BIO: Tony Martignetti is the evangelist for Planned Giving fundraising for small- and mid-size nonprofits.
STORY: Two years into building his business, Tony convinced himself he could become the nation's thought leader on planned giving fundraising — not just for nonprofits, but for all Americans. He walked into a swanky Midtown Manhattan PR agency, got dazzled by a four-inch binder, and signed up at $6,750 per month. Two months and $13,500 later, his only return was a single bylined op-ed in a free subway newspaper.
LEARNING: Check your ego. Vet your big ideas with honest, trusted people before spending any money. Understand that PR, even when it works, rarely converts to actual revenue.
"This was an ego investment. I did it for my vanity project. I got one placement in a giveaway newspaper on a federal holiday when nobody was in the subway. That was it."
Tony Martignetti
Tony Martignetti is the evangelist for Planned Giving fundraising for small- and mid-size nonprofits. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
Check out Tony's free How-to Guide on Planned Giving Fundraising.
Two years into running his consultancy, Tony had a big idea. He didn't just want to serve the nonprofit sector; he wanted to reach all Americans and make planned giving a concept that everyday citizens (not just charity insiders) would understand and act on.
To do that, Tony decided he needed PR, the kind that lands you on 60 Minutes and gets Charlie Rose calling.
He found his way to a prestigious agency in Midtown Manhattan, far from his own modest office in the Flatiron neighborhood. They had an 80-story skyscraper overhead to match. At the pitch meeting, they brought out what Tony describes as a four-inch-thick three-ring binder, every page in a plastic sleeve. Client on The Today Show. Client on Good Morning America. Client on 60 Minutes. Client with Charlie Rose.
All this sucked Tony in, and he bought it all—hook, line, and sinker. They kept feeding his ego. He signed on at $6,750 per month.
After two months, Tony canceled the contract. His total return: one bylined op-ed in AM New York, a free newspaper distributed in New York City subway stations. The placement ran on Martin Luther King Day. A federal holiday when subway ridership was a fraction of normal on a Tuesday.
No leads from Good Morning America. No call from 60 Minutes. No magazine profiles. No newspaper reporters are following up. Nothing promising on the horizon. Just $13,500 lighter and one op-ed that almost nobody read.
The agency saw a solo entrepreneur with ideas far bigger than the media landscape could realistically support, and instead of managing Tony's expectations honestly, they kept stoking his enthusiasm to secure the fee. They should have talked him down to what's reasonable to expect. Instead, they completely mismanaged his expectations and kept feeding his ego to capture a fee.
The fundamental problem was that Tony's ambition—to educate ordinary Americans about the value of nonprofits, then about the value of supporting them long-term, then to direct them toward specific giving vehicles—was a multi-step awareness campaign that no single PR placement could accomplish. It was simply too much to ask of the media.
Years after the failed agency experiment, Tony had better PR results. He hired a skilled freelance publicist who secured quotes for him in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Chronicle of Philanthropy, the leading trade publication in his sector. Reporters on the nonprofit beat came to know him and called him when they needed a source.
And yet: not one new client ever picked up the phone because they saw Tony's name in the Times. This taught him a lesson: PR is more about reputation and awareness than revenue.
Tony's number one goal for the next 12 months is to publish his first self-published book: Planned Giving Accelerated, due out in September. A companion course will follow the book's release.
"Thank you very much, Andrew. This was great, great fun. It's very different than what I've done."
Tony Martignetti
[spp-transcript]
Andrew Stotz:
Hello fellow risk takers, and welcome to my worst investment ever, stories of loss. To keep you winning in our community, we know that to win an investing you must take risk, but to win, but to win big, of course, you've got to reduce it, ladies and gentlemen, I'm on a mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives, all kinds of risks, not just investment risks. And I want to thank you for joining this mission today, especially our listeners in North Carolina, fellow risk takers, this is your worst podcast host, Andrew Stotz from a Stotz Academy, and I'm here with featured guests, Tony martinetti. Tony, are you ready to join the mission?
