The Knock on the Window: What Memorial Gifts Are Really Telling You

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I'm recording this episode on Sunday, May 24th, the day before Memorial Day.
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And for me, this specific Sunday is always going to mean one thing before it means anything else: celebration of life.
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It was an event that we did every year at Hawaii Care Choices, the hospice and palliative care organization where I worked on the big island of Hawaii.
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We served the east side of the island, communities like Hilo and Pune and Kao.
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And every year around this time, we would bring the whole community together to do something that I've genuinely never seen replicated anywhere else.
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When I got there, Celebration of Life was it was a lot of work for a modest return.
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It was a 5k walk-a-thon, a picnic in the park, lantern floating at dusk, and the lantern floating there was kind of atrocious because the river banks in the park were so steep that people were like tumbling headfirst into the water as they were trying to release their lanterns.
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Like it was bad.
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And maybe 150 people showed up.
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So, you know, it was like good intentions, not great execution, modest impact.
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And when I got there, and I had made it through my orientation, my first day out, Lani sat me down.
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And if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, or if you're a subscriber to my newsletter, you've heard me talk about Lani before.
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She's one of those rare human beings who attract people to her the way that a flame attracts moths.
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She has this gift of making you feel within minutes of meeting her, like she's known you your whole life, and is genuinely delighted whenever you show up.
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And I've never quite figured out how she does it, and I've spent years trying to learn from it.
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So, Lani sits me down, my first week out of orientation, and she says, I have an idea for this event.
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And what she described was not an iteration, it was a complete reimagining of the entire thing.
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She wanted to start the day with a motorcycle rally, going from Hilo all the way down to Kao, making stops to visit patients and families along the way, and a barbecue and hot dog cookout in the parking lot of the hospital down there.
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Motorcycles rolling through those communities, all that noise and energy announcing that something was happening, something that mattered.
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And then she wanted to bring every religious and ceremonial tradition on the island together: the Japanese bone dance, the military honor guard, the Hawaiian hula.
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And throughout the day, families could purchase lanterns and decorate them, personalize them and make them into something that held the name or the face or the memory of someone that they had loved and lost, all surrounded by the most glorious food trucks that you'd ever seen.
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One of my favorites was this food truck called Cheese Please.
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And they would broil those big wheels of cheese, and then they would just scrape that melted cheese onto whatever you'd ordered.
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It was fantastic.
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And as the sun started going down, there would be a multi-faith prayer, a Jewish rabbi, a Catholic priest, a Hawaiian Kahu.
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And people would walk holding their lanterns from the day's gathering space down to the edge of Reed's Bay.
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And while they walked, the only sound in the air was the Hawaiian nose flute.
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And if you've never heard a Hawaiian nose flute, it's unlike anything else.
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It's not music exactly.
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It's more like breath being made audible.
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It's the sound of something very quiet and very old.
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And people would walk to the water's edge and they would set their lanterns adrift and they would watch them float out into the bay, carrying whatever memories and intentions and thoughts and prayers that they had put into them.
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And when the last lantern was gone, the whole community gathered on the shore and sang Hawaii Aloha.
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It's the song that closes concerts and community gatherings across the islands.
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Everyone stands together hand in hand, swaying, and during the chorus, they lift their joined hands in the air in celebration of unity and love for the islands and of each other.
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And that event grew from 150 people the year before Lani reimagined it to over 3,500.
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And as I'm recording this, it's happening today in Hilo, right now, while I'm sitting here thinking about what I want to say to you.
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So that's where my head is on this Memorial Day weekend, on what it means to create a space where people can bring their grief and their love and their memory of someone and feel held by a community that says, We see who you lost, we see what they meant, and we're here.
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So let's talk fundraising.
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Today I want to talk about memorial giving, not the mechanics of it, not the donation page or the acknowledgement letter, though we'll get to some of that.
