Let's Talk Fundraising: Legacy giving and loyalty

Legacy fundraising is a long-term investment, but the relationships that make it possible are being built right now 

In this month’s Let’s Talk Fundraising, host Tim Beynon is joined by Lucinda Frostick, Director of Remember A Charity, to explore the changing legacy landscape. Tim also speaks to Kay Harrison, Loyalty Action Planner at About Loyalty, and Vix Friar, Head of Supporter Services at Air Ambulance Kent, Surrey and Sussex (KSS), about how investing time and resources into supporter experience builds meaningful relationships that can result in generous legacy gifts.  

Legacy giving is already worth around £4.5 billion a year to UK charities, with 22% of supporters aged 40+ now leaving a charitable gift in their will. As charities consider how they can grow this vital income stream, perhaps it's time to stop treating legacies as a separate fundraising channel and instead look at ways to keep supporters connected to the cause, which will in turn unlock more lifetime and legacy gifts.  

 
All roads lead to legacies

Legacy fundraising starts long before the legacy conversation. As Kay puts it “all roads lead to legacies”.  A supporter might first encounter a charity through an event, regular gift, raffle, campaign or personal experience. What matters is what happens to that relationship afterwards.  

Drawing on About Loyalty’s research Chase Index, she explains that across different forms of giving, people who had stopped actively supporting a charity were often more likely to leave a gift in their will than active supporters. This challenges the idea that a supporter who stops giving is necessarily a supporter who has stopped caring about the charity or cause. And for fundraisers, that means there now an opportunity to look beyond individual transactions. Continuing to share impact, offer ways to engage and make supporters feel part of the cause can matter even when somebody is no longer giving financially. 

There’s so much more to the supporter experience than just making those financial asks

Although it can be challenging to allocate budget and resources towards fundraising activities that include no financial asks, Kay underlines that doing so is essential to bringing supporters closer to the cause and keeping them engaged with the charity. And doing so can lead to additional income. And doing so does not always mean a financial loss for the charity.  

Vix shares an example of this. When KSS chose to send 14,000 hand-written thank you cards, One supporter replied with her own thank-you card and a £10,000 cheque, thanking the charity for thanking her. 

The lesson isn’t that every thank-you card generates a donation. It’s that stewardship has value even when that value can’t be immediately measured in income. 
 

Legacy fundraising makes that particularly clear. The return on a positive supporter experience might not appear next month or even next year. It can be the cumulative result of years of feeling valued, informed and connected. 

Make legacy giving visible, not inevitable 

Good legacy fundraising also means giving people the opportunity to consider a gift without assuming they want to make one. As the Chase Index found, some supporters who hadn’t considered leaving a gift simply “didn’t know that was an option” or said it “didn’t occur to me”. 

Lucinda highlighted that Remember A Charity’s annual consumer tracking study highlights the same challenge. People naturally want to look after their loved ones first. Writing a will can often come at significant moments of change in people’s lives; from marriage and divorce to bereavements in the family. At such times, there is a great deal to think about and charitable giving won’t always be front of mind. And that’s why it’s so important that Will-writing providers and solicitors highlight the option, helping to normalise and to prompt legacy giving at the very point when people are setting out their final wishes. 

The role of the adviser or Will-writing provider isn’t to promote giving. It’s to make sure people understand their options, including good causes and that they know any donations can fit around gifts for their loved ones. 

Interestingly, Lucinda explained that we're now seeing legacy giving becoming more of a social norm through the generations. Remember A Charity’s research shows that, although younger people are less likely to have written a will, if they've done so, they are more likely to have included a charitable gift. So, building awareness earlier can help make charitable gifts a more natural part of how people think about their wills in future. Still, she highlights that targeting younger audiences with legacy giving means that there will surely be a long wait for any returns. 

 

Starting the legacy conversation 

For charities facing challenging financial decisions, investing in an income stream that will take years to produce return can be difficult.  But charities starting out on this journey don’t require a sophisticated legacy programme. Kay’s advice is to start with the touchpoints already available – a message on a donation form, information on a website or a conversation when it feels appropriate. 

Legacy fundraising ultimately asks charities to think beyond the next gift and towards the lifetime of the relationship. 

If “all roads lead to legacy”, those roads are built from thousands of smaller interactions: stories shared, preferences respected, questions answered, impact demonstrated and, sometimes, a handwritten thank you.
 

Find out more about growing legacies 

Whether you are just getting started with legacies or looking at ways to enhance an existing one, the Chartered Institute and Remember A Charity have a range of resources to help you reach your goals:

Remember a Charity: Legacy Bulletin

Chartered Institute of Fundraising: Legacy Fundraising Training