Analysing performance data from groups of charities to provide a timely snapshot of the latest trends

The latest results from the Legacy Monitor are in!

Legacy income up…
Despite the acute uncertainty we face because of Brexit, our 80 Legacy Monitor members’ saw their legacy income grow by 4.3% to £1.54bn in the past 12 months. This strong growth is surprising given the recent slowdown in key economic variables; which saw house prices grow by just 1.5% p.a. in the first quarter of 2019 while share prices are lower than they were a year ago. We believe that some substantial bequests reported by some members have driven this growth.

…while bequest numbers fall
We’ve seen a fall in bequest notifications, which are down across the consortium by 7%. We believe that much of this drop is due to delays at the probate registries, caused by the introduction of new structure and processes. Providing that these delays are caught up, charities should see their bequest figures back to ‘normal’ by the time of our next bulletin, so watch this space.

For further analysis, you can download the Legacy Bulletin. You can also keep up to date with legacy market news and trends by subscribing to our newsletter.

It’s that time of the year again when we’re starting to think about next year’s Legacy Monitor consortium – how time flies! This year we’re starting the process earlier to coincide more effectively with everyone’s planning and budgeting cycles. We are pleased to be able to announce one new member for 2020; Action on Hearing Loss, who work on behalf of the UK’s 9 million people who are deaf or have hearing loss. Action on Hearing Loss (then RNID) were involved in our very first legacy forecasting project 25 years ago, so it’s great to have them back on board.

If you know any charity that would or should like to join the consortium, please let us know. For those of you that might be considering leaving the programme (perish the thought), please let us know by the end of September; we will, of course, send out a formal reminder beforehand.

We now have a date in the diary: 2nd October, for our annual market review presentation. This is a great time for all consortium members to come together for an afternoon to discuss economic, social and competitive factors driving the legacy sector. We will be sending out invites in due course and look forward to seeing as many of you as possible.

Legacy Journey has been live for three months now, and we’re starting to see a wide range of communications across the different legacy segments. It’s fascinating to see what all our consortium members are sending out.

We will be uploading response rates from the communications shortly, and, because we are recording all multi variants – including in one case, an email with two different case studies and three creatives each! – we should start to get a good initial picture of what’s working well. This detail will help us to understand where we would like to get to on measuring the ‘immeasurable’ and defining what an effective stewardship programme is.

Understanding good stewardship and how to apply it to an engaging and inspiring supporter journey is vital, but challenging to do. Legacy Journey sets out to help you answer these questions and ultimately improve the chances of a supporter leaving a gift in their will. Of course, the more members we have, the more insight we can generate.

If you are interested in joining the programme in the first year on a pro-rata basis, please get in touch with Richard Hill.

In an increasingly challenging fundraising environment, legacy giving remains a vital source of voluntary income. As the legacy giving sector continues to grow, we are seeing a more diverse range of charities receiving legacy gifts each year – no longer the sole benefit of a few large, long-established charities. Coupled with consumer facing awareness raising campaigns led by Remember a Charity, charities are speaking to their donors in higher numbers and more frequently about legacy giving than ever before. And, 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.

We know that measuring and evaluating legacy marketing activities can be challenging. A lack of consistency, both within individual charities and as a wider sector, makes it difficult to evidence a causal link between what is spent on legacy marketing, and the legacy income received as a result. This is why we launched our Legacy Marketing Benchmarks programme, most recently working with a consortium of 36 major charities in 2017, to analyse and compare their investment in legacy fundraising.

Based on the 2017 project, we were able to estimate that the top 100 charities alone invested £25m into legacy fundraising initiatives, employing over 450 legacy marketing and administration staff, and attracting 200,000 new prospects and pledgers.

New for 2019

Based on client feedback and learnings from past projects, for 2019 we are going to be looking at;

• Detailed benchmark data of current activity, to compare and contrast the ways charities are investing in legacy marketing activities, determining the scale, how effective they are in generating a ‘response’ and how investment is changing over time
• The amount of legacy income generated as a direct result of an increase in legacy marketing activity and the time profile over which a charity will receive that additional income
• Legacy stewardship and will-writing initiatives in more detail

We pleased to be working on this with legacy marketing specialists Legacy Voice. Our teams have collaborated closely in the past, including the two previous Legacy Marketing Benchmarks projects and last year’s Understanding Legacy Stewardship research. We believe that by working together we can provide robust analysis and astute interpretation of the findings, leading to conclusions that are both practical and strategic.

If you’d like to find out more about the project and how you can get involved, download the brochure here or contact Kath Horsley for more information.

In the 12 months to March 2019, our 80 Legacy Monitor members received £1.52bn in legacy income, representing 1.8% growth on the previous year.

However, legacy income has been slowing since 2013, thanks mainly to the deteriorating economy and falling house prices. The number of bequests has also largely remained flat.

Download the latest Legacy Bulletin for more analysis.