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I want to talk about what a memorial gift actually is, what it's actually telling you about the person who made it and what becomes possible when you have even a simple plan for what to do next.
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Because I think most of us in this work receive memorial gifts with gratitude and good intentions.
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And then we move on.
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And I want to make the case today that moving on might be the most expensive thing that we do.
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Let me start with something that research actually backs up because I know this audience, and I know you're gonna want to see the receipts.
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A study from Legacy Future, one of the most rigorous research organizations working on in-memory giving, found that donors with a known memorial connection to a charity are three times more likely to make a planned gift than standard regular donors.
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Three times.
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And not just more likely to give, more likely to give bigger.
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Residual legacies from in-memory donors averaged about two-thirds higher than those without a known in-memory connection.
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Cash gifts were roughly double.
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And here's the detail that I think should stop all of us in our tracks.
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Three out of five in-memory plan gifts were preceded by earlier in-memory giving.
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So the pipeline to your largest gifts runs directly through the memorial donor you received maybe six, eight, ten years ago.
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And most of us do not have a plan for that donor.
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And I don't say that critically, I say it because I've lived it.
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I know what it's like to be managing a portfolio of hundreds of donors, fielding calls, running events, trying to hit goals, and having a memorial gift come in and thinking, that's beautiful.
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Let me make sure they get a thoughtful acknowledgement, and then turning back to the hundred other things that are on our desks.
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The problem isn't the intention.
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The problem is that we haven't fully understood what we're being handed.
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Because a memorial gift is not a transaction, it's an invitation.
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And I want to tell you about the moment that I first understood what that invitation actually meant.
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So it was when I was working in fundraising at Hawaii Care Choices, and my office was inside Poha Malama, our inpatient care facility in Hilo.
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And I shared that office with Lani, and it was a small office with a window that looked out into a corridor that had been abandoned and was most of the time empty and pretty quiet.
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One afternoon, a man walked up to that window and knocked on it pretty hard.
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His name for this story, we'll call him John, and we'll call his wife Mary.
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And Mary was a patient.
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And the knock was gruff, a little confrontational, honestly, like he was testing something, like he wanted to see what kind of people were on the other side of that glass.
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And I watched Lani answer it.
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And if you want to understand what I mean when I say that Lani has a gift, like watching how she responded to that knock, there was no defensiveness, no professional distance.
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She just opened toward him like a door swinging wide.
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And within a few minutes, like John was telling us everything.
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He was deeply, completely in love with his wife.
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She was the center of his whole world, everything he worked for, everything he thought about, every plan he made.
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It was all organized around her and around their life together.
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And she was dying.
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He told us about what it was like to move back and forth between their home and Pohema Lama as her condition changed.
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He told us about the small things that he was holding on to, the rituals, the way he tried to make things feel normal for her, even when nothing was normal.
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And Lani told him about us, what we did, why we were there, me and fundraising, her and community relations, trying to make sure that the rest of the big island knew that hospice wasn't something to be afraid of, that it was actually a form of care.
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And over the next couple of months, John kept coming back.
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Not because we asked him to, but because Pohaimulama was where Mary was, and being there felt like being closer to her.
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And so he'd come by the window and we'd talk about how she was doing, about how he was doing, about what was getting harder.
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And then she passed.
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And John kept coming back.
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Because Pohaimulama was the last place that she had lived on earth, and walking its grounds was one of the ways that he stayed connected to her.
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But the grounds he told us one afternoon were in bad shape, overgrown, uninspiring, and it bothered him.
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Because this was the place.
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This was the place.
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And it didn't feel worthy of what had happened there.
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And he mentioned something else.
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He told us that when Mary was sick, he would make her mamaki tea from the tea plants that grew in their garden.
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And mamaki tea is a healing tea.
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It was something native to Hawaii, and it was something personal to them.
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And he told us that since her passing, he kept seeing the Kamehameha butterfly.
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It's one of only two species that are native to Hawaii.
