FAQs

Absolutely. US seniors use the Internet more than their younger counterparts and are the fastest-growing sector of the computer-purchasing public. They also possess the majority of the wealth in the US and therefore represent your main market. As they migrate to the Internet, you should be there to meet them.

To learn more, read Seniors and the Online Revolution. (PDF; opens in new window.)

The Internet is an exciting medium that engages visitors to explore and learn. Seniors are embracing it as a trusted source of information and communication. Even more compelling: for many in the generation of donors coming after today’s seniors, if the information does not exist online, it does not exist, period. When prospects visit your planned giving site, it’s on their own time, when they are most receptive to learning about creative ways to support you. A planned giving website is also an excellent medium to showcase your donors.

As your prospects become increasingly web-proficient, you need to take advantage of the tool that can extend your marketing reach, increase your gift activity, and help you close more and larger gifts.

Don’t put off the benefits of marketing to your most motivated prospects. Put your planned giving website up now, and incorporate it into your overall fundraising site when that’s ready to go live. Having a presence on the Internet gives your organization exposure in a medium that is playing an increasing role in the daily life of your prospects.

Not really: We do 90% of the work — allowing you concentrate on what you do best (raising money). We only ask you to answer a short (3- to 6-minute) questionnaire about the types of gifts you accept, and to provide donor stories. If you don’t even have time to create the stories in-house, we can put you in touch with professionals who can write them for you. Just ask us. We make this process as simple and painless as possible for you.

That’s because they want to make sure your institutional identity is maintained. It’s their job to be concerned, but they don’t have to worry when you work with VirtualGiving.Com.

We follow your exact graphic standards and make sure we do not compromise your institutional identity. We even consult with your marketing team as necessary. Navigating from your website to the planned giving pages and back is guaranteed to be seamless. Period.

Prices start at $1,495 per year, which includes a comprehensive, industry-leading planned giving website. That works out to just about $4.10/day — less than a Grande Café Latte from Starbucks. And we offer flexible payment terms — just ask.

Thanks, we think it’s an impressive list, too. We do showcase many of the leading non-profits in the nation.

Half of our clients, however, are small to medium sized nonprofits. All told, our clients have budgets ranging from less than $1 million to over $2 billion a year. We get to know every client’s needs and preferences personally, and we maintain vigilant quality control across the board. Read our testimonials.

It depends on how much information you want on your website. As you move from our Basic Level to the Advanced and to the Pro Plus, you gain more content and more interactive features.

• If you need a basic marketing tool, our Basic level will do the job well.
• If you’d like a little more interactivity, go with the Advanced level.
• If you need to educate and engage sophisticated prospects and their advisors, the Pro Plus level is the way to go. The Pro Plus features detailed gift descriptions that you can email to prospects for instant follow-up (instead of mailing expensive brochures). Interactivity? Pro Plus is more engaging than any other website you can buy commercially or develop in-house.

So ask yourself: What do you want to use your planned giving website for? Marketing? Educating prospects? Reaching out to financial advisors? Disseminating information by sending out links? Providing prospects with an interactive guide to decision-making?

Each nonprofit has its own goals. We recommend you make your selection based on your business requirements and mission, rather than price.

If you will be finishing your redesign in a few weeks or months, we’ll hold off on the graphics until your new site is completed. However, we will develop the planned giving content now. If completion of your new design is a little farther up the road, we can set up your site now, and update all the graphics later for a one-time fee of $500.

Search engine registration should be on your list, but it shouldn’t be your top priority. Most people do not know how to search the Internet proficiently, and a general search term like “planned giving” can easily locate tens of thousands of pages, many of them irrelevant to your prospects. If someone types in “planned giving at [your organization’s name]” your organization will very likely show up as #1 in a Google search. But prospects rarely do this.

We have consistently found that prospects go to planned giving pages through an advertised URL rather than a search engine.

You can learn more about this subject in Understanding Your Web Statitics.

Less than three weeks from the date we get your go-ahead. Arrangements can be made if you have a special deadline to meet.

Donor stories motivate others to give, and generate second-time gifts. Imagine the emotional impact of a heartfelt story featuring a donor who was able to make a significant gift without affecting his or her finances! Or imagine showcasing a donor who supported your mission while at the same time gaining significant financial or tax benefits. A real-life story illustrates the effectiveness of planned giving in ways that technical gift detail never can.

