When is the Right Time to Ask for a Legacy?

On the gap between feeling and taking action – and why age matters more than we think in legacy fundraising

Here is a question the legacy fundraising sector needs to have a long overdue wrestle with. When is the best time to ask someone to leave a gift in their Will?

If you listen to much of the current conversation, the answer appears to be: as early as possible. Get donors signed up to a legacy gift in in their forties. Get their details on the database. Build the pipeline. The earlier we recruit, the bigger the future income stream.

There is a problem with this thinking, and it starts with a question. Who is old?

If you are a 30-year-old fundraiser, you probably think 40 or 45 is old. I know. I was 30 once. But ask that question to someone aged 50 and they won’t see themselves as very old at all. After all, at 50, you’ve still got the best part of a third of a century in front of you – and that’s just on average.

Old is past 80. I tend to find that this is when most people start to realise that they are getting on. Old is when your friends start dying, when your health narrows your world. It’s also the time when your will stops being a theoretical document and becomes something that will actually be executed.

The fact is, when it comes to legacy fundraising, focusing on recruiting people in their forties – or fifties – could well be a bit of a mistake. You know the sort of approach – offering free will-writing guides aimed at first-time will writers as the primary hook, featuring middle-aged people in your promotional materials, and presenting legacy giving as though it were simply an extension of asking for a fiver a month.

But that seems to be where the focus of the sector is at the moment.

New data published by Remember A Charity in their Stages of Change benchmarking study - drawing on more than 2,000 UK charity supporters aged 40+ - shows that nearly one in three supporters with a will have now included a charitable gift – up from 14% in 2010. Will-makers in their forties and fifties are more likely to include a charity than those over seventy. Three-fifths of people who discussed legacy giving with a professional adviser went on to include a gift. The pipeline, on the face of it, has never looked healthier.

And when you speak to younger people about legacies, it’s not that hard to understand why adding a charity to a will has grown in popularity.

The hundreds of ads that you see on Instagram or Facebook, particular around Free Wills Month featuring forty year olds laughing around the kitchen table, has definitely had some sort of effect. Not just on prompting people to think about writing a will, but probably on advisers as well. At the very least, the idea of including a charity is no longer unfamiliar.

But what’s the purpose of that inclusion? And what’s the chances of a charity remaining in a will until it finally reaches probate in, say, 2066?

It is not uncommon for a solicitor to suggest adding a charity as a contingent beneficiary – a “catastrophe clause” - triggered only in the event that all primary beneficiaries die together. The charity is named. The box is ticked. But the probability of that gift ever being realised is vanishingly small. And yet, in the data, it shows up as inclusion.

Data from Fastmap (which I’ll come to in more detail shortly) may well back this up. Their core study, drawing on 62,000 supporter responses across 100 charities, built from around 20,000 hours of fieldwork over eight years, looks at how donors consider leaving a gift in their will. One of their findings is that most donors tend to add only one charity.

But that doesn’t quite match up with what we see in the real world. Legacy Foresight data shows that while leaving a gift to a single charity is still very common, by the time a will actually reaches probate, the average estate includes around three charities.

The fact is, not all legacy decisions are equal.

When you put a charity in your will at 45, it carries very little emotional cost. You’ve years ahead of you. At best, it’s a placeholder. Nice to have, don’t get me wrong! But if you believe that someone’s legacy intentions are going to remain unchanged over the next forty years, I’ve got a bridge you might want to buy.

This brings us back to the those questions that we need to address. Do we have any idea what those donors will want from us in forty years’ time, when they are sitting with an advisor writing their final will? Do we know what they will need to hear, what they will need to feel – what will make them keep us in rather than take us out?

Because the evidence from probate data, from qualitative work with donors at the end of their lives, and from one of the most comprehensive engagement studies ever conducted in the UK suggests that we do not. Not remotely.

It seems to me that the sector has become expert at the front end of the legacy journey. It knows how to get people thinking about adding a charity to a will. It knows how to generate free will writing guide downloads. It knows how to report a healthy pipeline – of interest – to the board. What it does not know – what few legacy fundraisers have looked at – is what happens at the other end. When the donor is eighty-five. When death is no longer abstract. When every name in the will is being actively weighed, and when the question is no longer “which charities do I like?” but “what do I want my final choices to say about me to the people I leave behind?”

That question – what donors want and need from charities at the point when the decisions actually matter – is the most important question in legacy fundraising. And it is the one we appear to be least equipped to answer.

