Great Ormond Street Hospital and Sightsavers have been named as the best exponents of online legacy fundraising, but there remains more to do for many other charities.

According to Bluefrog’s Generating legacies online research project, which assessed the top 100 charities by voluntary income, there were improvements in all areas since their last report in 2007, but there is still work to be done, particularly in legacy marketing and giving more consideration to the needs of potential legators.

It found that four-fifths of charities do not provide a single click-through from their homepage to their legacy pages – 22 per cent requiring three or more clicks to access.

Meanwhile, 71 per cent of charities do not offer a large text option for those with poor or impaired sight, while more than half use design styles such as reversed out text, greyed text or coloured text on another colour which can make it difficult to read, something which is considered discrimination under the Disability Discrimination Act.

The agency also expresses concern that 55 per cent of participants do not emphasise the option of leaving a residuary legacy, particularly troubling given that residuary legacies are, on average, almost 10 times more valuable than a pecuniary request - £35,000 compared to £3,800.

Bluefrog also assessed how well effectively charities follow up on requests for further information submitted via their websites; nearly 40 per cent of charities examined in the report did not respond, and therefore “in effect sent the message that they were happy to ignore a potential major gift”.