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hello everyone and thank you for joining us today for inside the mind of the plan giving donor market smart and Professor Russell James of Texas Tech University have teamed up today to bring you a presentation on neuroimaging and philanthropic decision-making just to let you know how today is gonna work we're gonna have a 45 minute presentation from Professor James and then we're gonna have a 15-minute question and answer session at the end if you have a question that you'd like to ask professor James please use the question function on the go to webinar control panel that you should see on your screen if you are using social media our twitter handle is greg market smart named for our CEO Greg Warner and we ask the e use hashtag RJ webinar to reference today's presentation so just to tell you a little bit about us here at market smart today we are an interactive agency and we have both software solutions and marketing services to help fundraisers get more major gifts today and more plan gifts in the future and our guest speaker today is Professor Russell James of Texas Tech University he's an associate professor and also the director of charitable financial planning he studied law at the University of Missouri where he was recognized for his work in gift and estate taxation planning he holds a PhD in consumer economics from the University of Missouri and his dissertation was on charitable giving he worked as the director of Planned Giving at Central Christian College in Moberly Missouri for six years and then served as the president for five years where he oversaw all fundraising today he researches neuroimaging and uses this technology to better understand at philanthropic decision making so without further ado I'm going to let professor James take over alright professor James okay Thanks so just a minute here while we get the screens working in the right order and once once you're seeing the screen there let's see okay all right I'm looking at thank you all right very good well thanks so much for joining us today again as the professor Russell James from Texas Tech University and I want to take a few minutes to share with you some of the latest research findings that we've uncovered in trying to gain a deeper understanding of how people make charitable bequests decisions and so today we're going to be looking at both neuroimaging results and experimental psychology results to understand a bit more about how these processes work so the way that this webinar will be divided is into two parts for the first section what I want to do is share with you some of the results the first section coming from our neuroimaging lab and the second section coming from other experimental psychology research and I want to share these with you as information that's good to know it's information that forms a framework for how we can understand how people make charitable bequests decisions but I don't want to leave it just in the ivory tower Theory realm I want to spend the second half of the webinar talking about how we can use these pieces of information that we've gained from research to actually change the way or improve the way that we raise funds in the area of charitable bequests giving now I will make an apology upfront as I'm an attorney and I know some of the other folks online are also attorneys I do use the term request here in the vernacular to cover all sorts of estate planning decision makings rather than it's more formal sense so let's start with the first idea from research that that we want to that first idea is the concept that from neuroimaging research it appears that bequests decision-making emphasizes visualized autobiography brain regions and I want to talk a bit about why we say that and what that means to begin with there is a clear behavioral distinction between charitable giving and charitable bequest giving and that clear distinction is that even people who engage in a lot of charitable giving over the age of 50 less than 10 percent of those individuals have a charitable estate plan so there is a substantial gap in behavior between these two kinds of activities so knowing that the process for the this first stage of research was to be able to understand what is the cognitive or neural difference between charitable bequests decision-making and other kinds of charitable decision-making such as current giving or volunteering decision-making so what we did was to have people make these type of decisions while they were in an MRI scanner so that we could see how does the brain process these types of decisions differently the so the just a second here sorry I am missing not missing a slide they're just sorry about that delay there let me fix this so what I want to show you here is is the okay there we go all right okay apologize for that that slow down there okay so what I'm going to show you here is I'm going to show you the images that we got from having people in the scanner and what we're looking at here is which parts of the brain are more activated for bequest charitable bequests decisions as compared to charitable decisions involving volunteering or current giving and so what this is this is a combination of all of our participants and basically stacking those neural images together and what you're seeing on this screen is essentially a flight through the brain we're starting at the nose and we're moving back through the brain to look at areas of significant activation now as you can see that as the image progresses we go back through the eyes and then towards the middle of the brain and one of the things I want to point out here is that after we get all the way through the front half of the brain we've seen no distinctions we've seen no significant differences so what that's telling us is that we're not seeing the differences