How to Build a Planned Giving Program Before the Baby Boom Bequests Pass You By
Every day, approximately 6,000 Baby Boomers die in the United States. Most of them have wealth their favorite causes will never see. This isn’t because they don’t want to give, but because no one asked them to think about it. That gap between donor intent and realized gifts is one of the most expensive missed opportunities in the nonprofit sector, and it is happening right now.
The numbers are staggering. Projects from 2024 to 2048 estimate that $123.7 trillion of wealth will transfer between generations, with nearly two-thirds of that coming from Baby Boomers. The most commonly cited figure for charitable giving within that transfer is $11.9 trillion flowing to nonprofits by 2045.
For context, total charitable giving in the United States reached $592.5 billion in 2024, according to Giving USA 2025. Bequests alone accounted for $45.84 billion of that total, which is roughly 8% of all giving. When you multiply that across two decades of aging Boomers, you begin to understand what is at stake.
The organizations that position themselves now for planned giving will be the ones that benefit. Here is how to get there.
Why Baby Boomers Are the Donors You Cannot Afford to Ignore
Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, are currently responsible for approximately 43% of all charitable giving in the United States. Their average household net worth sits between $970,000 and $1.2 million, reflecting decades of wealth built through real estate appreciation, equity markets, and two-income households. As the Chronicle of Philanthropy notes, they are the first generation in which dual-income households were the norm, and they had fewer children than prior generations. These are both factors that increase what tends to flow toward charitable causes.
Nearly 4.2 million Americans will turn 65 this year alone, the high point of what some demographers call Peak 65. This is not a slow demographic shift. It is a rolling wave of estate planning conversations happening in attorneys’ offices and financial planning sessions across the country. These are conversations your organization could be part of if your fundraisers are prepared.
What motivates Boomers to give and to give significantly? They are loyal. Research from the Association of Fundraising Professionals shows that 68% of Baby Boomers are subscribed to a nonprofit’s email newsletter, the highest of any generation. They expect regular non-fundraising communication, transparent financial reporting, and genuine stories that show their dollars at work. They also tend to give through email and Facebook rather than mobile apps, so meeting them where they already are matters enormously for both stewardship and cultivation.
One more fact worth sitting with: a planned gift through a will often represents 200 times a donor’s largest annual gift amount. A loyal donor giving $500 a year is not a $500 prospect for legacy giving. They may be a $100,000 prospect.
The Uncomfortable Reality About Wills and Your Donor List
Before your organization can benefit from this generational shift in wealth, it needs to address a frustrating reality. Giving USA’s 2025 data shows that only 24% of Americans currently have a will, which is down from 33% just three years ago. More than half of all Americans have no estate planning documents at all. This widespread avoidance of basic estate planning is a direct reason why bequest giving declined 1.6% in actual dollars in 2024 despite enormous Baby Boomer wealth.
That statistic is also an opportunity. Donors who include charitable giving in their annual budget donate nearly three times more on average than those who do not plan their giving. Helping your donors get to the point of estate planning, even if the educational push comes from your organization rather than their attorney, positions your nonprofit as a trusted resource and keeps your mission front of mind when documents are finally drawn up.
Starting the Legacy Conversation Without Derailing It
Many fundraisers are nervous about planned giving conversations because they conflate legacy conversations with death conversations. The most successful major gift officers do not lead with mortality. They lead with mission and legacy.
The most practical signal to watch for, asNonProfit PRO’s coverage of planned giving experts highlights, is the phrase “I wish I could do more.” That cue opens a door. A response like “Have you ever thought about how your estate plan might reflect that wish?” costs nothing and could begin a conversation worth millions.
Other practical starting points include:
Surveys. Send a stewardship survey to your loyal donors asking what impact means to them and whether they have included your organization in their estate plans. Donors who have already made the commitment but never disclosed it will often self-identify. Those who have not may begin thinking about it for the first time.
Educational events. Host an estate planning workshop in partnership with a local estate attorney or community foundation. Frame it as a service to your donors, not a fundraising ask. The goal is to normalize legacy conversations and reduce the anxiety people feel around wills and estate documents.
