A special note for you

With inflation as a macro-trend and the stock market quickly rising, it is crucial that you and your team have the tools to secure non-cash gifts. Furthermore, if the $300 charitable deduction that benefited non-itemizers is not renewed, there will be virtually no benefit to donating cash for many of your supporters in 2022.

I want to ensure you are prepared to see success, and I encourage you and your teams to join our last stock and QCD training of the year next Monday at 1pm EST.

We will be offering a few exciting opportunities to those who attend including a copy of “Creative Acts for Curious People” by Sarah Stein Greenberg to eight attendees, a $30 Etsy gift card to five attendees, and will provide one lucky partner with a $200 GrubHub certificate to buy lunch for your team!

We find that staff education is the single biggest factor in success around non-cash giving, so please feel free to invite as many people from your organization as you like.

Scroll down to our events section to sign up! I hope to see you all there.

Patrick Schmitt

Co-CEO

Learnings from National Estate Planning Awareness Week (NEPAW)!

Another NEPAW has come and gone, and we were thrilled to see your campaigns raise a total of $13.9M in bequest commitments for your causes — more than double last year’s NEPAW total! Here are our top learnings and takeaways:

Email was the #1 gift generator. You’ve heard it before, but that’s because we see this trend across every major bequest campaign: Standalone bequest emails are key to success. This NEPAW, emails generated gifts at about ~4x the rate as other types of outreach.
Every day of the week is an opportunity for success. Though NEPAW is only a week long, your outreach generated gifts at a steady rate across all 7 days. For shorter campaigns, use a couple of touchpoints across the week to maximize success!
Increase your overall email audience to maximize your gift potential — then segment your email by audience type to increase your conversion rate! As email audience size went up, we saw a general increase in the percentage of emails that generated at least 1 gift. However, smaller email lists resulted in a greater percentage of recipients creating bequests. We recommend sending your appeal to a broad list, but segmenting your audience to ensure the language feels personal and relevant (check out this helpful resource on defining your planned giving audience)!

We’re looking forward to working with you on our next major Bequest campaign: New Year’s Resolutions!

FreeWill selected as SaaS Customer Success Award Winner by APPEALIE

APPEALIE has named FreeWill as one of their 2021 SaaS Customer Success award winners! We were thrilled to be selected by a panel of industry leaders based on above-average Net Promoter Score™ (NPS) survey responses from partners, and an exceptional customer success story with a FreeWill partner who raised over $3 million in charitable bequests after testing language with our team. FreeWill has joined the ranks of other recognized software companies, including PandaDoc and Slack!

We’re honored to accept this award, and want to thank you, our partners! We’re here to support the amazing work our partners do for communities around the world, and you are central to everything we do.

You can read the full press release here —>

FreeWill events

Upcoming partner trainings

With more than one-third of all charitable giving happening in the last 3 months of the year, gift officers are faced with a tremendous opportunity to reach their goals. Join this training to level up your last-minute donor conversations and major giving meetings.

Are you talking to your donors? Last-minute tips to secure larger gifts

Monday, November 22nd, 1-1:45 PM EST

Save my spot

Do you have questions about how to secure more non-cash giving? Do you want to learn what other organizations like you are doing? Join our FreeWill Lunch & Learn sessions! Look out for a calendar invitation and join us to share your success stories!

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