Promote Planned Gifts Year-Round: 3 Key Times to Prioritize

Planned giving can transform your nonprofit and its capacity to drive impact. It not only provides a steady, predictable revenue stream but also forges deep, meaningful connections with your most loyal supporters.

Unlike other forms of fundraising (most notably broad annual fundraising, which naturally gets more attention at year-end), building a consistent promotion strategy for planned gifts may pose a bigger challenge. After all, planned gifts are a little awkward to bring up at first, and they’re highly individual—when the time is right for one donor to consider creating a bequest, there’s no guarantee that others will be ready, too.

But that’s the point of consistent outreach: Building awareness and educating your audience on the purpose and benefits of estate planning so that it stays on their minds. When you send appeals for planned gifts later, supporters will be better primed to engage.

Let’s look at three key times of the year when you can naturally infuse planned giving into your communications. Build your promotion calendar around these times, and you’ll be sure to catch more attention and inspire action.

A new year means new goals and new reflections. For many donors, estate planning may be top of mind at the start of the year. Others may be concerned about their finances or taxes, or their legacies and relationships.

In January, you can try a number of tactics to reach donors and raise awareness of estate planning and planned gifts. We recommend these two strategies:

• Resolutions campaigns. Send emails, create new features in your newsletter, and share social posts that promote the importance and ease of creating a will. Frame these messages through the lens of organizing your life and finances for the year. This campaign can be targeted broadly, meaning you’ll send it to a wide general audience or share it publicly.
• Targeted outreach to year-end donors. Via email or postcard, reach out to donors who gave at year-end to remind them about tax season and to check if they plan to itemize their deductions. Take the opportunity to promote estate planning with a quick year-start checklist—start collecting tax documents, review financial goals for the coming year, create or update your will, etc. This strategy should be targeted more narrowly to past donors or, specifically, those who gave above a particular amount (and thus are likely to itemize) and fit your planned giving prospect profiles.

Whichever kinds of messages you send, link (or include a printed URL or QR code) to your website’s estate planning and planned giving page. The goal is simply to further expose your audience to the option of creating a planned gift without making an explicit pitch.

Affinity months make easy opportunities to promote particular topics, giving methods, and more. August is National Make a Will Month, and it’s perfect for bringing up your planned giving program.

For August, you might try these strategies:

• Email blast. The affinity month warrants a dedicated email blast to your entire base of active donors or a narrower subset if you prefer. In it, discuss the month’s theme, list the reasons why estate planning is important, and explicitly mention planned giving and its immense benefits for your organization. Keep it short and sweet, and include a clear way for readers to learn more on your website or get in touch directly to discuss planned giving with your team.
• Social proof campaign. The entire month creates an opportunity to spread out your planned giving content. Once you establish a program, promoting planned giving becomes much easier because you can generate powerful social proof through donor testimonials. Plan ahead to reach out to your legacy society members (create one if you haven’t yet!) to ask for short quotes, longer reflections, or even selfie videos explaining why they chose to give, what your mission means to them, and what the planned giving process is like. Social media and your website are ideal channels for this campaign. As always, link back to the best page on your website for readers to learn more about why and how to give.

What messaging should you emphasize in your National Make a Will Month content? We recommend anchoring your emails and posts with these key points:

• A will is a critically important legal document that everyone should have regardless of age. (We see a full age spread among will-makers on the FreeWill platform, with those aged 18-24 perhaps surprisingly the most likely to create a bequest!)
• A will provides peace of mind to you and your family.
• It allows you to create a lasting, meaningful, and highly personal legacy through your estate plans and planned gifts.
• Creating a will is much easier than many initially assume.

These talking points keep the emphasis on the importance of will creation while also giving you natural segues to talk about planned giving more explicitly. During your August campaigns, ensure that you can accurately track engagement records—you’ll want to reach back out to supporters who express interest in what you have to say about estate planning and planned giving.

Estate Planning Awareness Week falls on the third full calendar week in October every year, and it offers another easy opportunity to promote planned giving. Follow a similar playbook from August, but take advantage of the encroaching end of the year and shorter timeframe of the affinity week.

For example, you might roll out these strategies:

• Reminder campaign. Send email blasts, postcards, social media posts, etc., that remind donors that year-end is fast approaching. Try a message along the lines of, “It’s Estate Planning Awareness Week, and we wanted to remind our community about the importance (and ease) of creating a will. If your 2025 goals included estate planning, creating a will, or tidying up your finances in other ways, now’s the perfect time to knock out one more item on your to-do list.” You can target these messages to broad groups or specifically to those who’ve received your past targeted messages about planned giving.
• Explicit promotions and appeals. Send emails or printed messages that explicitly promote your program to your top prospects and past recipients of planned giving messages (especially those who engaged with the messages but didn’t act). Remind them about estate planning, its benefits, the ease of creating bequests, and their massive benefits for your organization. Link these messages to your website, provide contact information, or consider attaching an invitation to an event, like our next idea.
• Estate planning seminar. For some organizations, an event is the perfect addition to their October plans. Recruit a local financial planner to explain financial and estate planning, how wills work, the tax benefits of bequests for donors, and more. This kind of event is easy, informative, and truly valuable for attendees. Make it a casual party with a meal and mingling, reinforced with mission moments to remind guests of your nonprofit’s work. Try targeting this event to your most likely planned giving prospects and past message recipients.

At this point in the year, you have a good idea of what kinds of messages and delivery channels work best for your unique audience. Bring those insights into October, but don’t forget to diversify your promotions, too. The same email gets stale and easy to ignore, but an event invite or year-end financial checklist postcard will stand out.

These three times of year give you a natural and easy progression around which to build your planned giving strategy: Broad awareness in January and then getting increasingly specific and targeted as the year goes on.

Combine this strategy with consistent but minor mentions of planned giving in your newsletter, annual report, and other fundraising appeals. Gather donor stories, discuss your planned giving program at events, announce new events and perks you’ve created for legacy society members—there are many ways to ensure that supporters remain aware of planned giving without bombarding them.

And don’t forget to integrate planned giving into your year-end messaging! Some of your Giving Tuesday promotions should discuss multiple ways to give, like via donor-advised funds and planned gifts. After all, this is the day to cast a wide net. Then, as more donors begin thinking about the upcoming tax season, keep the conversations going with your top prospects.

Adapt this loose calendar to your nonprofit’s unique needs, goals, and community. Back it up with helpful planned giving content on your website. In no time, you can launch a simple but highly effective promotion strategy.

Patrick Schmitt and co-CEO Jenny Xia founded FreeWill at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business in 2016. FreeWill’s charitable giving platform makes it easier for nonprofit fundraising teams to unlock transformational gifts, and to date has generated over $6.6 billion in new gift commitments for thousands of nonprofit organizations. Patrick hosts FreeWill’s popular webinar series, educating thousands of nonprofit fundraising professionals each month about planned and non-cash giving strategies.

Before FreeWill, Patrick was the Head of Innovation at Change.org, where he helped grow the organization to 100 million users in four years. Prior to that, he ran email marketing for President Obama and served as Campaign Director for MoveOn.org.