between these activations in the prefrontal cortex area which is your math your your rational cognition parts of the brain so the differences actually occur elsewhere and it's not until we start getting towards the back of the brain that we are seeing the initial differences in other words what is more active with bequests decision-making that first difference comes in it's the first major area that you will see of color in this image that first difference comes in an area known as the perk unius and then the second difference comes at the very back of the brain in an area that is centered in what's referred to as the as the lingual gyrus so that is the image for what the special regions of the brain that were associated with with bequests decision-making work and the next slide for any of you who are budding neuro images here's a little bit more of the technical results of that essentially we compared the quest decision-making to giving and because request decision-making to volunteering and also in a combined factor in all three of those analysis we got the same results so what does this mean well the lingual gyrus area is part of the visual system we know that damage can result in losing the ability to dream it's a visualization area so think of internal visualization the first area of activation that you saw in that image was called the pre cuneus now this has been called the mind's eye because it's used to take a third-person perspective on oneself so if we put these two concepts together the concept of visualization and the concept of third-person perspective on the self it produces this idea of a visualized autobiography now this is not a new idea from this research there's been previous neuroimaging research that has found these same two areas activated in some other circumstances in one study where older adults were shown photographs from across their life both the perk unius and lingual gyrus activate activation occurred when they were able to vividly relive those events in the photographs but not where the scenes were only vaguely familiar so this is suggesting to us that when people are thinking about their life stories as in this previous research that in fact we get activation from these visualized autobiography areas there's been other studies that show that both of these regions are simultaneously activated when people are mentally traveling back in time or recalling autobiographical personal events this is not just something from the neuroimaging results though we do in fact see this concept of autobiography and practice here quoting from clairaut lee's dissertation in 2011 where she interviewed planned bequest donors and she summed up how they describe their motivation for including different charities as this indeed when discussing which charities had chosen to remember they chose to remember there was a clear link with the life narratives of many respondents so that first piece of information I'd like for you to keep in mind is that idea that bequests decision-making emphasizes visualized autobiography brain regions the second idea I'd like for you to keep in mind is that bequests to friends and family members engage memory and emotion brain regions more than a charitable bequests do so in this experiment we had 36 participants and we also attempted to increase the realism of the decision-making but this is different the first experiment we were looking at the quest decision-making as compared to current giving or volunteering now we're looking at bequest decisions of different types friends family and charities so what the participants in this experiment saw was that at the end of the session a legally valid last will and testament would be mailed to them at no charge to help you design your plan we need to ask about some of your desires and preferences and they were asked about percentages and dollar amounts and specific personal property items they wanted to go to each of these three groups so this is intended to be a bit more realistic at least as realistic as we can get when people are actually in an mr scanner so the results from this is that bequest of friends and family member more heavily involved brain regions of emotion and of memory and the difference was a bit stronger for females and males so this is not a shocking finding by any means but I want you to keep it in mind because some of our other experimental results will show how this can be useful so that second piece is to keep in mind that bequest to friends and family member engaged memory and emotion brain regions more than charitable bequests now I want to shift from the neuroimaging results to some experimental psychology results and those give us a framework for how people deal with death related decisions and first we're going to look at this reaction of avoidance because the first stage defense to death reminders of the quest planning being one of them is avoidance so let's talk a bit about that first stage defense and what that looks like the unfortunate reality is this regardless of terminology or packaging if we engage people in estate planning we are helping them to plan for their own death this is a strong reminder of the reality of one's own mortality but it turns out there's been a lot of experimental research done that has identified consistent reactions to mortality reminders so just a quote to summarize what a lot of these findings have uncovered it's the idea that the initial reaction to death related thoughts is to push those thoughts out of mind it's a relatively irrational threat focused cognitive maneuver and the idea is to push these thoughts out of consciousness so what does this avoidance look like in experiment and in real life well it looks like these five DS it looks like being distracted well I'm too busy to think about that right now or differentiate it doesn't apply to