$430K in Legacy Gifts: How WYCF is Future-Proofing Wyoming with FreeWill

The Opportunity

Founded in 1989, the Wyoming Community Foundation (WYCF) has spent the past 35 years pursuing one big mission: make a better Wyoming and leave a better legacy for future generations. To do that, WYCF connects donors with local causes they care about most and increasingly, that means thinking ahead through estate and legacy giving. However, WYCF recognized a challenge: too often, estate planning felt intimidating and inaccessible. Many supporters hesitated at the thought of working with lawyers and legal fees or had never considered leaving a legacy. That’s why they partnered with FreeWill, a donor-centric online estate planning platform to simplify legacy giving and help Wyoming prepare for the $124 billion generational wealth transfer projected over the next decade.

More than anything, FreeWill has helped people recognize that making an estate plan is for everyone. It’s approachable, it’s personalized and it keeps Wyoming thriving.
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Laura Dale
Former Communications Coordinator at WYCF

The Solution

FreeWill offered the perfect, donor-centric platform to make estate planning accessible to everyone. “That’s what really drew us,” explained Laura Dale, former Communications Coordinator at WYCF. “FreeWill allows people to create a will quickly, update it easily as their causes change, and do it all without a lawyer.”

For Laura and WYCF’s small but mighty development team, FreeWill fit seamlessly into existing touchpoints. Laura wove FreeWill into stewardship seminars, capital campaigns, holiday communications, and social posts. Even better, the team introduced it to local nonprofits and their donor communities through their Wyoming Nonprofit Conference, small events, radio spots, and television ads. “FreeWill’s tools help us help other organizations too,” Laura noted. “And it reaches people we never would have had a connection with otherwise.”

This approach offers a valuable model for other community foundations aiming to broaden their outreach and deepen donor engagement. By integrating FreeWill into varied communication channels and leveraging strategic guidance, foundations can efficiently promote planned giving without extensive resources.

That broad reach was especially important for their Five to Thrive initiative, a bold campaign encouraging every Wyomingite to leave 5% of their estate to local causes. Stemming from WYCF’s generational wealth report and inspired by the fact that so many young people leave Wyoming for opportunities elsewhere, Five to Thrive invites people to leave a legacy for the local parks, food banks, shelters, schools, and programs they love; sustaining the entire nonprofit fabric of Wyoming.

And the results speak for themselves. Emails that once saw average click-through rates now reach 40–50% open rates. Local radio and TV ads during Make-A-Will Month drove significant engagement, especially among younger, first-time will makers, a previously unreached audience for WYCF. The TV ad campaign alone brought 5,684 visits to their FreeWill bequest website. In total, the broader ad campaign generated nearly 19,000 streaming impressions with a 98% completion rate and over 40,000 display ad impressions.

“More than anything,” Laura shared, “FreeWill has helped people recognize that making an estate plan is for everyone. It’s approachable, it’s personalized and it keeps Wyoming thriving.”

When we did the Make-a-Will Month TV ads with Spectrum Charter, it performed better than anything else we’d done, it just skyrocketed the click rate
for FreeWill.

Laura Dale
‍Former Communications Coordinator at WYCF

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To learn more about the Wyoming Community Foundation’s work with FreeWill, you can contact Rachel Bailey, Director of Philanthropy, at rachel@wycf.org.

Results

• 430K in primary bequest commitments
• 20 primary bequest commitments