But before we get to the evidence, let me offer one example that illustrates the scale of what we are getting wrong.

The question we are not asking, and the one that changes everything

Legacy Foresight data shows that just 6% of deaths result in a charitable gift in a Will.

Which is an extraordinary figure when you stop and think about it.

Because if engagement were the answer – if awareness, warmth and affinity were enough – that number should be far higher. It isn’t.

I was working with one organisation recently, running a discussion with a group of their closest supporters. Trustees. High-value donors. Long-standing volunteers. People who knew the charity intimately, who trusted it completely, and who by any reasonable measure were deeply engaged.

Eventually, I raised the question of legacy giving. Would any of them consider leaving a gift in their will?

The answer was immediate, unanimous, and emphatic. No.

Not a polite maybe. Not a hesitant I’ll think about it. A firm, unapologetic no. Family comes first. The process feels complicated. The decision carries psychological weight that nobody in the room was interested in picking up.

These were the most engaged supporters the organisation had. And not one of them was willing to leave a legacy.

Then I changed the question.

Instead of asking “Would you consider leaving a gift in your will?” I asked: “Would you consider leaving 1% of your estate to the charity – with 99% going to your family?”

Every single person in the room said yes.

Not grudgingly. Not after persuasion. Immediately. The mood in the room shifted within seconds. 1% felt proportionate. It felt fair. It felt like something a reasonable person could do without it costing their family anything meaningful. It gave people permission to start thinking about the idea – an idea they had just flatly rejected moments earlier.

Nothing about the engagement had changed. Nothing about the relationship had changed. Nothing about the charity had changed. What had changed was how the decision was framed.

This is not an isolated finding. In research setting after research setting, across the UK and Australia, the 1% reframing has consistently moved people from active refusal to genuine intent within minutes. As another donor said, in another study when prompted about the idea of leaving 1%...

“Of course I could do that. That seems fair. I would actually give more. 3%? 5%?”

And as legacy consultant Richard Radcliffe has recently reported from his own extensive experience, when he mentions that donors can leave a charity 1% while their family inherits 99%, the response is overwhelmingly positive. Donors describe it as fair, as painless, as something that “doesn’t do the family down.” And crucially, it shifts thinking away from fixed, pecuniary gifts towards a share of what remains – a residuary gift. That matters enormously, because residuary gifts tend to grow over time rather than shrink. One donor in Radcliffe’s experience moved from a £500 fixed gift to leaving 48% of their estate.

The 1% ask is not a gimmick. It is not a sales technique. It is a window into something the sector has fundamentally failed to grasp – that the barrier to legacy giving, for most supporters, is not a lack of engagement. It is a failure of framing. We are asking the wrong question, in the wrong way, and interpreting the response as evidence that people are not ready, when in reality, they were ready all along. We just did not know how to ask.

And if we are getting the question wrong for the most engaged supporters we have, what does that tell us about everything else we think we know about legacy decision-making?

The studies I have mentioned along with some of my own research, taken together, help explain the nature of the problem – and begin to point towards what we need to do about it.

Three studies, one problem

Through Bluefrog and now through MPFA, I have been involved in speaking with donors about legacies the best part of three decades. Most recently I have focused specifically on attitudes to legacy giving amongst much older donors in the UK and Australia – people approaching the end of their lives. As evidence grew that people were increasingly willing to remove or swap charities in their wills, we undertook a focused study in 2024 (along with F&P Magazine in Australia) exploring how donors think about legacy giving in practice – how they revisit earlier decisions about who is included, who remains, and who may ultimately be replaced. That’s study number one.

The second is the substantial body of work from Fastmap that I mentioned previously. Dr Tom Burke has published a detailed analysis of engagement and legacy giving based on over 12,000 responses from their 2025 dataset. Fastmap have also developed LegacyMind, a psychological profiling framework that categorises supporters into six motivational types. Taken together, this work represents one of the most ambitious attempts we have seen to quantify the relationship between how supporters feel about charities and whether they go on to leave a gift.

The third is the Remember A Charity Stages of Change study, which provides the longitudinal trend data on will-writing and charitable inclusion that the sector has been celebrating. I only have access to the summary deck – there will obviously be much more insight in the full paper.

Each of these studies is valuable on its own. But when you consider them together, the picture isn’t quite as rosy as we would like. Yes, when it comes to planting seeds we are doing well. But we have almost no idea how many of those seeds will survive to harvest – or what it would take to make sure they do.