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And it would appear when he wasn't expecting it.
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And he came to believe that it was Mary, her spirit, checking in.
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And the Kamehameha butterfly feeds and breeds only on that Mamaki tea plant.
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So I asked John if he would consider funding a renovation of the back gardens at Pohima Lama, a meditation walk, and if we could take cuttings from his garden, from their garden, and if we could plant their Mamaki tea along the path.
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And he got quiet for a moment and then he said yes.
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He said he'd absolutely be open to that.
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Yes, it's to put together the numbers and come back to him.
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And about a month later, we sat down together and we told him that if he donated the plant cuttings, we could complete the project for $10,000.
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And he burst into tears.
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It wasn't just tears of gratitude, it wasn't only that.
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He was also in pain because he felt in that moment that his love for his wife had been reduced to a dollar amount.
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And I want to be honest with you, I don't think that the amount mattered.
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I think that if I told him it was a billion dollars, the reaction would have been the same.
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We never ended up moving forward with that project.
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And I've thought about that conversation a lot over the years.
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What I might have done differently, whether there was a way to frame it that didn't feel like a reduction.
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And I'm still not sure.
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What I do know is that what we received from John was something that money couldn't measure, which was his story, his trust, and his continued presence, because John showed up to every single event that we held after that.
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Celebration of life, season of hope, our annual gala for everyone.
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And at every event, he was our biggest donor.
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We never asked him for another dollar.
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He just gave again and again and again.
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Because we were giving him something in return, ways to feel connected to Mary, ways to honor her memory in a community that remembered her too.
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And I know because he told us that he intended to leave his estate to Hawaii Care Choices when he passed.
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He never formalized a planned gift document.
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There were some complicated feelings about leadership at the time, but there was no one else.
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We were the place that had held him through the hardest thing he had ever experienced, and we kept holding him after.
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That is what a memorial donor relationship can become.
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Not because we had a plan, but because we had a Lani and we had the wisdom to listen and we kept showing up.
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But here's what I want you to sit with.
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What if John had walked up to that window and knocked and we hadn't been there?
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What if his first interaction with our organization after Mary's death had been a generic thank you letter and a new donor welcome series?
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What if nobody had been paying attention when he mentioned the gardens and the mamaki tea and the butterfly?
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We would have had a memorial donor in the database and we would have had no idea what we were sitting on.
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I also want to tell you about Mike.
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Mike's father was an architect and not just an architect.
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He was an alumnus of the School of Architecture and Planning.
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And when his father passed, Mike called to make a gift in his memory.
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And I'd been in my job for six days.
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Six days, and I was still trying to figure out my passwords.
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But Mike started talking about his dad, and I did the thing that Lani taught me without knowing that she taught me, which was to stop worrying about the transaction and just listen to the person.
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He talked about how his father used to take the family on vacations when he was growing up, all over the world.
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And no matter where they went, his dad would turn it into an architectural tour.
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Every city, every trip, look at the corbels, look at the monuments.
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And as a kid, Mike hated it.
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But now it's one of his most treasured memories of his father.
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Mike thought he could do a gift of $5,000, maybe toward a scholarship.
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And I told him we would be so grateful for any gift that he wanted to make.
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And I asked if I could throw out an idea.
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And he said yes.
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And I told him about endowed scholarships, how they're permanent, how we would put together a biography of his father and give it to every student who received the award, so that the memory of his dad wouldn't just live with Mike and his siblings.
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It would be carried forward by every recipient for generations.
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He thought that sounded expensive.
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And I told him the minimum to establish an endowed scholarship at our school was $25,000, and that we could even spread it out over three years if that made it more feasible.
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And he said yes before the sentence was even finished.
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And every year that scholarship is awarded, Mike flies back to Albuquerque to have lunch with the recipient.
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He talks with them about what they're studying, what they want to do with their lives, what they want to build.
