By: Melissa Bank Stepno, President & CEO
We’ve all heard stories like this one: a low dollar annual donor leaves a multi-million gift to a nonprofit in their bequest.
Or, a longtime volunteer who never made a financial donation surprises everyone by designating the organization as a beneficiary of a seven-figure retirement account.
Or, in one real-life example, Ronald Read, a 92-year-old retired janitor and gas station attendant who left a combined $6 million to his local library and the local hospital where he enjoyed breakfast nearly every day. At the time, the bequests were the largest gifts that the Brooks Memorial Library and Brattleboro Memorial Hospital, both in Read’s VT community, had ever received.
Or, in another real-life example, Elizabeth Verdow, a former art teacher who left the Detroit Institute of Arts an unexpected $1.7 million bequest.
How does this happen?
For one: frugality, frequently paired with good investments. In the case of Read, he was known to use safety pins to hold his winter coat together, yet his stock portfolio included blue-chip companies such as Procter & Gamble, Dow Chemical and J.M. Smuckers.
For another: a long-term deep commitment and connection to the nonprofit(s) that ultimately benefited from the gifts. In the case of Verdow, she volunteered at the museum for more than 19 years!
In fact, most people have greater philanthropic capacity in their estate than they do during their lifetime. From a planned giving perspective, that makes sense: once living expenses are no longer part of the equation, all assets will ultimately be distributed somewhere.
This is true in my own household. During our estate planning process, our attorney walked us through what our net worth would look like at the end of our lives. The exercise made something very clear: assets that are unavailable while we’re living can become significant charitable opportunities later.
For us, the biggest example is our home. Like many families, much of our net worth is tied up in home equity, an asset we need while we’re alive because it provides shelter. If we sold the house today, we’d still need the proceeds for another place to live. But once we die, that need disappears, and the equity can be turned into cash for charitable giving. Add life insurance, retirement assets, or other long-term holdings, and the potential becomes much easier to see.
This may sound more personal than some of my posts, but it reflects the reality many households, and by extension, donors share. And it helps explain why someone who appears to have modest giving capacity today may still be capable of making an extraordinary legacy gift.
So, what should prospect researchers and frontline fundraisers do with stories like these beyond feeling that boost of endorphins from a feel-good story and then filing them under “anomaly” that could never happen to our own organization?
Here are a few takeaways for prospect researchers and frontline fundraisers:
- Don’t let “low annual giving” equal “low capacity.” Small gifts can be an inclination and values signal, not a wealth or capacity signal. Use wealth screenings, models, and other prospect research techniques to determine potential capacity holistically, not just focused on near term major giving.
- Treat longevity as a form of wealth. Tenure matters. Years of volunteering, decades of membership, recurring attendance, and consistent engagement often predict inclusion in an estate plan, even when cash giving is non-existent or modest. Perhaps these types of prospects might not be appropriate for a major gift portfolio without accompanying wealth data, but they could be perfect candidates for a planned giving portfolio.
- Code and quantify commitment in your data. Capture and score non-gift behaviors (volunteer shifts, committee roles, program participation, advocacy actions) into an engagement score that can sit alongside financial giving capacity. Make “engagement history” easy for development team members to see at a glance.
- Look for the “frugal but capable” profile. Frugality can often mask capacity. As I noted in a previous blog post: “the way people present themselves, with or without materialistic luxuries, could have very little to do with their philanthropic capacity.” While frontline fundraisers may be more likely than researchers to notice these cues, both should treat them as part of a broader, more holistic assessment of prospect capacity.
- Understand the assets that commonly become bequests. For many households, the largest eventual charitable opportunity is tied to assets that aren’t being used for day-to-day spending, including things like home equity, retirement accounts, life insurance, appreciated securities, and even the presence of a donor advised fund.
- Normalize legacy conversations early—and make them mission-first. Fundraisers can use simple language (“Have you ever considered a gift in your will?”) and connect it to impact. The goal is to open up a path for conversation, not to secure an immediate commitment.
- Honor and steward legacy intent like a major gift. Volunteers and long-time supporters who include your organization in their plans – in fact, anyone who includes your organization in their estate plans – should receive consistent recognition and relationship-building, because the decision is emotional and identity-based, not transactional.
The real lesson in these stories isn’t just a surprise gift. Rather, it’s the missed opportunity to recognize a donor’s intent while they’re still here. As the Planned Giving Officer at the Detroit Institute of Arts reflected: “If there’s anything bittersweet about [Verdow’s bequest], it’s that we were never able to thank her and tell her how much this means to us.”
Bottom line: when you look beyond immediate wealth capacity indicators for documented engagement and commitment signals, you’ll surface more “quiet legacy” prospects, and you’ll be ready when the surprise gift isn’t a surprise anymore.
