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Legacies are growing faster for smaller charities

Fundraising | Gemma Ware | 1 Sep 2006

Legacy income has grown over twice as fast for smaller charities than larger charities over the past four years, according to the results of the Legacy Market Audit 2006.

The audit reveals that although smaller charities with a legacy income of under £7m saw their legacy income grow by 5.2 per cent per year, those with legacy income over £20m only saw their income grow by 2.3 per cent.

Conducted by Lightspeed Research and sponsored by Remember a Charity, the audit examines the legacy income of the 32 charities in the Legacy Market Audit Consortium, which represent around 44 per cent of the legacy market.

According to Meg Abdy, Legacy Foresight project manager, this is because there have been: "a higher volume of smaller legacies, not a small number of larger ones. It appears that a new generation of legacy donors is emerging who are interested in more contemporary causes - the ones they grew up with - and are more willing to take 'risks' by leaving money to less established charities," she said.

Abdy added this is reflected in causes such as welfare & housing which saw legacy income grow by 45 per cent and conservation and the environment, which grew by 17 per cent.

Despite this, the audit re-iterates that the legacy market is still heavily weighted towards larger charities and the top 10 legacy charities, which include Cancer Research UK, RNLI and the RSPCA, account for 34 per cent of the market. However, not all large charities receive a large amount of legacy income. Although Cancer Research UK and the National Trust receive 30 per cent of their voluntary income from legacies, it only makes up 7 per cent of Oxfam's.

The audit also reveals that expenditure on legacy marketing has grown an average of 9.9 per cent per annum over the last 10 years. But Abdy believes that: "The charities which are performing best in legacies are those with the best overall brand profile", rather than those that spend huge amounts on legacy marketing.

Jonathan Parris, direct of Remember a Charity said the audit showed that charities need to reach out to new and different audiences. "With more people leaving a gift to charity in their wills, there is a larger legacy 'cake' but more charities are sharing it. This is not a time for charities that have traditionally relied on legacy income to rest on their laurels, but to re-energise their legacy fundraising strategy," he said. "Remember a Charity is a platform that allows charities to collectively grow the legacy market, reaching supporters not currently on charities' databases," he added.

Carol Hicks, a fundraiser at the small disability charity Skill which is a member of the scheme, admitted that although her charity has seen three of its seven legacies come in the last year, the money comes in a "an erratic nature" and is almost impossible to predict. "We have to accept that they are an extremely welcome windfall when they come, but we can't plan for them," she said.

A separate piece of legacy analysis, carried out by Richard Radcliffe of Smee & Ford, shows that charities are failing to convert their current donors into legators. Drawing on the results of focus groups with over 850 donors, Radcliffe found that on average, although 76 per cent of donors had wills and 34 per cent had legacies, only half of those legacies were for the charity they were representing. He suggests that this is because "donors think 'remember a cause' rather than 'remember a charity'. Action is taken because they want to take it and not because they have been asked to take the action of leaving a legacy," he said.

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Directory: Cancer Research UK (CRUK) | Legacy Foresight | National Trust | Remember A Charity | Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) | Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA)
Who's Who: Richard Radcliffe