:I'm excited to join the risk reduction mission. Absolutely. Thank you for having me. Andrew, yeah, well,
Andrew Stotz:
I'm excited to have you on because, you know, you you come in coming from a very different angle than some of our guests, and I'm interested to learn more about what you're doing, including learning a little bit about, you know, as you and I were just talking about about your upcoming project that is getting ready to get done. So let me introduce you to the audience. Tony is the evangelist for Planned Giving, fundraising for small and mid sized nonprofits. And you can connect with him right there on LinkedIn. Just I'll put a link in the show notes, but you can just type in his name, Tony, and his last name, M, a, r, t, I, g, n, e, t, t i. So Tony, take a minute and tell us about the unique value that you are bringing to this wonderful world.
:Well, thank you again for having me, Andrew. This is great fun. I've never been on a worst investment podcast before I'm usually, I'm usually talking to nonprofit audiences. So this is great fun. My value. I bring a different perspective to what you introduced me as my work in planned giving fundraising. I say it so deliberately, because a lot of people think it's plan, giving. And then, you know, your audience might think that's an investment plan, or it's a condominium plan. I'm, you know, I'm a real estate developer, no planned giving, fundraising. It's raising money for nonprofits. All my clients are nonprofit charitable organizations in the United States, and I'm introducing their donors to a method of giving to the charity that is through their will, or their life insurance plan, or life insurance policy, or an IRA pension plan, charitable trusts, charitable annuities. Give through your Give. Give directly to you through a qualified charitable distribution for your IRA, all these long term methods of giving and giving to and supporting nonprofits.
Andrew Stotz:
And so there's two aspects that I'm thinking about as I was listening to you. You know, the first aspect is there are givers, people who have excess funds and want to, you know, share those funds with organizations that are fulfilling a mission that they believe in. And then there's those organizations that are driven by not, not necessarily the person who's accumulated money and is a giver, but by a person who has accumulated a passion and an excitement about a particular thing. For instance, there's an organization in Thailand, in Bangkok, called soy dogs. Soy meaning street, or, like, small street. And, you know, there's a, there's a huge need for taking care of these dogs that are in, you know, really terrible shape. So they need to raise funding. And, you know, it's a pain in the butt, and, you know, it's so I just think about the there's, there's people that are on a mission, and then there's people that have funding that they want to, you know, contribute. Am I? Am I framing it right? Or, how do you see this, this, or, you know, the industry of the nonprofit.
:Now, you're right. There are nonprofits doing great, important social change work, like soy dogs and you know that. So that's grassroots animal welfare, right? Animal assistance. I mean, there's religion, education, healthcare, the environment. Domestic Violence, children, all the different medical causes, 1000s of medical cause. So all this important social good work, and thankfully, the United States, people in the US are very generous. We're the most philanthropic country in the world. And putting those two together is the work that I do, and it's just that my work is fundraising for the long term, like a good example. The easiest example is a gift in someone's will. When you put a charity in your will that's not cash to the nonprofit. And. Till you've died. So it's long term fundraising, but you're exactly right, matching generous people with important causes
Andrew Stotz:
and why? Why does someone like you exist? Because sometimes you could think, Okay, well, those people that have money, they're looking around, and the people who are running these organizations, they're always looking for funding. But yet, I'm sure for many different reasons, they don't connect in the way that you help them connect. Why is it that you exist in this, you know, ecosystem?
:That's a pretty big existential question, why? Why do I exist? Why do I exist? All right, we could take that in a lot of different levels. We'll stick with it the way you stick with it the way you asked it. Yeah, you know, you have your own business, multiple businesses. You know, you don't just build a business and people come to it. You have to promote the business. You have to bring people to it. It's the same as a nonprofit. These are the way I look at it. These are businesses. They just happen to be in a tax status in the US, which is designated as nonprofit, so that people get charitable income tax deductions when they make gifts to these important causes. That, though it's a tax status, but it's a business, and you have to bring people to your nonprofit business, attract them to your cause, and encourage them, not only to, you know, follow you on Instagram and connect on LinkedIn with your cause, but also they need donors and volunteers, and so those that's part of the reason I exist is to promote the idea of giving to the causes that hire me to help them,
Andrew Stotz:
and what is the ideal you know, person in this situation, let's say someone who has something that you know, they've got a huge demand. They want to expand what they're doing, but maybe they don't either have time or skill or knowledge to reach that long term audience, and so they just never are able to really fund the stuff that they're doing. Like, what is the perfect type of client for you?