Consistent messaging. Add a planned giving note to your email signature. Mention legacy giving briefly in your newsletter. The ask does not need to be dramatic to be effective. One guidance on legacy society programs recommends something as simple as: “When you make a planned gift to our organization, you join like-minded supporters helping us create lasting change for generations to come.”
One population worth specific attention: women. Research consistently shows that women are more likely to give to charity than men at comparable wealth levels, and women are projected to control two-thirds of U.S. wealth by 2030. Including spouses and partners in legacy conversations is not courtesy. It is strategy.
Tracking Planned Giving Intentions in Your CRM
A planned gift commitment is not a realized gift. It is a relationship signal, and it demands a different kind of data management than your typical donation record.
Most development professionals recommend against mixing planned gift intentions with your active pipeline forecasts. Because bequest intentions are non-binding and the disbursement date is unknown, folding them into revenue projections creates noise and can lead to uncomfortable tracking of donor life expectancy. The cleaner approach is to create separate fields or tags within your CRM specifically for planned giving status.
The most useful tracking categories include whether a donor has disclosed a bequest intention, what stage they are in the cultivation or stewardship process, and when your last personal outreach occurred. GivingDocs recommends tagging contacts with designations like “legacy society member,” “bequest intention,” and “moves management stage”so that reporting can isolate planned giving engagement and reveal what communications are actually moving donors forward.
With Julep, you can easily track these asks through Actions, Attributes and Notes in People Profiles. If you set up an Attribute for “Planned Giving,” you can easily do a search for everyone who has committed to leaving a bequest. Additionally, Julep has options to create membership clubs that you can utilize to capture all planned giving donors. You can also set up Moves Management to include planned giving asks and gradually move the donor through the giving process with scheduled reminders to keep you on track.
One behavioral marker worth flagging in your system: donors with seven or more consecutive years of giving have a significantly higher propensity to make a planned gift. NonProfit PRO’s reporting on legacy society building suggests prioritizing this cohort for legacy conversations before any broader outreach, because depth of relationship predicts intent far better than gift size.
Building a Sustainable Planned Giving Program on a Budget
The good news for organizations without a major gifts team or a six-figure development budget is that a basic planned giving program can be launched for under $5,000. The foundational elements are simpler than most development staff expect.
Start with bequests. Nine out of ten planned gifts are simple bequests. The vehicle requires no complex legal infrastructure on your end. A donor simply names your organization as a beneficiary in their will. That is the ask, and it is genuinely accessible to donors at any income level.
Create a legacy society. According to the Nonprofit Learning Lab, you can launch one when you have as few as four to six identified planned giving donors. Give the society a name. Create a simple recognition page on your website. Share donor stories with their permission. The social proof function of a legacy society matters as much as the recognition function.
Add a planned giving page to your website. Include sample bequest language, a one-paragraph explanation of what a bequest is, and a clear contact for interested donors. Internal links throughout your site that point to this page ensure donors who are browsing can find the information without a conversation having to initiate it.
Integrate legacy messaging into what you already send. Annual reports, stewardship newsletters, gift acknowledgment letters, and email campaigns can each carry a brief planned giving mention without requiring a dedicated campaign budget. Consistency compounds over time.
Partner for complexity. For donors interested in charitable gift annuities, charitable remainder trusts, or other complex vehicles, a relationship with your local community foundation gives you a referral path without requiring in-house legal expertise.
The Organizations That Wait Will Pay for It
The Chronicle of Philanthropy was right to note that past projections for generational wealth flowing to charity have not always materialized. But the demographic fundamentals this time are different: a larger generation, richer than any that came before it, with far fewer heirs to absorb all of it. The estate planning conversations are happening right now. Donors who update their wills this year and do not include your organization may not revisit those documents for another decade.
The nonprofits that build legacy societies now, that train fundraisers to recognize a planned giving signal in a casual donor conversation, and that use their CRM to track and steward these relationships systematically — those are the organizations that will benefit from the $11.9 trillion headed toward the charitable sector. The ones that wait will wonder why they keep getting surprised by other organizations’ bequest announcements.