The will that gets rewritten

As I’ve explained, the decision to include a charity in a will at forty or fifty is, for most people, a low-stakes act. It is aspirational. It costs nothing in the present. It is the kind of thing a thoughtful person does. And it is almost infinitely revisable.

The decision to keep that charity in the will at eighty-five is something else entirely. The will is no longer theoretical. It is a real document, sitting with a solicitor, containing the names of real people and real assets. Death has moved into the foreground. Every beneficiary is being actively weighed.

When much older donors take the time to think about their wills, something significant happens. The comfortable decisions of midlife come under scrutiny. Charities that were added decades earlier find themselves being reconsidered. Not because the donor has turned against the organisation, but because the donor, their lives and the wider world has changed.

As one donor explained in our research:

“It (the charity) went in a long time ago, and I can’t really remember the reason why.”

Think about how much the world has shifted over the last decade – Brexit, Covid, Trump, Black Lives Matter, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the wars in the Middle East. In that context, is it any surprise that the social and cultural landscape we now inhabit is reshaping decisions about which charities people choose to include in their wills – and which they decide to remove?

There is also some unsettling quantitative evidence out there. A detailed Australian study conducted by Bequest Assist in 2024, examining probate outcomes for 2,002 individuals recorded by 27 charities as confirmed pledgers, found that in more than 80% of cases the charity that held the pledge was NOT named as a beneficiary in the will at probate.

The changes we have lived through – perhaps most importantly, Covid – appear to have broken a certain kind of loyalty, a sense that a promise to a charity should be honoured. Particularly for larger organisations, the moral weight that once sat behind “I’ve left you something in my will” has, in many cases, simply fallen away.

That point should fundamentally reframe how the sector interprets the Remember A Charity data. If we cannot rely on a recorded pledge – something that represents a clear expression of intent – what confidence should we have that a younger donor who ticks a box at fifty will still have that charity in their will at eighty-five?

When the real decisions are made

Some of the most revealing evidence about the timing of legacy decisions comes from probate data. A number of years ago I analysed wills that achieved probate in 2015. When you look at when they were last amended, it reveals dramatic differences between charities.

A fifth of all bequests received by Macmillan Cancer Support came from wills that had been amended in the previous year. This may well suggest that many of those donors added Macmillan at the very end of their lives, almost certainly because the disease had become personally relevant. The British Red Cross showed a similar pattern as did Cancer Research UK. These are late-life decisions, made under the pressure of real circumstances.

This pattern tells us something crucial. The charities that benefit most from end-of-life decision-making are those where the cause has become personally and urgently relevant, or where the relationship is so deeply tied to the donor’s identity that it survives decades of change. Everything in between is vulnerable.

What engagement can and cannot explain

When we start to consider the impact of engagment on attitudes to including a gift in a will, the Fastmap research provides some essential context.

Tom Burke’s analysis demonstrates that emotional and psychological engagement – measured as a composite of satisfaction, loyalty, commitment, passion, personal connection and emotional connection – is the strongest predictor of legacy consideration. A one-point increase in engagement more than triples the odds of a supporter being in a higher legacy consideration group. Even after controlling for donation amount, engagement remained the dominant factor.

This is an important finding. It tells us that the sector’s long reliance on behavioural metrics – donation frequency, recency and value – as proxies for commitment may not be that useful. As we should all know, a supporter who has not given in years may still feel deeply connected. A supporter with a small direct debit ticking over may feel almost nothing.

Burke reinforces this with evidence from Russell James’ research showing that giving and volunteering decline sharply in the final three to five years of life – even amongst individuals who will later leave a charitable bequest. This is precisely the period when wills are most likely to be updated. If a charity relies on behavioural data to identify its most engaged supporters, it could well overlook many of its most committed people at the very moment legacy decisions are being made.

The Fastmap scatter plot plotting 100 charities by engagement against legacy consideration reveals a clear trend, but also important outliers. Animal charities cluster in the top right, their supporters characterised by identity-led engagement where giving is an expression of who they are. Marie Curie, the Royal British Legion, Great Ormond Street Hospital and others sit below the trend line – organisations with warm supporter bases but where the relationship may be more functional than identity-defining.

Burke’s sector-level analysis adds further nuance. Animal and cancer charities consistently achieve the highest engagement scores, with animal charities standing out particularly on passion. Overseas charities score lowest – which Burke attributes partly to the psychological dynamics of in-group bias and social distance.