:It's a smaller, mid size nonprofit, and I don't put a budget number on that, or number of employees, or annual revenue, or just small, mid size. So you know, we're not talking about the biggest five or 10% of the charities in the United States. Probably more like 5% for but for the other 95% that are not doing planned giving fundraising. So they have immediate fundraising, of course, because they have to keep the lights on. They got to keep salaries paid. They got to fund the five year technology plan, etc. So they have immediate and maybe even midterm giving, but they don't have long term giving. And the type of that's the type of fundraising that I do, it enhances their sustainability, so that they have cash flow coming in future decades. Now we don't know when, because it's the fundraising I do, as I gave the example before, is based on when people die, but when you have a cadre of folks who have made that type of commitment, that type of long term commitment. You know, the reality is, some folks are going to die in some years, and some folks are going to die in other years, and there can be a while not predictable. There can be a fairly steady stream of fundraising revenue that comes from these, these long term commitments. I mean,
Andrew Stotz:
it sounds like it's an area that that fundraising, you know, that that nonprofit just never is going to really think about, because they just probably focus on the operating costs and, you know, talking to people to get funding, but to, you know, it's like you've got a niche that you understand what it is, what the opportunity is, how to structure it in such a way that it's super clear for that person to say, I want to, you know, I want to put in my will as an example, some contribution to this. And it's like, just to me, it seems like it's an area that just, you know, they're never going to really put together. So, like, you can instantly come to them and go, here is a segment of funding you're probably not thinking about. You probably not really have the time or the energy or the knowledge to access, but through me working with you, I can help you access that, and that's going to provide, you know, the long term funding that you need to be able to really support the long term growth that you have. So that's the way I see it. Am I? Am I right with that? Am I? What do you think?
:Are you interested in a second gig as a sales, business development representative, doing my best because that, yeah, you framed it perfectly. I'm not even gonna, I'm not even gonna tweak it.
Andrew Stotz:
No, no. So for those people that are listening to either have nonprofit or that know someone that's, you know, got a mission and they're excited about. On it. And they're, they, you know, they're, they're covering, they're figuring out how to cover their operating costs, but they're wondering, how do I really build stability in my long term mission? And for many people, that mission can go on for many, many decades. You know, I think that's interesting. And as we've talked about when I introduced you, you can just reach out, I have a link in the show notes to Tony's LinkedIn and learn more. So now it's time to show your worst investment ever. And since no one goes into their worst investment thinking it will be, tell us a bit about the circumstance leading up to and then tell us your story. All right.