Legacy Monitor Netherlands 2019 has kicked off with 4 new charity members: Alzheimer Nederland, IFAW, Nationaal Ouderenfonds and Plan Nederland.

Between them, this year’s 19 consortium members represent almost half of the top 100 Dutch legacy charities’ combined legacy income.

This year’s programme will continue to analyse performance and marketing benchmarks, update our Dutch legacy market forecasts and carry out new research into legacy donors’ motivations and attitudes.

Legacies have become a very important source of income for Dutch charitable organisations. In 2016 the hundred largest legacy charities received €311 million through wills, representing 27% of all fundraised income, compared to just 21% in 2005. Faster growth is predicted for the next ten years, averaging 3.8% p.a. Over that period the number of Dutch deaths is predicted to increase by 1.1% per year; house prices are expected to rise by 3.9% per year and share prices by 3.3% per year.

Arjen van Ketel, programme manager of Legacy Monitor Netherlands said “We’re delighted to welcome our new charities on board. As the consortium has reached this large number of participants, we can collect and benchmark data from a very robust sample and make  comparisons between sectors. We can also conduct more consumer research and explore issues such as the growth of will-making, the behaviour and perceptions of Dutch baby boomers and the “invisible” legators who exist both inside and beyond a charity’s database”.

What’s new this year?

The Legacy Foresight Netherlands team is planning a new research project on the Dutch ‘invisible legator’ – the 46% of legators who were apparently unknown to the charity before they died. The project will build on the widely reported British Invisible Legator project carried out in 2017, using an in-depth survey of 500+ Dutch legacy donors.

To keep up to date with our news on the UK and Dutch legacy markets, you can sign up to our newsletter by clicking the Subscribe button to the right.

In 2018 our 80 Legacy Monitor members received £1.46bn in legacy income which equates to a 2.3% fall in the income recorded in 2017. Bequest numbers have also dropped over the last three quarters, with figures now totalling 54,325 for 2018.

There are three main factors behind the decline; A slowdown in the number of deaths, and as a result a downturn in the volume of bequests notified. Secondly, we’ve seen a slight change in the bequest ‘mix’, with residual numbers lagging cash gifts. And last – but by no means least – the macro-economic climate has weakened as the ‘fog of Brexit’ continues to hamper economic activity.

We estimate that if Briton crashes out of the EU without a deal, legacy incomes will be £1.2bn lower over the next five years. The closer to the Brexit deadline we get, the higher the chance of this occurring.

For more on the latest Legacy Monitor results, download the Legacy Bulletin.

We’re excited to announce the launch of Legacy Journey, a new online platform which will track the communications received by legacy and in-memory donors throughout their supporter journeys.

Legacy Journey is a consortium-based product and will give visibility of every member’s legacy stewardship communications across all channels and all legacy segments. 

How it works

Unique seeds for each supporter segment are inserted into consortium clients’ databases with all communication channels opted in, including direct mail, email, SMS and telephone. The communications then received are scanned and uploaded to the Legacy Journey platform to be viewed immediately, each piece of communication can be ‘clicked’ so that the entire PDF creative can be viewed.

Benefits for legacy fundraisers

Legacy Journey will enable legacy fundraisers to:

• Ensure their planned supporter experience matches the actual experience received.
• Ensure GDPR compliance is met and that internal data ownership rules are being followed
• Learn from peer charities about the breadth, frequency and ‘quality’ of communications, and gain inspiration for creative and copy
• See how legacy communication trends across the consortium are changing over time

As well as access to the Legacy Journey platform, members will receive communications updates on a monthly basis, a bespoke annual review with recommendations to improve legacy communications and an annual consortium-wide presentation, discussing best practice examples, charity case studies and wider consortium trends.

Interest and investment in legacy stewardship is growing

Legacy stewardship is a hot topic among fundraisers, as a way of converting, retaining and, potentially growing the value of gifts from known supporters. Fundraisers are investing in cultivation activities which convert prospects to pledgers and retention activities to ensure that pledgers keep the gift in their will over time.

Last year’s Understanding Legacy Stewardship research project involved 29 leading UK charities. Our member survey revealed that almost all of the charities in our consortium expected to be investing more resource on legacy stewardship over the next five years; 42% of them anticipated a lot more investment.

But despite the growing interest, almost half of all respondents (46%) felt that legacy stewardship does not – as yet – have sufficient priority in their charity. Our clients told us that a lack of hard evidence – about what works, the return on investment and actionable strategies – is curbing organisational commitment. 

Legacy Journey, alongside other sector initiatives including our recent stewardship research, will help to address this evidence gap. As the consortium grows we will gain a much greater understanding of what works and what doesn’t work for legacy stewardship, and ultimately that can only be a good thing for supporters as well as for fundraisers.

If you’re interested in joining the consortium or finding out more about Legacy Journey, please get in touch with Richard Hill: r.hill@legacyforesight.co.uk