But here is the critical finding: sector averages conceal enormous variation between individual charities. Within the overseas sector, some charities have among the lowest engagement levels of any organisation in the dataset, while others have among the highest. The variation within sectors is often larger than the variation between them.

This means no charity can safely assume its sector average applies to it. Understanding your own engagement profile – and how it compares with your specific competitors – is not optional. It is fundamental. Burke’s warning against organisational introspection reinforces this: a charity that sees improvement in its own scores may feel it is making progress, but if competitors have improved faster, the relative position has actually declined. And because legacy giving is inherently selective – most people ultimately leave gifts to just a small handful of charities – competitive positioning may well matter far more than in individual giving.

The identity question, and why it’s more complicated than it looks

We have to accept that engagement matters. But it does not explain the whole story.

When we speak to donors, particularly those towards the end of their lives, about how the legacy decision actually unfolds, a different logic emerges. It is less about the steady accumulation of positive sentiment and more about a specific set of questions that become increasingly pressing as time marches on - ‘have I made the right choices?’, ‘does this still reflect what matters to me?’ and ‘what message does this leave for the people I leave behind?’.

A gift in a will is not simply a financial transaction deferred. It is a statement about identity. It says something about what mattered, what counted, and what kind of person you were.

Fastmap’s LegacyMind profiling framework begins to address this. It identifies six psychological types: Family Orientated, Traditionalist, Impact Focused, Prestige, Symbolic Immortality, and Charitable Identity. Several of these map directly onto what the qualitative research has been finding for years.

But the qualitative work also reveals complexity that the profiles, in their current form, do not fully capture.

Take the animal charity sector. On the Fastmap scatter plot a few charts above, these organisations cluster together in the top right – high engagement, high consideration. It would be easy to treat them as a homogeneous group. But they are not. Battersea Dogs and Cats Home is, at its core, perceived to be a caring charity – it cuddles the animals, it looks after them, it rehomes them. The RSPCA is something quite different – it rescues animals from cruel treatment, it prosecutes, it punishes. Both are animal charities. Both score highly on engagement. But the psychological relationship supporters have with each is fundamentally different, and the identity each charity enables its supporters to express is equally distinct.

The same distinction shows up in children’s charities. Barnardo’s is typically seen as caring, nurturing, protective. The NSPCC, by contrast, is more interventionist, more confrontational. it is closer in tone to the RSPCA, positioned around actively rescuing children. The cause is the same. The identity proposition is not.

This matters because it determines which supporters will hold on to a charity in their final will – and which will let it go. Identity-led engagement tends to survive. Functional engagement appears to be less powerful.

Some of the most revealing data from the Fastmap portal illustrates this directly. When you look at Battersea’s supporter profiles and compare those with children against those without, the psychographic differences are stark. Supporters without children score dramatically higher on Symbolic Immortality and Charitable Identity. The interpretation is straightforward – these are people who want Battersea to value them. In the absence of family who will carry forward their memory, the charity becomes the vehicle through which they will be remembered. For this group, the legacy gift is not generosity – it is a way to live on.

But identity does not always express itself positively. Some donors use their will to send a message. Not “I’ve done a lovely thing”, but “I’m a little disappointed, to be honest – I’ve left all my money to charity.” The will becomes a way to deliver a final statement. The LegacyMind profiles currently assume positive motivation – prestige, remembrance, doing good. But the qualitative evidence shows that some of the most committed legacy decisions are driven by anger or estrangement. Understanding this dimension of identity should never be ignored.

I’d also make one additional point specifically about overtly political causes. If a will is, in part, a statement to others, then how that statement will be received matters. As organisations become more overtly political in how they present themselves, they are not simply sharpening their positioning, they are introducing a new layer of interpretation – one that will not be controlled by the donor, but by those left behind. Donors understand that. They know their will may need to be read, explained or even defended by surviving family and friends who may not share their views.

In that context, the decision is no longer just about personal belief, but about how comfortably that belief can be carried forward by others. And for many, that is where hesitation creeps in. The result is predictable: when it comes to the final will, organisations that feel too politically charged can be set aside in favour of those that feel easier to stand behind. “No. Not the political ones” is less a rejection of the cause than a reflection of how identity, and its interpretation by others, ultimately shapes the decision.

The charity portfolio, and the fairness problem

One of the least understood aspects of legacy decision-making is how donors construct and manage their charity portfolios.