me now because I exercise or have good health or to deny these worries about mortality do some simply don't apply to me or very common is to delay well I definitely plan to think about all of this estate planning stuff but I'm going to do it later or finally to depart to simply stay away from that reminder I want to now turn to an example that I think has some applicability for bequest planning but it's from a little bit different field and that is the decision of organ donation I think there's a commonality because organ donation is a decision you can make that benefits other people it doesn't have any cost to you but unfortunately it's a decision that has a high level of mortality salience it reminds us of death so what is the most common response to an organ donation request is it yes is it no or is it I don't want to think about it well if we look at this next set of results published in science magazine a few years ago if we looked at these first four countries we would say given the effective consent rates to having a leaving an organ donation that the answer is no most people don't want to donate organs however if instead we looked at this other set of European countries where we get effective consent percentage rates that are over ninety nine percent in many cases then we would take that evidence to say well it appears that yes people do want to donate their organs so what's going on here what is causing this inconsistency in results well the inconsistency and results is driven by the countries in gold are ones that have opt-in systems that is you check the box to say yes I want to donate organs and the countries in blue have opt-out systems that is you check the box to say no I don't want to donate organs so what we can take from this is that from the countries on the Left people don't want to opt in to organ donation and what we can take from the countries on the right is that people don't want to opt out of organ donation so if we combine both of those realities what it tells us is people don't want to think about these topics now does that have any applicability for charitable bequests decision-making I think it does when we look at people over the age of 50 about 6 percent have charitable plans about 38 percent either weren't asked when they were planning or they were asked and said no because they have plans without a charitable component but the majority of people simply have no planning documents that is the majority of people are answering this question with I don't want to think about it so that third thing to keep in mind is that the first stage defense to death reminders is avoidance the final piece from research that I want to share with you today is the idea that when avoidance doesn't work the second stage defense to death reminders is to seek symbolic immortality the supports one's in-group community now I know that's a bunch of professor words all put together there but I want to make that a bit more practical so the reality is that that first stage defense of avoidance is something that people employ consistently but it doesn't always work external reality sometimes break through that first stage of audience defense it might be illness or injury or advancing age or the death of someone close to the person or someone like me gets you to intentionally plan for your death through estate planning whatever it is that makes that happen avoidance doesn't always work when avoidance doesn't work the second stage defense to mortality reminders is symbolic immortality a form of autobiographical heroism this is the idea that some part of oneself one's name family community achievements values goals is going to persist after death now for those of you who are interested in the psychological background of this you're more than welcome to read some of the original manuscripts from the 1960s in the 1920s by Ernest Becker Otto rank and some other Freudian related folks about why all of this is but I just want to summarize for you the basic idea and to tell you that I'm interested in this not so much for all of the psychological theory but because of the actual experimental results that are showing the strength of this model and so what I want to suggest is that symbolic immortality the idea of leaving a legacy that's going to be remembered can be thought of as the attic of this house of autobiographical heroism that requires the foundation of one's community and values that provide a framework of meaningfulness so let me share with you now some of the actual experimental results and I'll just run through a bunch of them that shows how strongly this affects people when people are reminded of their own mortality it changes their preferences and decisions in a number of ways many of which show this increased desire for symbolic immortality and autobiographical here ISM so for example it increases there desire for fame it increases the interest in naming a star after oneself it increases the perception of one's past significance the likelihood of describing positive improvements when writing an autobiographical essay and the perceived accuracy of a positive personality profile of oneself all of this in this category of what we might call autobiographical heroism but it's not just the case that we see that happening we also see an increased allegiance to one's community and community values so for example death reminders increased giving among Americans to US charities but they don't increase giving among Americans to foreign charities they increase negative ratings by Americans of anti United States essays they increase negative ratings of foreign soft drinks so apparently your taste buds become more jingoistic when you're reminded of mortality as well they even increase the predicted number of local NFL football team wins death reminders increased ethnic identity among Hong Kong