Our websites give you the flexibility to showcase your own donors, their own stories, and their reasons for supporting you. We urge you to take advantage of this.

Why use a composite story when you can feature a real-life donor with an original story to tell? We’ve seen some of the same stories on over 400 planned giving websites. We’ve also seen some of the same faces from website donor portraits advertising healthcare products on billboards. (Either there are some VERY busy and generous donors out there, or someone is using stock photography and canned stories!)

97 out of every 100 clients post their own donor profiles online, but if you are in a bind, we do have canned stories you can use temporarily.

We advise that you write your donor stories. Why? Because no one knows your donors better than you do. Alternatively, we can provide numerous pre-written samples that you can copy, revise, and customize. Chances are you have numerous donor stories waiting in your files right now.

We also provide a donor story brainstorming sheet that will help you gather and organize information about your donor.

The quickest and most accurate way is via email. Send us a photo (any format) by attaching it to the story in the email message. You can also submit a previously published story in a PDF format. We’re flexible.

No limit. No other fee. Period.

You can email us comments or detailed instructions. You can also print out the pages, annotate them, and fax them back. Whatever works best for you.

But we advise caution in completely re-drafting our copy. Our gift descriptions, for example, are tried, tested, and true. They are web centric and get to the point quickly. Why roll the dice with new, home-made copy when we provide you with solid content out of the box?

Also, remember that although all of our planned giving websites are personalized to your organization, some of the language text on certain pages (for example, gift plans) can’t be altered except on the Pro Plus. Please contact us for details.

All VirtualGiving websites are fully personalized for your organization. This means they seamlessly maintain your institutional identity, from your organization’s name and its logos to your gift policy details (age and gift minimums, etc.), look and feel, and more.

We also offer further degrees of customization depending on the website product you choose:

• Our Pro Plus level, for example, allows you complete freedom to tweak the language on all of its pages, including gift plan details.
• Tweaking is more limited on our Basic and Advanced level websites, but they are intended to be ready-to-go right out of the box for clients who want world-class web-presence in a hurry, with minimum hassle.

Yes. Whether it’s a welcoming article or a gift description unique to your institution, you are welcome to do so at no additional fee.

We do. We ask you to give us three days, but if it’s a rush, just let us know. We’ve done minor updates in as little as 30 minutes.

Just email us the copy and we’ll upload it at no charge. You can also put us in touch with your consultant; we will be happy to work with her.

Yes, we make any tax-law updates as needed, so you don’t have to worry that your site is out-of-date. We also stay current with changes in the rates that affect life-income gift calculations. It’s part of our ongoing commitment to deliver the most complete and accurate websites possible. (Some vendors’ websites actually omit changeable rates so they can avoid the effort required to maintain accuracy!)

As an option, we offer the best planned giving calculators in the business, our proprietary DonorCalcs™. You just can't get more donor-centric or easier to use. Unlike other calculators, DonorCalcs™ are available right on your website — that means no pop-ups or redirects to confuse the prospect. DonorCalcs™ are branded with your organization's name and logo. And every field in the calculator offers a contextual help menu to assist the user.

Also as an option our sites can provide a portal to the gift calculator of your choice (PG Calc, Crescendo, PhilanthroTech, etc.). If you choose one of the other vendors, we work with them, set everything up, and have them invoice you directly.

Note that not all nonprofits wish to have a planned giving calculator online.

They’re not calculators. They’re our proprietary, interactive gift-decision modules. They recommend a gift type — they do not calculate payouts. Used in conjunction with a gift calculator they make your website more engaging and useful for prospects.

Yes, and many charities are encouraging them to do so in their annual giving programs.

Several firms (such as Asset Stream), provide tools, systems, and support for online transfers. VirtualGiving.Com can incorporate these tools on your website, specifically on the pages titled "Gifts of Appreciated Securities."

We constantly check for updates and technology changes that we can implement to ensure our server is safe and secure from hackers, spam, viruses, etc. We are confident your IT department will be satisfied with our practices. Read our Technology page for more information.

Not at all. It’s very easy to create a domain on our server. Creating a DNS record of your domain takes about 2 minutes on our end (though it can take approximately 24 hours for DNS registration to complete with other servers on the internet). We have created a back-end manager to facilitate setup of the variable information on the webpages and transfer of the files. Total time here is about 10 minutes. Once the transfer is complete, we do what’s necessary to further tailor the site to your needs. All in all, the process is very quick and simple.

