As the legacy market continues to grow, it is becoming increasingly complex and competitive, as charities vie for the attention of potential future legacy donors. But as we all know too well, measuring and evaluating legacy marketing investment can be challenging. A lack of consistency, both within individual charities and as a broader sector, makes it difficult to evidence a causal link between what is spent on legacy marketing and the legacy income received. Not to mention the time lag that exists between the investment and receiving a gift.

Despite this complexity, in today’s highly scrutinised fundraising environment, legacy leaders are responsible for understanding the effectiveness of their marketing activities better, both to secure additional investment and to evaluate the ‘return’ on the resources invested.

This is why we launched the first Legacy Marketing Benchmarks project in 2016 and why we have run the project twice since in 2017 and 2019.

Here’s just a taste of what we learned in 2019, based on a sample of 33 leading charities’ data:

• Overall, like for like spend and staff were up significantly – outpacing total marketing budgets
• Legacy investment relative to income is still tiny – across those 33 charities, legacy budgets (excluding staff costs) accounted for 4% of all fundraising spend, but 44% of fundraising income!
• Spend was driven by donor acquisition
  • TV (for those who could afford it)
  • Free Will Schemes, both on and offline
• The time spent on both stewardship and acquisition was up, at the cost of awareness raising

So, where are we now?

How have the extraordinary events of the past year affected legacy budgets and activities?

How have marketing strategies changed, perhaps for good?

The fourth Legacy Marketing Benchmarks project will take place later this year, kicking off in September and reporting early 2022. This will be based on legacy marketing data for 2019/20 and 2020/21, allowing us to see how trends in legacy marketing investment have changed over the past six years and how the pandemic has affected charities’ legacy marketing programmes over the past eighteen months.

The metrics we collect cover legacy marketing capacity, investment by channel and marketing responses (in terms of pledgers and prospects gained). This year we also hope to create some case studies of charities that have invested in legacy marketing and are starting to see the impact of that investment.

Proposals for the 2021 Legacy Marketing Benchmarks project will be launched in a couple of months but meanwhile, if you have any questions, please get in touch with Kath Horsley or join our mailing list to stay informed on the project.