3 Key Insights Revealed by Our Legacy Potential League

Since the release on Monday 19th November our Legacy Potential Premier League Table 2018/19 has caused a big stir in the charity sector. It is being covered by major industry press as well as other mainstream publications like The Financial Times and The Economist.

Our Legacy Potential Premier League is based on our research into the legacy giving plans of supporters aged 50+, capturing both current legacy donors and those who would consider leaving a legacy.

The legacy rank shows what proportion of each charity’s supporters we surveyed would leave a legacy when compared to the other charities in the league. This legacy rank indicates which charities are performing best in their legacy fundraising. The performance of legacy marketing is an area that is notoriously difficult to track due to the long lead time between a supporter deciding to leave a legacy and the charity receiving the gift, especially as legacy givers are unlikely to tell the charity. This is an area we also covered fully in this webinar presentation: ‘Why don’t people tell charities when they leave a legacy?’.

WHAT DOES THE LEGACY RANK REVEAL ABOUT LEGACY MARKETING?

1) Animal charities are top dogs for legacies

Out of the charities analysed, animal charities’ supporters are more likely to consider leaving a legacy to them when compared to children’s and cancer charities, with Cats Protection as the overall winner.

When The FT asked Matt Vincent, Manager at Cats Protection, for a comment he said that legacies “fund almost half of everything we do”, adding that “one out of every two cats we help is thanks to people remembering our work in their wills”.

2) Only two cancer charities appear in the top 10

Cancer Research UK are ranked 5th and are the first non-animal charity to appear in the league. They are closely followed by Macmillan Cancer Support who are ranked 7th, and two more big cancer charities appear further down the league.

Whilst CRUK and Macmillan aren’t as effective at encouraging their supporters to consider leaving a legacy as animal charities, it should be noted how much bigger their potential audiences are with Macmillan just edging out CRUK to have the most supporters.

3) Charities in the same causal sector can have different strengths and weaknesses

Our fixtures are comparisons between two charities’ legacy marketing performance and consider different attributes measured against our benchmarking data. They show how a charities’ approach to legacy marketing affects their legacy giving potential.

One showed that although CRUK excelled in most of the motivational factors for leaving a legacy, e.g. ‘They are always in the news’, ‘We need to solve this problem’ etc., Marie Curie outperformed them for ‘They do so much for people in the local community’. This makes it obvious that there is room for improvement in even the top performing legacy marketing teams.

To learn more about the motivations for leaving a legacy, and the barriers, take a look at our Guide to Maximising Legacy Fundraising Consideration.

We regularly help charities with bespoke legacy marketing insights and would be happy to help with our legacy fundraising strategy in any way we can. To learn more about our Legacy Potential Premier League Table 2018/19 how to improve your legacy rank, and other fundraising and marketing research we can help you with please don’t hesitate to get in touch with David Cole, Managing Director at fastmap on david.cole@fastmap.com or +44 020 72420702.

This article was written by Declan Spinks, Marketing Executive at fastmap. To find out how fastmap can help you with your legacy fundraising strategy and other market research needs visit www.fastmap.com or get in touch with David Cole, Managing Director, fastmap on +44 (0) 20 7242 702 or david.cole@fastmap.com.