Chinese and German preference for the German mark versus the Euro they increase acceptance of negative stereotypes of residents of other cities or other nations they've been shown to increase support by Israeli participation of military action against Iran and death reminders also increase support by Iranian students for martyrdom attacks against the US they increase willingness of English participants to die or self-sacrifice for England Dutch agreement with our opinions given by Dutch but not by Japanese voting for female candidates by females but not males and the list could go on and on but the ultimate result is this attachment to community and values the final result I want to share with you from Experimental Psychology is one that was dubbed the Ebenezer Scrooge effect and this is the result that if you bring someone into the lab who is psychologically more self focused after the mortality reminders those individuals increased their ratings of charitable organisations following mortality reminders now why is this a big deal well this is something that goes a little way to explain I again and again organizations share stories about having received significant bequests gifts from individuals who never made charitable gifts during life never volunteer to the organization during life the reason is the environment in which people make bequest decisions is a high death reminder environment it is a high mortality salience environment and because of this environment people's preferences are different in that environment as we see from this research as well okay so that's the last piece of the research background and information that I'd like for you to keep in mind that I think can form a framework for how we think about these charitable bequests decision-making processes so that's all well and good but how do we use this in the real world to try to improve results in the quest fundraising well the first suggestion I want to make that links into this idea of visualized autobiography is to suggest telling life stories of donors who will live beyond their death through their bequest giving and I'm not just telling you this because I think it's off the cuff may be a good idea this is actually something that we've recently tested what we did is we tested different marketing messages with nine different groups and a total of of actually 4,500 individuals within these groups and this is give me just a second Pollak for the apologize for the delay Here I am okay there we go I was working on edits all morning and realized that I've that I've gotten a bit older presentation here so once again accept my apologies there okay alright so this is actually the latest results I knew the number was off there because we had run a few more of these okay so we were testing different marketing messages with eleven different groups I have some excuse of being an absent-minded professor really I do this sort of thing all the time we had 4,500 individuals a bit over that total and we tested 40 different charities and this is what we were looking at we were looking at the comparison between their answers to these two questions on a 100 point scale first they were asked if you were asked in the next three months what's the likelihood you might give money to particular organization of course we tested 40 different organizations and then we were asked if you signed a will in the next three months what is the likelihood you might leave a bequest gift to that organization the reason that we care about these two questions is that this will show us us if there is a gap between willingness to make a current gift and willingness to make a bequest gift and the reason the gap is important is because you know some people are just not charitable and so we're not going to concerned about those individuals if they don't care about the organization we're not worried about it we're more concerned about the gap between people's willingness to give currently and their willingness to leave a bequest so what did we find well what we found was that respondents were more willing to give money than to leave a bequest for every single organization now these are the 40 organizations that we tested with that research but the reality is this is a universal finding so chances are even if your organization doesn't appear on this list the reality is that your organization likely has this gap as well where people are more willing to give than to leave a bequest so what we then did is to try to tell different marketing messages to see which marketing message would affect this gap and so what we did is we broke the group's up into different groups some of them receive no marketing messages at all and with that group we had an average gap of about ten and a quarter points on this hundred point scale in other words that's the gap between people's willingness to give and their willingness to leave a bequest well first we started with this message about speed and thrift airs it's the idea of basically arguing look the statistics show that a lot of these inheritances are just spent really quickly and therefore it may make sense to leave money to something that's going to last longer and it had a little bit of an effect we got maybe a 3/4 of a point reduction in the gap for the group that received that message then we tried another message as social norms message and basically this is the idea where you presented them with a lot of information that this kind of charitable bequests inclusion was something that is is typically included by Americans it's the right thing to do everybody agrees with it and we got a little bit more of a hit from that one and we were able to reduce maybe by about a point and a half and slightly better if we put both messages together for the same group we then did a different set of interventions for separate groups this and