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And he thinks about his dad, about what his dad would have said, about how proud his dad would have been for what the student was accomplishing with their lives.
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And every five years, Mike makes another major gift to grow the scholarship.
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My guess is that one day Mike will make a planned gift to that scholarship as well.
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It's two very different stories, two very different donors, two very different organizations, but the same fundamental thing is happening in both of them.
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Someone walked toward a nonprofit carrying grief and their love for someone that they had lost.
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And somebody was paying enough attention to understand what was really being offered.
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John never made that $10,000 gift, but he gave far more than $10,000 over his lifetime with the organization and what he's planning to give everything that he has.
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Mike called to give $5,000 and left the first conversation committed to $25,000, with a relationship that has now lasted years and will likely last the rest of his life.
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The research from Legacy Futures describes what they call catalyst donors, people who begin with an in-memory gift and then engage over years or decades, often after losing someone unexpectedly.
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Their motivation evolves.
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It starts as a remembrance, it becomes their identity and it becomes legacy.
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The first gift isn't the gift.
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The first gift is the beginning of the conversation.
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And here's where I want to be honest with you about something because I hear this from fundraisers all the time, and I've I've said it myself that we don't have the bandwidth to build a separate stewardship track for every memorial gift that comes in.
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We're managing hundreds of relationships, we're trying to hit goals.
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And memorial gifts are meaningful, but they're not always major gifts.
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And that's true.
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You're not gonna do what Lani did with John for every memorial donor in your donor base.
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But you are going to miss the mics of the world if you don't have even a simple intake process that helps you understand what you're holding when a memorial gift arrives.
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Because the difference between a gift that stays at $5,000 and a gift that becomes a $25,000 endowment that grows for the next 20 years, was one question.
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One question asked six days into a job before I knew anything about the organization, before I had the faintest idea of what I was doing in this new context.
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Can I throw out an idea?
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That was the question.
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And so what I want to give to you today, and I'm going to tell you where you can get this in a minute, is a simple framework for what to do when a memorial gift comes in.
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It's not a 20-step cultivation plan.
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So you don't need a new full-time program, just a set of questions to ask, a handful of touch points to make, and a prompt for when and how to open the planned giving conversation in a way that feels like a continuation of the relationship rather than a sales pitch.
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Because the question isn't whether you have the bandwidth to steward memorial donors well, the question is whether you can afford not to.
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Three times more likely to make a planned gift.
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That's the number.
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And a planned gift is almost always the largest gift that a donor is ever going to make to your organization.
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The pipeline runs directly through the memorial donor you received a few years ago who has been getting your annual fund appeals ever since.
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So I've put together a memorial donor intake and stewardship framework, a real simple one-page tool that walks you through what to capture in the first conversation, the touch points that matter most in the first year, and how to approach the plan giving conversation when the time is right.
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You can download it for free at Let's TalkFundraising.com forward slash memorial day.
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It's one page.
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You could implement it this week.
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But I want to come back to where we started.
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Reeds Bay at dusk on the east side of the big island of Hawaii.
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Lanterns on the water and the Hawaiian nose flute filling the air.
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More than 3,000 people standing on the shore, holding hands, lifting their arms in the chorus of Hawaii Aloha.
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That event wasn't a fundraiser.
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It was a memorial.
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It was the community saying, We see your loss.
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We hold it with you.
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And we're not going anywhere.
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And the extraordinary thing, the thing that I've carried with me ever since, is that the fundraising followed.
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Not because we asked for it, but because we created something worth coming back to.
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That's what a well-steward memorial relationship is.
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Something worth coming back to.
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The next time a memorial gift arrives in your portfolio, I want you to hear it differently.
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Not as a kind gesture to close out.
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As a knock on your window.
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Someone is standing on the other side of the glass carrying something important.
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Wondering what kind of people are there in the office.
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Be the kind of people worth knowing.
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I'll see you next week, my friends.