Want to build lasting relationships with your donors? Research can help secure legacy gifts.
Legacy gifts aren’t just financial transactions. They’re deeply personal decisions that come from a place of trust and connection. Building and nurturing strong relationships with your supporters is an integral part of best-practice fundraising. Research can help you understand who your supporters are, what drives their giving and who might be best placed to leave you a legacy.
Legacy income sits perfectly alongside other fundraising programmes, and you don’t need a huge investment to ensure you have an impactful campaign. By setting aside some time to start researching and identifying legacy prospects now, you can help strengthen your organisation’s resilience and sustainability in the future.
Look for legacy prospects in your database
Your own database is always the best starting point to identify legacy prospects. Analyse your existing data to find who among your current supporters ‘looks’ like legacy prospects. Ask intelligent questions about your database, and it can be a really powerful way of getting more insight into your donors. Start by running a search for your long-term supporters, even those who may have given relatively small amounts.
Wealth screening
It’s always worth looking ahead for legacy prospects when wealth screening. Wealth screening involves comparing the information in a data source such as Prospecting for Gold’s Wealth Intelligence Database with your supporter database to find matches.
We’ve been building our Wealth Intelligence Database for twenty-five years. Today, it has information about over 270,000 high-net-worth and well-connected individuals based in the UK. Through this process, we can build on what you already know about these supporters and fast-track the identification process for a legacy campaign.
Million Pound Properties
People who make up the top 1% of wealth in the UK have, on average, 30% of their wealth in property. This means around 70% of their wealth is in either financial assets, pensions or other assets. So, knowing the value of a property is a key step to understanding someone’s overall wealth and legacy potential. Our Million Pound Property Tags provide details of your supporters living in properties with a current value of £1 million or more, based upon a known sale price and published property price indices. Undertaking some Million Pound Property screening is a great way to test for mid to high-value donors who might progress to a major donor pool or those who may be suitable for a legacy programme.
Break down silos
Too often, fundraisers work in silos with major gifts, individual giving and corporate fundraising never crossing paths. Running a legacy campaign is a fantastic way to break down these organisational barriers because it fits with all areas of fundraising.
Your legacy campaign can complement activities that are already happening across your organisation and give your volunteers and service delivery staff something new to talk about. By involving them in discussions about legacy campaigns from the beginning, your most passionate advocates will have all the knowledge they need to tell people about legacies on your behalf.
If you don’t have a legacy campaign in place, then your fundraising portfolio isn’t complete and the gifts in wills won’t come. Legacy fundraising is a truly sustainable form of fundraising. That will keep income flowing in and allow you to turn your attention to other areas.
If you’re ready to build your legacy income, we can help.
Our team has 25 years of experience providing research, wealth screening, consultancy, regulatory compliance, and training support to charities of all sizes, making fundraising more effective and successful.
To find out how we can help you on your fundraising journey, get in touch with us today.