this is using the leave a legacy stories which you can get from the PPP national website we got permission to test these in some cases we tested them with our own images in some cases we tested just pure text there wasn't really a significant difference between the way they were delivered but we got our biggest results so far in terms of reducing that gap with the leave a legacy stories then we did something different we took those leave a legacy stories and we changed them just slightly so that they were talking about living donors so for example one of the story starts with school janitor lester holmes died in 1992 that story becomes school janitor lester holmes signed his will today and then as much as possible the rest of the story was the same what we found with this is that the living bequests donor stories had the biggest impact in reducing the gap between willingness to leave a bequest and willingness to give now I will tell you the reason that we had 11 different groups for this testing was because the first time I got this result I didn't believe it I thought the deceased the Quest donor stories would be better and so I tested it again and the living bequests donor stories won again so I tested it again and again and then you can see why we have 11 different groups finally I gave up because every single time the living request donor stories out pulled the deceased request donor stories this actually fits with what we're seeing from the neuroimaging lab the quest decision making is like visualizing the final chapter of one's own biography so it makes sense that sharing biographical stories of other individuals is one of the most powerful interventions so that's the first suggestion telling life stories of donors who will live beyond their death through their bequests giving the second suggestion relates to the second finding and this is the idea of reminding donors of life story connections of friends or family with the charity or cause and then to provide tribute request opportunities we know that the emotion and memory associated with a living or deceased loved one is stronger than that associated with the charity by itself so what we wanted to explore is is it possible to attach that emotion and memory of the family member or friend to a cause that represents them now this is not a new idea going back to some of Clare outlays research when people are interviewed about why they included different charities and this is from the UK so the organisations will be slightly different we see that people make reference often to family member connections here's a quote there's the youth hostel associations where my wife and I met my father died of cancer and so I've supported them ever since he died or from another one reason I've select Help the Aged it was after my mother died and I just thought she's been in a care home for probably three or four years and I wanted to help the elderly have also supported things like cancer research because people I I've known have died in an animal charity as well I had a couple of cats so how did we test this well in those previous 4,500 individuals who are taking this survey we after they either didn't receive a marketing message or they received whatever marketing message they had then we asked them whether they had in some cases deceased or in other cases living friend or family member who would have appreciated their support of a particular kind of nonprofit and gave them some examples such as a cancer research organization such as American Cancer Society MD Anderson and so forth if so please state your relationship to them and write at least 25 words describing their interest in our connection with the cause and then we asked them the bequests question again except now it's slightly different it was their willingness to leave a bequest gift honoring a deceased friend or family member so this is a tribute or honoring gift so the question is did that change the results and the answer is yes it changed it and it changed it dramatically so so what we're looking at here is the increase in their willingness to leave a charitable bequest when they had a when they were reminded of a friend or family member connection so what we see is a strong result overall and an even stronger result for the older participants who are filling out this survey now these numbers are very important because if you remember with the previous life story messages we were able to get that gap down to a four or six point gap now when we add to those individuals these reminders for those who had friends or family member connection we were actually able to completely eliminate the bequest versus giving intention gap meaning that people had a higher to leave this kind of a quest than their initial willingness to leave a gift to the charity now I say short side note here this is an intervention that worked great with the quest intentions it didn't work that great with intentions to leave a current memorial or tribute gift so do keep that in mind so how do we implement these kind of results well I want to borrow something from my friend Phyllis Friedman who is president of smart giving and this is how she's incorporated in some of the response cards for the quest offerings and that's just the idea of if they have included a gift to give the opportunity to say that that the quest gift is in honor of or in memory of someone it's a no-cost way to remind people that they can make these kinds of gifts and may give a good reason for why they may want to reveal it ahead of time so that the charity knows that it is a tribute or a memorial gift so that's the second suggestion to remind donors of life story connections with friends or family member with the charity or caused to provide tribute requests opportunities let's go to the third suggestion and this is the idea of communicating the