracked in Giving USA’s annual report on charitable giving.
This growth signals a highly favorable environment and provides a compelling reason to proactively engage donors about legacy gifts. The real gap is meeting them where they are by aligning your outreach with how supporters actually research and make financial decisions today.
Today’s donors expect more than a compelling fundraising appeal. They want flexibility in how they give, clarity about what their generosity can accomplish, and experiences that feel personal, relevant, and easy to navigate.
If your planned giving program is already up and running, you don’t need to build a new marketing strategy from scratch. It’s really about tightening up your communications and workflows to prioritize your outreach and build durable planned giving pipelines that far outlast any single fundraising push.
In this article, we’ll discuss tips and strategies for how to market your legacy giving program to modern donors – supporters who expect customized, interactive, and transparent giving experiences.
Build engaging donor-facing content
Generic brochures don’t engage supporters like they once did. Donors weighing a major estate decision expect resources that feel closer to customized professional financial guidance than a pamphlet mailed alongside an annual report.
Help donors make a decision by:
- Segmenting donation options by gift type. Let donors self-select the option that fits them best by offering clear tracks for bequests, beneficiary designations, and DAF gifts.
- Implementing donor-facing calculators. Embed interactive tools on your ways-to-give page so prospects can instantly turn abstract tax advantages into concrete, personalized numbers.
- Normalizing advisor relationships. Frame vendor and advisor involvement as a standard rather than an administrative hurdle. By positioning vendors as strategic partners who actively add value and expert guidance, donors will see them as an asset.
Once you’ve built interactive tools to engage today’s donors, the next step is ensuring that their engagement translates into actionable insights for your team. Be sure to use tracking tools, like UTMs, for your online tools. Tracking how supporters interact with online resources tells you which vehicle they’re leaning toward, so gift officers can tailor follow-up conversations using integrated CRM data instead of guessing. As Orr Group notes, “planned giving is a complex strategic endeavor, representing a donor’s lifetime of financial planning and charitable intent. Therefore, you must take a proactive and structured approach to meet donors where they are and anticipate future impacts.”
Cross-promote legacy giving inside campaigns you’re already running
Integrating planned giving into your broader fundraising efforts often yields stronger long-term relationships than treating it as an isolated initiative. Cold outreach about someone’s estate plan lands very differently than the same conversation woven into a capital campaign that donors are already excited about.
Fold legacy messaging into appeals donors are already engaging with by:
- Combining the ask with capital campaigns. Introduce planned giving language during cultivation, right when donors are already focused on long-term impact.
- Maximizing existing touchpoints. Use routine communications like event invitations and impact reports to position legacy giving as a natural next step rather than an arbitrary ask.
- Incentivizing documentation. Formalizing intent matters just as much as generating it. For instance, Washburn University Foundation secured over $21 million in formally documented legacy gifts by creating a $1 million incentive pool. Every time a donor formally documented a planned gift, it unlocked $10,000 from the pool for immediate use on current campus priorities chosen by the donor.
These strategies only work with intentional coordination. Align major gift officers and annual fund directors so cross-promotion feels organic instead of forced, since regular check-ins between the two teams prevent overlapping asks and keep the donor experience seamless.
Turn confirmed legacy donors into a marketing asset
Most legacy giving marketing is aimed at prospects who haven’t committed yet, while the donors who already have are sitting on the most persuasive proof a program can use. A prospective donor deciding whether to include your organization in their estate plan likely trusts a peer’s example more than a brochure.
Amplify the voices of your confirmed legacy donors, with their permission, by:
- Frontloading real donor stories. A real person explaining their motivation resonates deeply on an emotional level and can quickly inspire hesitant prospects to take action. Feature donors prominently on ways-to-give pages and in appeals, not as footnotes.
- Publicizing a legacy society. Create a named planned giving group and promote it across your website, annual reports, and events. Seeing recognizable peers helps build community and normalizes the commitment for everyone else.
- Leveraging peer referrals. Ask current legacy donors to act as informal advocates. Simply asking whether the donor can mention their gift to a friend gives you a warm introduction.
- Segmenting your testimonials. Match the story to the specific vehicle. A prospect exploring bequests needs to see an example of that exact option in action.
Prospects don’t need more convincing that legacy giving is a good idea in the abstract. They need to see people like them who’ve already decided it was worth doing, and the donors who’ve already committed are the most credible messengers a program has.
Build legacy messaging into everyday donor operations
Organizations with strong planned giving programs weave legacy messaging into the way staff and leadership communicate with donors throughout the year. They recognize when a donor’s story, priorities, or long-term commitment creates an opening to discuss legacy giving, and bring up planned giving when it feels relevant rather than treating it as a separate or scripted conversation.
Here are some actionable tips to broaden your marketing:
- Equip your team to make the ask. Provide gift officers and organizational leadership with specific talking points and conversation starters so they can naturally weave planned giving into everyday donor meetings year-round.
- Target your outreach. Use your donor data to pinpoint the best candidates for a legacy conversation instead of blasting a general audience.
- Optimize your prospect research. Predictive modeling and wealth screening will yield the best results when backed by clean, accurate contact data, ensuring your message reaches the right people.
Prioritize your outreach based on affinity. You can streamline your pipeline simply by sorting your database by consecutive years given, which surfaces your most loyal baseline supporters for immediate qualification. Recurring gifts, event attendance, and loyal supporter relationships are all strong affinity signals.
Additionally, as Double the Donation’s guide to phone appending notes, outdated contact information quietly kills more legacy conversations than any messaging problem ever could. You can’t have the conversation if you can’t reach the person. Ensure your team can actually make these connections by routinely using a data appending service to fill in missing phone numbers, emails, and mailing addresses.
Lead with legacy and future impact
Tax advantages can help make the case for legacy giving, but the decision to include a nonprofit in an estate plan is ultimately an emotional one. Donors want to feel connected to the future their generosity will help create and to understand how their gift can shape the organization for years to come. Painting a clear picture of what that generosity makes possible makes legacy appeals more meaningful and tangible.
To make the value of a legacy gift more tangible:
- Focus messaging on the legacy a donor is creating, not the mechanics of the gift itself.
- Keep donors updated on the organization’s future plans so they can picture the long-term impact of a gift made now.
- Time these conversations around moments of genuine reflection, like milestone anniversaries or program outcomes, rather than a generic year-end ask.
Shifting the conversation from organizational need to the donor’s personal motivations turns a solicitation into a partnership. Asking someone how they want to be remembered does more to drive engagement, which is really why the legacy giving conversation works better as an invitation than a request.
Marketing a legacy giving program means treating it as an ongoing, integrated practice rather than a one-time campaign. For nonprofits with established programs, the biggest gains come from optimizing what already works instead of starting from scratch. By upgrading digital materials, aligning development departments, and embedding legacy language into daily donor conversations, you can transform a seasonal scramble into a sustainable, long-term pipeline.