If we take international development, for example, donors increasingly build deliberate portfolios where each charity plays a distinct role. MSF handles healthcare. World Food Programme covers food and water. Red Cross provides emergency response. The donor has assembled a team, and each member has a job. In terms of engagement, there may be very little to separate them – the donor cares about all of them. The question of who stays in the will and who is removed often comes down to something much simpler: who is asking at the right time, and who has maintained the relationship most consistently.

But there is another dynamic at work that the current models do not capture at all – fairness.

In our qualitative work, we have encountered donors who have removed charities from their wills not because the relationship had weakened, but because they felt the distribution had become unfair. One donor explained that a charity kept asking them to increase their regular gift, and they had done so willingly because they loved the work. But when they came to review their will, they felt that charity was now getting more than its fair share compared with the others on their list – and they took it out. Not as a punishment, but as a correction. The charity’s own fundraising success in lifetime giving had, paradoxically, undermined its legacy position.

“I changed my mind because I figured in fact, they’ve had enough money from me now. They did everything I wanted, nothing wrong – it’s nothing like that.”

This is the kind of insight that no engagement model or psychographic profile can predict. It emerges only from conversations with donors about how they actually think about their wills – conversations that very few in the sector are having.

Where the gaps are

Taken together, these three studies represent a huge step forward in helping us understand how legacy giving works. The Remember A Charity data tracks the macro trend. The Fastmap research quantifies the relationship between engagement and legacy consideration with unprecedented rigour, and begins to capture the psychological types that drive legacy motivation. The MPFA qualitative work reveals what happens at the other end of the timeline – when the will is actually being written for the last time.

But there are gaps that none of the current research adequately addresses. And they all point in the same direction: we do not yet understand, with sufficient depth or precision, how a donor’s relationship with charities changes over their lifetime – and this relates to both lifetime and end of life giving.

We do not understand how motivations change with age

The Fastmap engagement model is cross-sectional. It measures what people feel at a given moment. The LegacyMind profiles capture what kind of person a supporter is. But neither models how the relationship between supporter and charity evolves across decades. A Symbolic Immortality supporter at fifty-two who casually adds a charity to their will is psychologically a very different proposition from the same person at eighty-three. The profile might be the same. The stakes and the scrutiny are entirely different.

The probate data tells us that some charities benefit enormously from late-life decision-making, while others definitely depend on gifts placed decades earlier – representing a high level of identity association. But we have no systematic understanding of what donors at different ages actually need from charities to move from consideration to action. The fifty-five-year-old is almost certainly not looking for the same thing as the eighty-year-old.

We do not understand what keeps a charity in a will

We know from the Bequest Assist data that a place in a will is become more fragile. We know that increasingly donors are less likely to want to give us a pledge – which tells us one important thing – they know they may change their mind.

“I haven’t told any charities because I feel your circumstances can change, and I don’t want to make a promise in case I can’t keep it.”

There will obviously be a group who value anonymity for other reasons, but the fall in numbers of those willing to pledge does have a message for us.

“For what? They don’t need to know until the time. Don’t worry, they will get the money. It’s written down.”

We know from the qualitative work that donors routinely remove charities – sometimes because the relationship has gone cold, sometimes because they cannot remember why the charity was there, sometimes because of fairness dynamics within their portfolio. But we have no systematic understanding of what predicts whether a gift will endure. Is it the type of engagement? The nature of the cause? The quality of ongoing stewardship? The frequency of contact? The way the original decision was framed? We do not yet know – and this is arguably the most important question in legacy fundraising.

We do not understand the gap between engagement and action

Tom Burke’s analysis shows that engagement is a strong predictor of legacy consideration. But consideration is not the same as action. Many highly engaged supporters do not go on to leave legacies. When you ask them why, the barriers they describe – the effort of updating a will, concern about cost, the feeling that the will is already sorted, the simple absence of a clear invitation – are not failures of engagement. They are failures of decision architecture.

The Fastmap strategic driver map (you can see the full video on this here) offers useful guidance on where to invest to improve engagement. David and his team highlight that focusing on demonstrating impact can be like pressing the accelerator when the car is not in gear – the engine revs but you do not move. That is a powerful insight. But the same principle applies at a higher level: you can get engagement entirely right and still fail to convert it into legacy gifts if the ask is poorly framed or the timing is wrong.

