Love A Legacy Fundraiser

Let’s spare a thought for our sector’s legacy fundraisers. Fundraising isn’t the easiest of professions to work in, but legacy fundraisers can struggle more than most because of the nature of what they do and the need to secure buy-in from both leadership and their colleagues in different roles. 

What makes legacy fundraising particularly hard is the need to convince leadership and/or the Board that the additional staff time and investment are truly worth it. Most Boards understand (and can buy into) forms of fundraising with immediate returns. They see that the organisation spends £X and achieves £Y as a consequence. More enlightened Boards might even entertain notions of lifetime value, factoring in lifetime expenses/revenues into their donor acquisition discussions to calculate projected lifetime ROI. 

But in legacy fundraising the effect of spending £50K today is frequently unknowable. We can rarely track cause and effect in the same way as our annual fund colleagues. Yet we can say with something approaching certainty that if we invest that £50K today we will boost giving five years down the line as the donors exposed to our legacy communications five years ago begin to pass. 

A further difficulty is that legacy fundraising is seen by some organisations as a “bolt-on” to individual giving.

Legacy colleagues may have their own program of communications for pledgers, but to expand that pool they need the cooperation and acquiescence of their annual fund colleagues who “control” access to the database of individual supporters. Space needs to be created in every donor journey to raise the possibility of “Gifts in Wills.” Space must be made available at events to talk to the opportunity, and the website needs to include pages dedicated to the legacy purpose, including occasionally, the organisation’s home page. And all such access has to be negotiated. Legacy fundraising can only happen with the goodwill of colleagues. 

But the good news is that granting that access can be good for all. Recent work in the US has determined that after donors make a legacy pledge they actually give more in their annual giving than they had done previously. 

Finally, in countries such as the USA and UK, there is an increasing awareness on the part of Boards that they should be giving financially to the organisations they support. They have learned that it isn’t the amount that’s the issue, but rather the fact that they took the time to express solidarity with their fundraisers, by offering a personally meaningful gift. For some members of the Board that might be a gift of £50K while for others £5K or even £500 would make that cut. Fundraisers experience heightened levels of wellbeing and motivation as a result. Yes, the Board value what we do. 

But alas the same is rarely the case with “gifts in wills” even though a small fixed sum or residual percentage of an estate can make a bold statement about how the Board see their legacy program or embrace its future potential. The folks who serve on our Boards are usually there because they care passionately about the cause or have some deeply personal relationship with it. They can also be leaders in the requisite field and thus highly inspirational. Having the support of such a talented group of people means a lot and would certainly mean a lot to our sector’s legacy fundraisers. They deserve a little love too. 

So today, let’s spare a thought for our sector’s legacy fundraisers and let them know just how much we value what they do and the difference they will be making in securing a much-loved organisation’s future.

If you want to learn more about the economics of legacy fundraising and what can be done to support it – please check out our Certificate in Legacy Fundraising class.