Writing a Will
(Added 3/12/2014)
We have been approached by a company that has offered to help us help our donors write their own will online. While the sales pitch is compelling – too many people put this off, and no one can leave a bequest to us without a will – the idea seems a little . . . off. I've always been told that we should direct our donors and prospects to an attorney. In addition, we've established a program where we reach out to advisors in our area to remind them that some of their clients might want to be charitably minded in their estate plans, particularly as it pertains to including us in their will. Wouldn't promoting online will-writing by-pass a legitimate process? The idea would be for our donors who go to our website to be linked over to the company's site where a bequest reminder would be included.
In our world, we've been trained to think of almost anything offered by a for-profit provider as being a little . . . off. What's in it for them? What dark-side motive do they have? Clearly, they must be trying to take advantage of us, trying to get their hands on our donors. Such an alliance would violate our trust with them while at the same time promoting something that's, on balance, bad. Let's be honest here: That's what goes on in at least some of our minds.
As part of better understanding that many service and product providers are not attacking us with nakedly greedy impulses, we know that some people and organizations that come to us feel right: money managers, seminar sponsors, and the software providers of calculations come to mind. The differentiating aspect seems to be how close others want to get to our donors. The idea you write about could well fit into that category.
A 2007 study showed that about 55 percent of adult Americans have not written a will – and there's little reason to think things have changed in the last several years – so clearly there is a benefit when a company promotes the writing of a will, even if it's online and by-passes an attorney's input. Still, when it comes to specific provisions, a professional skilled in the minutiae of estate planning will better prepare your donor to consider a bequest. The online will providers seem to be more concerned with reporting relatively shallow matters – gathering data on the number of people who signed up, their ages, and their states of domicile; things like that – than with helping you build relationships. (That's just as well, when you think about it, because any outsider that purports to help you strengthen the cord between you and your donors should be suspect.) The sales language usually does not acknowledge that a charity has a sacred bond with its donors, a bond that is not for sale.
I applaud a for-profit organization whose goal is to get more people to create a will, and have no problem with the money-earning aspect of that effort. But, as with bad insurance policy comes-ons (and yes, there are some good ones), this idea seems to be far too tilted to provide more benefits to the company than to the charity. As inefficient as the process now is, the better decision – one that seems less "off" – when trying to get people to include you in their estate plans, is still to continue reaching out to advisors and reminding people in your communications – whether in print, on your website or in your emails, or even in your social media – to create a will by visiting an attorney, and asking the attorney about including your organization in those plans.