Bequest Pipeline Conference Whitepaper

The bequest pipeline is made of donors, not dollars. Who are they and what happened to them between the time their bequests were committed and the gifts arrived in the development office? Planners and database managers from 12 Western Pennsylvania nonprofits analyzed ten years of received bequests to find everything we could about the people who made the gifts, then compiled our analysis to identify trends and develop a model that helps us predict what the pipeline will produce to satisfy the donor's goals and the organization's needs. In the course of this analysis, we confirmed or debunked a number of truisms about bequest giving, including "for every known bequest, there are two unknown bequests," "bequest donors do not remove charities from their wills," and "one's best annual donors are one's best bequest prospects."

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