It’s fundraising conference season, folks! In April, I was lucky enough to speak at both the Canadian Association of Gift Planning annual conference and at the Nonprofit Technology Conference – two of my favourite fundraising gatherings. And as I write this, I’m gearing up to deliver a flipped classroom session next week at Convene Canada.

One of my favourite parts about conferences is the folks you meet. The chit-chat between sessions, at lunches, during mocktail hour, with old friends and new, discussing fundraising challenges and opportunities and questions and qualms. Here’s what I’ve been talking about with fundraisers so far.

Legacy fundraisers are hungry for online tools.

Yes, direct mail is still the queen of mass marketing legacy cultivation tools – after all, 60% of legacy donors are also mail donors! But digital is coming in hot, and I’m seeing so much more appetite and adoption this year than I have in the past (yay!). Charities are spending time and investing resources into building digital capacity and infrastructure with a planned giving lens. That tells me that legacy fundraisers are doing a great job making the case for this evolution in their programs!

Web content is being re-evaluated to make sure it aligns with best-practice around planned giving audiences and users. Email is being used as a low-cost cultivation option, made even easier with thoughtful automation and segmentation to back it up. In mature legacy programs, online ads are helping to grow the marketing funnel and access brand-new audiences. And partnerships with online will-making tools, like Epilogue, are streamlining the giving experience, especially for younger donors.

Charities are continuing their equity and inclusion journeys.

From the ethical use of AI with a DEIB lens, to shifting away from inequitable segmentation strategies, to telling stories in an inclusive way, there were so many deep and much-needed conversations – both in sessions, and outside of them.

And what I found particularly interesting was that almost all of these conversations came down to the practicalities of how to do our fundraising more equitably, more than the ‘why’. How do we activate our entire community in a way that’s authentic, that reduces harm, that empowers our people, and dismantles systems of inequity? How do we change the way we do this work? This lens of taking action and actually doing it felt really motivating!

I also liked how much people felt willing to take risks here. CAGP and NTC are both brave spaces, to take a term I learned from Tanya Rumble at Recast Philanthropy, and people felt able to process tough topics, call one another in, and keep the focus on learning and doing better.

Gen X and Millennials are still a hot topic in planned giving.

We’ve been talking about the reactive legacy donor – you know, those folks who made their first wills in COVID, but haven’t yet made their first charitable bequests – for a few years now. You might have even seen our Netflix & Will session at your local CAGP Chapter! It seems to me that the topic of next-gen legacy donors remains hot.

Where can we find these folks? How do we speak to them? How will they give? What stewardship do they need to keep you in the will? I had so many of the conversations at CAGP this year.

And yes, these audiences have a ton of merit! But remember, younger audiences mean much, much longer times to realization and much, much higher death avoidance. Legacy is a long game, especially when your legacy donor has 4-5 decades of life left to live! You can’t rush it.