:Thank you very much. Andrew. I love this, this, yeah, so I've been in planned, giving, consulting, my own business, one, one person business, you're looking at the company, since 2003 so 26 years, about 24 years ago. So two years in business. I thought, you know, I would like to try to be a thought leader in this niche that I'm this is a narrow niche in planned giving, in fundraising, this narrow niche, but I'm deep in it. I thought, well, you know, I could, I would like to be a thought leader in this area, but, but I don't really want to restrict that. You know, my wisdom, all right, to just not the nonprofit community. I want to go broader. I want to encourage citizens of the United States who are not familiar with Planned Giving fundraising might not even be supporting any charity at all in any way. They might not even be writing $5 checks or $500 checks or $5,000 checks. They're not supporting nonprofits. I want to get the word out about the importance among our culture, in our nation, of supporting nonprofit causes for the long term. So now that's a that's, that's pretty big. That's a pretty big undertaking because, but this is what I was thinking. So this, I think I'll, I think I'll hold the headline, you know, I'll just what the way I see the headline, I'm gonna, you're not supposed to bury the headline, I know, but I feel like leading him to it, and then I'll share what I think comes out of this. Yeah, so I was in the New York City area. My business was in New York City, headquartered in New York City. Now we're talking about 2000 2003 four, like, four or five. Of course, we were all in offices, you know, five days a week. You know, you got to go back 26 years. So I had an office space in lower Manhattan, in New York City. Fifth Ave, if you're in, if you're in or near or or No, New York City. I was on Fifth Ave, between 22nd and 23rd streets. Eisenberg's diner was my favorite lunch place, if you know, if you know the flat iron now I'm in the flat iron neighborhood, you can see the flat iron building from the little office I had. And there was Eisenberg diner on it's still there. No but I think it changed names. They have fifth, they have between 22nd 23rd so I went to what I thought would be the perfect PR agency to help lift me up, to make me a thought leader in the nation. I'm going to be the nation's thought leader on planned giving fundraising thing and big thing and big Yeah, well, I thought there was a need. Yes? Well, and there, I thought there was so it is, I think I got a referral to, I don't remember how I got acquainted with this agency, but now we got to go uptown. We got to go into Midtown. Now we're on Sixth. Ave like in the 50s. You know, 70 story, 80 story office buildings, high rent, very high rent. District, not, not down flat iron, where my office was, where, at the time, like the biggest, tallest building was probably six or seven stories or something, or the flat iron building was like 12 stories something right now we're in Midtown now, 80 story skyscrapers with the overhead that you would imagine. And here I am one person shop, and I'm walking in and I'm interviewing, you know, I'm interviewing them. They're interviewing me. This is a PR agency, and they bring out the big binder, like, probably a three ring binder, of it's probably four inches thick, you know, the spine is four inches thick. And they flip through and all the pages, of course, are in, it's all in page protectors, so you're flipping the plastic pages. And there's, Oh, there they are on the Today Show, and oh, there's a client on 60 minutes, and there's one on Good Morning America. Oh, and there Charlie Rose introduced what interviewed one of their clients. Oh, my God. This is going to be incredible. I'm going to be on Charlie Rose. It's going to be amazing. 60 Minutes. Is going to do a profile of me and my practice and how important this is to the nation. So they sucked me in. You know, I got, I bought it all hook, line and sinker. Oh, we'll, we'll get you on. You know, you've seen the portfolio. You know, we're gonna get you on the Oprah. They were full of shit, as you might imagine, as my tone may suggest, the marketing. I bought it. I bought it, and this turned into my,
:my $13,500 vanity investment. Okay, this was now, here's the kind of the headline coming in, my kind of my lessons. This was an ego investment. I did it for two months because it was 6750 a month. I did it for two months, and all I got in the two months was a one time byline, like op ed that I had that I Well, of course, so I wrote it in a giveaway newspaper. There were, there were two at the time, there were two giveaway newspapers in the city of New York, down in the subways. There were two. There was, there was Metro. It was called Metro New York, and there was a New York. I got an am New York written com that are like an op ed. I wrote it. It's not like they interviewed me as a thought leader. I wrote a byline op ed, and it was given out on Martin Luther King Day, when nobody's in the subway, because it's a national federal holiday, the subway, and this is where these papers were given out am New York was given out in the subways. There was nobody in the subway. It was a federal holiday, so that the subscription, the readership, was probably, you know, 1/50 of its of what it would have been the next day on Tuesday. But they didn't offer me the Tuesday so this swanky PR agency on Midtown in Manhattan, 6750 a month, got me one placement on a giveaway newspaper on a federal holiday, and there were no leads for Good Morning America or Charlie Rose or the Today Show or 60 Minutes. There were no leads, no magazines, no newspapers. There was nothing promising coming. So I dropped it after spending $13,500 on my vanity, ego investment.
Andrew Stotz:
Interesting. One question I have, you think they always had it planned like, oh, let's put them on the, you know, let's put them on that. You know, subway giveaway, this will be perfect, you know. Or did they really think they were going to get you on those but they just couldn't deliver? Or, I'm just curious, what did you think was in their heads?