This brings us back to the 1% reframing described at the start of this article. That room full of the most engaged supporters in the organisation – every one of whom said no to a legacy, and every one of whom said yes to 1% – is the clearest possible demonstration that engagement and action are not the same thing. The barrier was never the relationship. It was the architecture of the decision. And the sector’s current models, however sophisticated, do not account for this. They measure the strength of the feeling. They do not measure whether the ask, when it finally arrives, is framed in a way that the donor can say yes to.

We do not know enough about what donors need from charities at the end of life

This is the biggest gap of all. The sector has barely begun to ask the most fundamental question – what do donors actually need from charities in the final years of their lives, when the decisions that matter are being made?

My qualitative evidence suggests that what donors need at the end of life is quite specific. They need to feel that the charity still knows them and understands their relationship with them. They need to feel that their contribution has mattered and will continue to matter. They need reassurance that the organisation is stable, competent, and will use the money well. They need to feel that the charity reflects who they are – not who they were twenty years ago, but who they are now. And they need to feel that the people they leave behind will understand why this gift was important. This last point cannot be over-emphasised.

But because donors are increasingly unlikely to share their intentions, charities are operating largely blind – unaware of the potential, unable to steward the relationship, and unable to deepen a commitment that already exists.

The practical implications are substantial. Legacy giving needs to remain visible and meaningful in ongoing communications. Genuine stewardship matters. Thanking donors well matters. Showing impact and communicating stability and continuity matters. How staff changes or rebrands are managed matters – perhaps more than most organisations realise. And legacy communications need to inspire rather than simply inform about the technicalities of the process.

What legacy fundraising needs now

To my mind, the main issue we face is that the discipline, as currently practised, is overwhelmingly focused on the front end of the process – on free will guides and free will writing services, recruitment, on pipeline-building, on persuading people to include a charity in their will for the first time. It is far less focused on what happens after that moment – on understanding what donors need at different stages of their lives, and on ensuring that the gift, once planted, survives to harvest.

The decision-making framework that follows below is not simply theoretical. It has been built over many years, using multiple studies, and successfully tested in practice – with great results – for organisations including Rethink, Marie Curie, Alzheimer’s Society and the British Lung Foundation. It reflects what we have seen repeatedly when you sit down with donors and try to understand how these decisions are actually made.

What it makes clear is that legacy giving follows a process. One that does not end until the end of a life.

Assuming – or even hoping – that a legacy gift written into a will this year will still be there when the donor dies in 2066 makes about as much sense as treating a direct debit signed up by a face-to-face fundraiser as income guaranteed for life.

Let me explain how legacy decision making appears to work.

First, the idea has to enter someone’s field of vision. Someone has to be asked – and asked in the right way. The Remember A Charity data suggests this is increasingly happening, and happening earlier.

Second, the decision is driven by underlying psychological needs – how I will be remembered, whether anything of me will last, whether I will have made a difference to something that is important to me. The LegacyMind profiles begin to capture these needs. The challenge is understanding how they evolve across a lifetime, and how the giving patterns that emerge at the end of life – the disease, the values, the identity – should shape how charities position themselves.

Third, those needs are tested against the real world, in the context of an ever more rapidly changing socio-economic landscape or, put more simply, what’s happening in the news and in people’s lives. Cause priorities shift, trust rises and falls, questions emerge about how money will be used, alongside the competing claims of family and the fairness dynamics of a donor’s charitable “portfolio”. The Fastmap engagement data and competitive benchmarking provide essential context for understanding where charities stand relative to others at this stage.

And finally, the decision is most definitely not fixed. It is revisited, adjusted, and often reversed. What is included at fifty is reconsidered at seventy and tested again at eighty-five. The charities that survive this process are those that have maintained a living relationship – not those that were merely warmly remembered from an earlier point in life.

As one donor put it simply:

“I’ve kept them in my will because I trust them to do what they say they’ll do. That’s really all it comes down to.”

The evidence base is richer than it has ever been. The tools are more sophisticated. The data exists at a scale that makes real progress possible.

The question the sector now needs to answer is whether we understand our donors well enough – at every stage of their lives, and above all at the end – to earn and keep the place in their will that we are asking for.

That understanding does not come from data alone. It comes from sitting with donors in their seventies and eighties and listening to how they think, what they fear, what they hope their final choices will say about them. It comes from research that most of the sector is not doing, with people that most of the sector is not reaching. And it is, I believe, the most important frontier in legacy fundraising today.

If you’d like to explore what this might mean for your organisation, I’d be very happy to talk. There isn’t a standard playbook here – it’s about working through what your donors need, and where your current approach may be helping or hindering. Feel free to get in touch if that would be useful.