The actual site usually takes less than 3 weeks from when we get your go-ahead to a first draft, and then perhaps 2 or 3 additional weeks to go live depending on changes you make to the content and the acceptance process on your end.

If it’s available, yes. We will gladly register it for you for a nominal fee. Our standard practice, however, is to set up a special link (e.g. www.YourName.org/giving) from your institution to one of our sub-domains. We find such links to be easier for your prospects to remember.

We run a Red Hat server that utilizes Apache web services, PHP, and MySql. Our hardware is upgraded regularly. As a backup we utilize Raid and additional tape backup. Our system is behind a 100% Cisco Infrastructure that ensures security as well as reliability.

More information: Technology.

We test every aspect of your site intensively before we launch it. We test with our email address and yours to ensure it is properly working. You will receive a preliminary email that lets you know when we have tested the submission form. Did I mention we test your web site intensively? If you have not received an email in a while and are concerned that there may be an error, let us know. We also generate a report for you that shows if the page that submits the email has been active or not.

Just as a webpage will look slightly different depending on whether you view it on a Mac or a PC platform, different browsers will render the same site slightly differently as well. When the site is designed by experienced professionals like those at VirtualGiving.Com, it will be fully functional in all browsers and on both Macs and PCs. The layout of your site may look slightly different, but all the information will be visible. We test our sites in the major browsers before going live to make sure everything works.

We give you a special link where you can see your number of visitors as often as you wish. We also send you a report outlining this data on a quarterly basis.

We ask you to remember, though, that you should be focusing on marketing and not hits.

This subject is worth exploring more deeply, and we recommend you learn more about web hits.

Yes. We just need their email addresses. We can add as many people as you wish.

First of all, it is not technically possible to capture visitors’ email addresses “secretly.” But even if it was possible, the answer would be “No.” Your prospects demand that their privacy be respected. Stealth capture of their addresses would seriously risk alienating them. And that’s something you don’t want to do. Read more about this subject here.

Yes, and it’s essential to make them comfortable enough to spend time exploring your website. Tell them that they are not being monitored, and mean it. (We can back you up by posting a friendly but explicit privacy notice on your site.)

If you mean email blasts announcing events (such as a legacy society event day), sure.

But if you mean automated email blasts on planned giving topics, definitely not.

We’re often asked why we do not provide automated weekly email blasts like other vendors. Our answer is simple: they don’t work — in fact, they alienate prospects. More information here.

By the way, don’t forget to get your announcements included on your organization’s general email blasts. Hitch a ride on whatever other vectors are available to you — even print!

We can't overstate the importance of effective prospect identification in successful planned giving marketing. It doesn't matter how good your messaging is if the wrong people are reading it! That's why if you want the biggest bang for your marketing buck, you need to extract the best from your prospect lists to identify your most likely future — and repeat — donors.

A simple and effective approach is to evaluate your list based on donor loyalty. Find the individuals who have given most often over the last seven years — regardless of gift size — and focus on them. Because your most loyal donors make your best planned gift prospects.

A more effective donor identification tool is PGFinder™ by The Planned Giving Company. This proprietary tool achieves 91% accuracy, and we recommend it. Here is more information.

Effective marketing depends on reaching out to your prospects through a balanced blend of vectors, and print marketing/direct mail can play an important role in that effort.

Bear in mind, however, that planned giving has changed over the years, and so has your constituency. What worked in the 1960s is dinosaur marketing today. So if you want to engage your prospects effectively — and avoid boring them and making them tune you out — you need up-to-date tactics, tools, and know-how.

That's why we recommend The Planned Giving Company. They know print media and direct mail. And they're results-oriented — not only in today's market, but tomorrow's as well. Here is more information.

E-blasts are huge electronic mailings that carry a single message to a list of recipients. E-blasts are very popular because they are comparatively cheap and easy. But like any other form of marketing, an e-blast is only as good as the mailing list it goes to, and the appeal of the message it brings.

If you're considering e-blasts, we recommend you go with a vendor who can ensure that you're getting the highest return on your investment (not to mention not alienating your prospects in the process!).

We think the best vendor in this case is The Planned Giving Company. They offer integrated e-blast services that get the job done right. Here is more information.