quest information through mixed packaging now before we get into this I want you to understand that what I am talking about here is when you are communicating to a broad audience this is an audience that has not been pre-qualified that is still going to be in that avoidance stage as most people are until they get to the stage of wanting to actually engage in planning so if we are trying to communicate with a widespread audience we have to realize that for many people bequests decision-making is emotionally aversive when we go out and present something like a seminar on estate planning we see nothing aversive about that but here's the difference when I am presenting a seminar about as day planning I am talking about your death which doesn't bother me all that much but for people going to an estate planning seminar it is a seminar about their death which we know is generally aversive so how do we deal with avoiding this kind of avoidance response to the fact that we're talking about a death related topic well I want to suggest that we can do that by using mixed packaging if we realize that the topic is subconsciously aversive we may consider combining or masking it with more attractive topics to sidestep the initial avoidance response this is the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down well how might that work if we're going for a general broad audience well perhaps instead of a seminar on charitable estate planning we'd want to do a seminar on stories from the front lines the cause and people who make it happen where we talk about stories about the nonprofit work but also the support of Planned Giving donors who have made that work possible and some examples of how they did that perhaps instead of doing a standard it's to a seminar on charitable estate planning we could do a seminar on new new ways to save more taxes when you give not that taxes is the major motivation for our people but it is not an offensive topic it is not one that's going to respond with avoidance and we can then encompass a wide range of planned giving topics including estate planning and we've income qualified our audience fairly well the idea here is if we engage in mixed messaging and we manage avoidance we may put these messages in general interest donor publications but we might not do a donor wide mailing labeled as estate planning unless we're mailing to people who have been qualified in such a way that we already think they're passed the avoidance level what's a good way to do this well one approach is to use a broad survey to both learn and to teach how might you do that well let's say for example that this is for a university we might have a serve that includes questions such as you know which of the following areas of the nonprofit do you consider to be the most important so that you can find out what people care about and then you can also within that context convey some information so for example here I've used the example where you aware that for those over age 55 donating the future inheritance rights to your home or farmland creates an immediate income tax deduction of 70% or more and this of course is the is the remainder interest in home or farmland if your organization happen to be supporting that or at that particular time but of course you can include any kind of information in here that was relevant to your context when we think about charitable bequests decision-making I think it is important to break it down as a three step process the first stage and the stage that most people are in all of the time is the I don't want to think about it stage now of course what we want to do is we want to move people from I don't want to think about it too yes and here the mixed packaging idea presents information in non death related contexts but it turns out that in charitable estate planning moving people to yes is not the biggest hurdle the biggest hurdle is moving people from yes to now because now has that high death related sense to why do I need to plan now that's the real question why now if I am NOT going to die tomorrow why not deal with all of this unpleasantness later now I will tell you that you may be very well tempted to answer the question of why now with a comment like this well you might get hit by a truck tomorrow now we know that's true but I can tell you that everything from the experimental psychology results suggests to us that this is a bad argument people will resist acting in response to this argument because this is an argument that depends upon their own personal mortality and you're gonna run up against the avoidance response so what do we do to move people from yes to now without hitting that avoidance response I want to suggest is coming up with a creative way to attach a non-death related negative outcome to planning later or if you'd like to frame it a positive outcome to planning now something that's non death related well what could this look like well maybe we have a matching grant that will pay 10% of planned bequest up to $10,000 per donor signed before November 1st that's a motivation because if you do it later there's going to be no match and if you already have a donor who is already intending to give a significant amount of money it shouldn't take too much convincing to give have them give it to the organization and this challenge kind of framework or perhaps simply our campaign to reach a hundred plan bequest ends in three months won't you consider joining these others so if they do it later then the issue is they're going to be left out of the group now you can get creative here you can offer whatever it is for anyone who signs up for an appointment tonight only as long as it's attached to immediate action but it's an opportunity that you lose for later action so for example I use when I used to give seminars there would be an opportunity for a free