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Attracting Bequests
The idea of Australian community groups going out of their way to attract bequests is, in many ways, still in its infancy.
While a number of local organisations are growing the income they attract from bequests, Australian efforts are dwarfed by efforts of the American non-profit scene - where many cultural, educational and social traditions are firmly founded on bequests.
Groups thinking about going down this path should think about how they want to sit on the spectrum of bequest-related activities, running from low investment, low probability strategies to high investment, high workload planned giving campaigns.
The Basics
Some of the more basic ways you can start are:
Be ready
Make sure your group is ready - take your time and have your board think about what resources you might need, any professionals you might need to get in touch with for guidance, etc.
Tell people
The first, most important thing you need to do is to tell the people closest to your group that you are interested in bequests. People are unlikely to leave money in their will to a group or organisation that they didn't have respect for - or contact with - during their life.
Think about how many people have had contact with, benefited from or just enjoyed being a part of your organisation - they may like to give back. If they don't know they can give to your organisation through a bequest, then their money will go elsewhere.
Some of the ways you can get the word out include:
- Adding information on your web page.
- Inserting an article or small piece in your regular newsletter.
- Dedicating a page of your annual report to the subject.
- Offering information in a mail-out.
Tell them the difference the money could make
It is vital that you not only tell people that you value and welcome bequests, but also how those bequests can make a difference.
There are a number of ways you can do this, including:
- Placing an article in your newsletter telling recipients about a bequest that was left to your organisation (or a similar organisation), and how they could do the same.
- Quantifying exactly what you were able to do with the money left from various bequests - for example, what a $1000 bequest could help you do.
Provide testimonials
Once your campaign has started rolling, ask those who have signed up to leave a bequest to your group to outline why and how they have done so (publicly is best but anonymous is OK too). Use this information to form the basis of articles and web content.
Ask
Yes, asking for bequests might not be easy; no-one likes talking about death, wills, estates and all those types of things.
But think of it as a way of allowing people to make a difference to a group or a cause they believe in. You're asking them for help, yes, but you're also offering them something in return.
Bequests for mental health consumer groups
There is little doubt that in the mental health area the most successful fundraising organisations also attract the majority of bequests.
If consumer groups want to 'break into this market' it will involve becoming a little more savvy about how to gain the necessary public profile.
This may be hard, particularly given the continuing discrimination against consumers, which includes both real and imagined beliefs that such groups may find it difficult to manage major donations such as bequests.
However, attracting bequests is still possible.
- Act local. Try and increase the profile of your group or organisation in your local area if you are a local group. Use local papers to tell your community about your group, your achievements, your events - both small and large. Think about the people who are already involved with your group, and their friends and family.
- Small is beautiful. Often when we think about bequests we think about huge amounts of money, but this doesn't need to be the case. Even a few hundred or few thousand dollars could be useful to your group. Make sure people know that not only wealthy people are eligible to give a bequest.
- Emphasise the positives. Plan activities in your local shopping precinct for Mental Health Week, put on concerts or art displays, stage public talks about experiencing mental illness, find high-profile people in your local community to vouch for your integrity as an authentic, grassroots organisation. Put some real effort into designing a pamphlet to explain why bequests to grassroots organisations might be able to do more good for more people in the local area than bequests to large organisations.
- Keep your own internal dilemmas and disagreements 'in house'. Your group will not attract funding and bequests if the local community believes you are divided, bitter or continually angry with the world and with each other. All the passion in the world will not undo the damage of an ugly community profile.
- Be realistic. Most grassroots consumer groups and organisations in mental health have very little funding. One of the restraints of insufficient funding is that there is usually few, if any, paid staff. Organisers are often over-stretched. Stress and friction are very time-consuming for consumer groups, so don't over-reach. If your group does not have the energy for bequests right now, leave the idea on the back burner for the time being. Remember, a bungled first effort could tarnish your group's name for several years.
- Remember why you're here. Mental health consumer groups exist for self help and self advocacy. Even though we use different language to name our experiences, consumer perspective implies that we have had experiences that have been named abnormally bad, mad or sad. The institutions that have been created around these ways of being are what bring us together but our group identity also means that members are susceptible to periods of time when they need to pull back or pull out of the group and handball their responsibilities to someone else. It is imperative that your group is constantly vigilant about this reality as it affects what groups can and can not take on. Taking on the administration, the legal requirements and the reporting requirements of administering bequests may sometimes be beyond your group's capacity and these limitations must be realistically built in to all planning.