:No, I think they what. Well, what they should have seen was a pie in the sky solo entrepreneur whose ideas are bigger than the mediascape reality, and they should have talked me down to what's reasonable to expect. Instead, they completely mismanaged my expectations, had me flipping through the binder and kept feeding my ego and vanity project so that they could capture a fee.
Andrew Stotz:
And how would you describe the lessons you learned?
:Don't take yourself so seriously. Keep your ego in check. Maybe check with some other folks in your, in your in your field, you know, vet your ideas before you invest. I mean, that was a lot of money for me, 6750, a month. So, you know, you know, check with friends, check with people you trust, yeah, whether they're colleagues or just, well, in my case, just citizens of the US, you know. Does it sound like something that, you know? No, it was like I said, pie in the sky. I mean, I would have had to educate Americans as to the value of nonprofits, and then to the value of supporting nonprofits in the long term. You know, through methods like we talked about wills and life insurance and then, and then, you know, go find a charity. I mean, it was just there was too much. There was way too much for reality. So, yeah, yeah, that I would check, check your ideas with somebody, or some few people who you trust, yes,
Andrew Stotz:
who are honest, yeah,
:who you trust, who is just to be honest with you? Yeah, exactly. I mean, yeah, don't go check it with the people who are going to get a fee for capitalizing on your pie in the sky idea. That's what I did, and I got no check at all on my vanity project. Yeah.
Andrew Stotz:
Um, here's a couple things I was thinking about it. I mean, the first one, I'm, I'm kind of picturing, you know, a good old uncle who should have, you know, just walked you out the door. Said, this really exciting, you know, go back, rethink it, put some more time into it, and then come back when you but, you know, of course, that's not going to happen in the business world, because you're sending $6,000 out the door. And why do that? But the other thing, I think it happens for everybody. When we start a business like we just really get that entrepreneurial seizure. As Mike Gerber said in his book E Myth, he talks about, you just get so excited about your idea you can't talk people, you know, even if you went to your friend and your honest friend who told you this honest opinion, you know, this is where it's kind of, the advice I sometimes give in this type of situation is, go do it. I mean, it's so hard to break through. And if someone's listening or viewing this, and they're in that entrepreneurial seizure. I mean, this is a chance to break free from it a bit, but, you know, it may be that they have to do it so that's one of the things that I was thinking about. And then I remember, there's two things that I did similar, you know, when I started my own business. And the first one is that I had just finished my PhD in China. And so I was back and forth between China and Thailand. And so, you know, I had a lot of connections. I had built up. And so I thought, you know, let's do social media in China. It's big. Build out my presence. And, you know, all that. And I paid a guy. And, you know, in his case, he delivered. He delivered, you know, he did a pretty good job. It wasn't, it wasn't cheap. And then I had another case where I was like, okay, you know, I used to go on TV shows a lot like CNBC and all that to talk about the markets when I worked for big investment banks. So I thought, do that same thing. And so, you know, I had some other organization that got me on some of those, and then, but then I realized there's just one thing that even if you're successful in getting on the shows and all that PR does not equate to business to revenue to customers. So even if you think, well, that's not gonna happen to me and my PR guys are good. Sorry. PR rarely connects with revenue and expanding your business. Occasionally it does. And when it's done, really focused and really right, it can so PR won't save you in most cases, even if you got it right,
:absolutely true. Yeah, my experience as well, because later on, probably three years later or so, I met a freelance PR guy, and he delivered for me. I got some quotes in the New York Times. I got quotes in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, which is a respected then it was print, you know, of course, but still now that now the digital, but respected publication in the nonprofit sector, Wall Street Journal. He also got me some Wall Street Journal quotes placements. I had a very good relationship with the times and the and the journal reporters on the nonprofit beat, so they would call on me from time to time. But even with that, you know, I never saw Never did I pick up the phone or get an email. I saw you in the times. You know, let's talk about the nonprofit that I'm on the board of. I think they could use some help in planned giving fundraising. It doesn't equate it's rare, like you said, it's rare. It's more for reputation, you know, awareness more of a long term, long term play.