consultation or a free simple will but only if you signed up on the night of the presentation it was not an ongoing opportunity because we had to motivate action for now how else might you motivate action in a non death related context well you might say the 7520 rates went up so if you don't sign the remainder interest deed in the next 30 days your deduction is going to drop so if you do it later you're going to get a lower deduction or we can flip that around and say the 7520 rates went down and if you don't fund the CRT or a charitable gift annuity in the next 30 days then your deduction is going to drop so whether they go up or they go down if it gives us a reason to attach a negative outcome to doing something later we can move forward that process and moving forward that process may be something as simple as creating an appointment okay so it looks like we're set up for a follow-up appointment to review things on March 6 so there's the social stigma if we come back on March 6 and you haven't done anything or you have to cancel the appointment that's the social stigma that I have to deal with if I do it later so we're attaching that negative outcome to planning later which is exactly what we want to do maybe we just want to convince people that they're going to be a bad example for others people really take their cue from leaders like you your action would motivate many of them to act we might even do this in terms of SIA filling out a commitment to plan card this is the idea of say for example to show a strong leadership commitment and this plan giving push we want to announce a hundred percent participation for whatever the group is by the fall banquet can we count you in and then people can checkmark I commit to an estate plan with a gift of the organization within six months yes no our already completed why do we do it this way well that within six months means that it's not going to be all that offensive because I'm avoiding it and yeah I'll get to it later that's not a problem now that commitment by itself won't do anything to get people to act but what it does do is it gives you the opportunity to come back and say how's it going can I check to see how the process has been going okay so that's the third suggestion the fourth suggestion that I want to make to you in the last one today is to consider providing bequest giving opportunities with permanence again if we go back to the psychological model permanence is psychologically attractive people are looking for something reflecting the person's life story their community and values something that will live beyond them I want to share with you some results from that study that we did with the 4500 respondents in those surveys we gave people an opportunity to answer whether they would prefer their gift to be immediately spent to advance the cause of the charity or to establish a permanent fund and what we found was that for those who expressed a preference difference they by more than a two-to-one margin wanted more perm for bequests guests and for current gifts we see this in another piece of research that I think is really interesting in this research the same charitable organization was described in two different ways to different groups either as meeting the immediate needs of the people or as creating lasting improvements that would benefit people in the future and the individuals who were participating had the chance to win $1,000 one of them would win $1,000 and they would act they were asked would you be willing to pre commit some of those winnings to this charity in case you happen to win and it turns out that they were more willing to give to the immediate focused charity in the normal group but the other group was actually reminded of their death went through mortality salience first and that group the results flipped and they were more willing to give to the permanent focused charities this may be part of the reason why we see organizational age can help both its perceived stability and the donor age profile in terms of what percentage of income comes from the quest giving if you're working for an organization that is newer or less stable perhaps consider marketing permanent funds that are managed by a large financial financial institution or a large Community Foundation to try to borrow those feelings of strength and stability and then finally I want you to think about this idea and that's the idea of considering developing permanent giving opportunities for the mid-level bequests donors now people who are high-level donors they can readily think of ways that they could leave a gift that would have a permanent impact whether it's building a building or doing something else that's a very large but I want to be able to expand that to incorporate more mid-level donors and give them opportunities in a bequest context to make permanent gifts now whatever your organization is you have to think through what that might look like that might be scholarships or lectureships or annual performances or Perpetual child sponsorship or for petrol rescue pet sponsorship memorial wall of Heroes whatever that that permanent opportunity is and I would even suggest limiting this opportunity just to legacy donors to emphasize the specialness of it and to avoid pulling from current giving the reason we want to emphasize this with legacy donors is that we see a strong preference for permanent opportunities having a permanent impact when it comes to bequest charitable giving that we don't see with current charitable giving so that's the last suggestion on how to use the framework and that is to provide request giving opportunities with permanence so within this framework I want to suggest to you that there are a couple of ways that you can use it yes I think the suggestions that I've given to you are ones that have been borne out by the