Survey Results: How Do You Market CGAs?

As many of our loyal readers know, we invited people to take a survey on marketing charitable gift annuities recently, and this month’s Marketing Corner gives some insight into what we’re all doing. With our first question, we tried to get a feeling about whether there were more, fewer, or about the same number of new donors to CGAs in the time period from 2013 to now. Your experiences were almost equal in those three categories! Interesting…

“Yes” beat out “no” by a rate of 4 to 1 to the question “Have you actively promoted CGAs” which is very encouraging. Also encouraging was that 25% of respondents had tried new marketing techniques in this period.  Furthermore, more than 45% had used analytics to help with their CGA mailings. (For more information on using analytics to refine your marketing efforts, see this month's Featured Article.) And, 85% said the number of recipients to their mailings had stayed the same or grown.

On the “could be better" side, 66% of respondents did not try any new techniques and a full 76% hadn’t changed their marketing budget in the last two and a half years.  Most people, 61%, said the frequency of mailings had stayed the same, with 20% increasing and 14% decreasing their frequency.

Finally, it’s nice to see some data regarding mailing timing, and we are not surprised to see that the time of year is not as relevant as other things, like the list or message.

Of the 20% of organizations who did change their gift and/or age minimums, the majority raised the minimum gift age to 65 and the gift amount to $25,000.

And of those who are using a new marketing technique to promote CGAs, electronic wins: email, websites, and specific landing pages.

We were pleased with the volume of responses, more than 330, and appreciate the hundreds of comments that were added to questions with open-ended sections.  We will publish the full statistical results and the themes from the comments in a future Marketing Corner.