Andrew Stotz:
There's what the remnants of, what remain in my brain from my Latin class in high school, is Caveat emptor, fire beware, which my mom used to say. I remember, you know, she also used to say, just because it's discounted or cheap doesn't mean you have to buy it, which was really annoying. You know, luckily I get to, I get to say that to my mom now, as she's turning 88 but the other thing I was singing in is the great saying, a fool and his money are easily parted. You know, when we are so excited about our ideas, we're foolish. You know, are we a fool? Probably not, but we can be foolish. And if we can separate that kind of foolish time where we have these big dreams from, you know, we're not fools, but we can be foolish at times, it can help us. Let's go back in time now. Let's think about that young man or woman today, they're they're doing this right now, and they're listening, and they're like, Hmm, so based on what you learned from this story, and what you continue to learn, what's one action that you'd recommend our listeners take to avoid suffering the same fate?
:I would say, you know, check your ideas. I. And you look, you know, you might get the same, the same advice that Andrew just said, which go do it, you know, if I, if I, if you're, if your mentors and your advisors or your friends think it's a great idea. I mean informed, informed friends, if they think it's a crummy idea, is what I mean, if they think it's a crummy idea, and, you know, you can't be talked out of it, then I would say, Take Andrew's advice and go do it. But I would say, you know, check your ideas. I mean, is this an ego project? Is this really going to build the business? I mean, here I was just a couple years in business. I'm still in the growth business development phase. You know, PR was not the way to go about that at that stage in my business. Yeah, that's great advice.
Andrew Stotz:
And what is a resource, either of yours or any others that you'd recommend for our listeners?
:Well, if you are acquainted with a nonprofit, if you are on a board of a nonprofit and small and midsize, and you know that they are not engaged in the long term fundraising, planned, giving, fundraising that I do, I'd be grateful if you'd check out my work at Tony martinetti.com connect with me on LinkedIn. Otherwise my advice is, check your ego.
Andrew Stotz:
Yep, that's good. I am a member of CFA Institute, Chartered Financial Analysts, and was also president of the CFA society here in Thailand. And I want to share this with them in that in our little group that we have all of our members, because, you know, they're involved, they're they're, they have clients that have this need. So I think for those that are listening and thinking about it, that your CFA charter holder, certainly, you probably have clients that are happy to figure out ways to give so check it out. All right. Last question, what is your number one goal for the next 12 months?
:Publish my book in September. I'm publishing a book called planned, giving accelerated. It's coming out in September. So I'm, I'm, I'm excited to do that. It's my first book. I'm self publishing. I've got a great talk about check your ego, and, you know, having somebody to rely on. I've got a great mentor who used to publish books in the nonprofit community. He retired his publishing house. But I've got a great mentor who I'm very grateful to, Steve, and that's, that's what's got me energized for the whole year, finishing the book and promoting the book. And then there's a course that will also follow on to the book.
Andrew Stotz:
Wonderful. Well, I hope that we can get you back when you have published it, and we can maybe go through some of the tips, the chapter summaries, or some ideas that you can get from it. And then I'd love to have you back on, oh, thank you. I'd be honored.
:
Thank you very much. Andrew, yeah, I'm going to take you up on that. Sure.
Andrew Stotz:
Looking forward to it all right. Well, as we conclude, Tony, I want to thank you again for joining our mission, and on behalf of a Stotz Academy, I hereby award you alumni status for turning your worst investment ever into your best teaching moment. Do you have any parting words for the audience?
:I'll just say thank you very much, Andrew, this was great, great fun. You know, it's very different than what I've done.
Andrew Stotz:
Thanks so much. Yep, and that's a wrap on another great story to help us create, grow and protect our Well, fellow risk takers. Let's celebrate that. Today, we added one more person to our mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. This is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz saying, I will see you on the upside. You.