Planned gifts increase when an organization moves from passive marketing (a newsletter mention, a webpage) to active, live qualifying conversations with the donors most likely to have legacy-gift capacity, typically the longest-tenured, most loyal annual donors rather than the largest one-time givers.
Catapult's Legacy Call methodology is built around that shift: Tier 1 qualifying calls reach 60-70% of prospects with a 10-15% positive response rate, and Tier 2 gift-planning follow-up conversations close 25-32% of those qualified leads, at an average confirmed gift commitment of roughly $48,500, often 200-300 times the donor's largest annual gift.
Documented results scale with the size of the donor file reached: a two-phase Legacy Call program identified $6.8 million in planned gifts across 3,100 loyal donors for an international ministry, while a single-phase program for a New Jersey hospital secured $1,023,000 at a cost of just $0.06 per dollar raised.
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