Advice Admin & Legal Your Guide to Legacy Marketing

Your Guide to Legacy Marketing

Why is legacy marketing important?

Legacy marketing is all about the long game. The leads and pledges you receive today won’t come into effect for possibly 5 - 20 years. However, that doesn’t mean it’s not important. Over the next 30 years, £5.5 trillion is set to be passed down to the next generation, which is a huge opportunity for charities across the UK. So if you want to benefit and increase your income in the future, you need to be investing in your legacy marketing today.

How to build your legacy strategy:

Behind every successful legacy marketing campaign is a dedicated strategy. Before you dive into the world of legacy fundraising, it’s important to take a step back and check out the bigger picture. You can do this by:

Conducting research to help inform your legacy strategy
Reviewing your current legacy messaging and proposition
Reviewing your current legacy marketing activities
Identifying any gaps
Exploring at the different tactics and tools you can use by looking at other charities or businesses and their approach

We recently held a webinar on this very subject with RNID who talked about how they developed their strategy. You can watch it back through our online community here.

How to make the legacy ask

Legacy fundraising is not about the hard ask. You need to make sure your audiences are aware about the difference a legacy makes and why it’s important to the future of your charity, then follow it up with a clear call to action. There are different ways you can do this, such as:

‘Will you consider leaving a gift in your will?’
‘Request a gifts in wills guide to find out more’
Write your will for free through our free will writing services

You can find out more about call to actions through our online community, here.

How to launch your first legacy marketing campaign

Legacy marketing campaigns come in all shapes and sizes depending on your capacity and budgets. A good place to start is drip feeding the legacy message through communications that are already being sent out to spread awareness, which saves you time and money.

Once you have your feet firmly in the legacy marketing ground, you can look at a dedicated campaign. There are lots to consider here including the:

Different audiences you want to target
Channels you want to test out (we find a multi-channel approach are most effective)
Time of year for the campaign
Call to actions

Find out more about how you can launch a legacy marketing campaign here.

How to increase internal buy in

Sometimes to get started with legacy fundraising you need to get approval from above. And unfortunately many teams are still reluctant to talk and invest time and resource into legacy giving. So what can you do to overcome this?

Make it clear that legacies are about the future and not death
Write a blog for staff about the importance of this way of giving
Offer free wills to staff and volunteers
Share compelling stats on the potential of this income stream
Hold training sessions to ensure the relevant teams are comfortable talking about legacies

We held a webinar with our charity partner RHS who talked about how they ran a free will campaign for staff and volunteers, watch it back through our online community here.

Give your Legacy Marketing Campaigns a Leg Up

To help you continue to learn and grow your legacy marketing, we’ve created an online community just for you. Join Leg up for Legacies Community for free today, where you’ll find a treasure trove of toolkits, knowledge and learnings on all things legacy marketing.