research results that are effective now I will tell you that what we're doing right now is we're scanning people who have been reminded of this friend and family member connection under the tribute request to understand why is it that it's making such a big difference and how does the brain think about it differently so perhaps look forward to in the spring seeing the results from that when all of the data analysis is done but I think it's useful if we keep in mind those four core ideas that we have a deeper understanding and a deeper framework of how these decisions are made because if we have that deeper framework and understanding then you can take that information and apply it to your situation and come up with your own unique situations and responses that work for your situation but take advantage of understanding those underlying processes and how that works so I'm out of time at this point I'll turn it back over and see if there have been any questions and then since I can't see the questions I think those will be shared with me and we can go from there so I'll stop here for a moment and see if there's any questions thanks so much Russell we have had some questions submitted and thank you to those who sent them in one of the first questions that came in was someone asking if you have any suggestions for presenting an opportunity for Planned Giving within a comprehensive campaign with either annual and/or special gifts so the what I would suggest is within the context of a of a comprehensive campaign if you are communicating to an audience that's not pre-qualified and by pre-qualified I mean these are not people who have checked the box and said yes I'm interested in estate planning now help me with it okay if we're just dealing with the general audience then the nature of our message is one that needs to take into account this tendency to avoid this kind of information so I think you want to mix it together with other things you don't have to have a communication that's completely focused just on estate planning it can be as part of the overall campaign there's a lot of different ways that we're using to accomplish our campaign goals and just putting that in as a piece so you sort of get in with the quick reminder putting it in the consciousness of people and then being able to follow up with individuals out of at a later point one other approach is to consider having a deadline having a goal for a certain number of new charitable bequests commitments so that you can also as your reporting progress for the campaign as a whole you can report progress to let's say you have a goal of a hundred new request commitments you can report pot towards that goal at the same time you could have a a celebration dinner at the end for those who have participated in it and it gives you a reason when you are going out to talk to donors it gives you a reason to bring this topic up you can simply say we're also going through this campaign we're about halfway through our goal of having a hundred new charitable bequest gifts that are planned and if we can reach this goal by January fur then the plan is to have you know the the celebration dinner or whatever and you know if you would be interested in participating in that let me know so it's it's basically a reason it's a pre Texas it's an excuse but it works well as some of the other campaign goals that you can attract and you can communicate how you're doing in your progress because by communicating how you're doing in your progress towards that goal you're communicating the idea that that this is something that people should think about and most importantly they should think about it before the deadline I've got to put a deadline on that on that piece of the campaign as you have with all other pieces of the campaign great I another question that came in was do printed lists of Legacy Society members in publications have an impact on persuading others to leave plant gifts I have not tested that so I don't know the answer to that I think that in general it's a positive thing obviously what we got the biggest response from is sharing the life stories of other people who had made that kind of a commitment now in that case you're just listing the names it would seem to me that that should have a positive effect because of course we're saying look here's other people who have made this this kind of a commitment this kind of decision but given that we know that the decision-making process is one of visualized autobiography I've got to believe that the effect is going to be even more powerful if in addition to that list you're gonna do a couple paragraphs of someone who's willing to share their story of why they are giving or to share the story of how that gift that they have planned will continue to make an impact long after they're gone so I think it's a good idea I haven't tested it I think it would be an even better idea if you combined it with even brief biographies or stories of people who had made those kinds of commitments and in particular emphasizing how those gifts would continue to have an effect after their death so that's the polic immortality side of it okay wonderful and I think we have time for one more question here when a potential donor is engaged in a discussion about the quest giving through your sugar coating approach wouldn't the initial avoidance reaction resurface later when more literal discussions about the quest itself are raised yeah I mean I absolutely I think it's kind of this issue that it can come back up again so when do we have situations where it doesn't come back well we have situations it doesn't come back if if avoidance isn't an option so for example if someone is in a context where you know they've maybe just had somebody die recently or they've had a recent diagnosis with that with an illness they want to get it done