Willing Supporters

I’ve spent a while thinking about the best topic to choose for this article, having found that I’ll be writing it early on in the year’s Fundraising Fellowship.

What’s really struck me about our cohort is the number of different directions we’ve taken to get here. I’ve worked closely with full-time fundraisers for most of my working life in the arts, but only recently has it become the single focus of my own job description. My previous work in communications and marketing brings certain skills to the cohort, whilst others in the peer group are Artistic Directors, company founders, Executive Directors and much more.

Of course we’re all passionate about the arts and constantly thinking about maximising the impact of our own actions, whilst remaining conscious of how many external factors we can’t control. One of my peers recommended Mel Robbins’ Let Them theory as a useful reinforcement of how to let go of these everyday uncontrollables, of whatever size and impact.

If you’re reading this and wondering whether you should apply to become a Fellow, I’d strongly encourage you to take one of Cause4’s excellent short courses. I learned so much from attending Michelle Wright’s Legacy Fundraising course last year, and for this piece I’ve chosen to write about how increasing my efforts on giving in wills has been a valuable investment – which will surely be true for many others.

But first, a reminder that ‘Every gift has invisible fingerprints all over it’. I’ve never met Emily Bocking, who is based in Canada, but I saw her post just as I was preparing this blog. She makes such an important point, that in effective fundraising ‘the whole community comes together, everyone lifts something essential’; that effective fundraisers celebrate this rather than assigning any success to a single, apparently mercurial individual. I think this is particularly true for gifts in wills, when the donor has picked out your charity as one which has meant most to them across their whole life. As Michelle pointed out in the course, this is also ‘usually the largest donation an individual ever gives’. So being left a legacy is a real privilege – and is obviously not the result of a single email, no matter how carefully composed.

All of the stats tell us that more people are leaving gifts in their wills. Charities’ legacy income hit £4.5billion in 2024, and annual increases are greatly outpacing inflation and 16.6% of wills including a charitable gift (Legacy Futures and Smee & Ford report 2025).

Large charities with universal brand recognition will always dominate, of course: the ones that a solicitor is likely to recommend when their client tells them that they really care about cancer research or distressed animals. The report above quotes that nearly 40% of all legacies to charity in 2024 were classified as supporting Health, and half of that was given to only eight charities. Our sector, ‘Arts and Education’, is a relatively small portion of their ‘Other’ segment, which attracts 18.8% of all support. But the good news is that it’s expanding faster than any other area, with annual growth averaging at over 15%. ‘Oxbridge colleges have helped to boost this’, they report: but there are still plenty of crumbs left even once all of these well-resourced mega-charities have taken (more than?) their fair share.

So, as more ‘niche’ charities, we need to be active in reminding our engaged supporters to think of us and not just those distressed donkeys. Over the past 18 months, I’ve been working to embed reminders about gifts in wills into more of our regular communications to our active donors and members.

It’s easy to postpone working on gifts in wills. But they’ve already provided vital income for the charity I work for, even with minimal promotion, so it wasn’t so hard to argue that this was a valuable investment. Actually, making a bit of a culture change in this area is likely to be your biggest legacy to your successors.

Here’s some of what I did:

• I set up a working group of highly engaged supporters, including current and former chairs of the board and a couple of people who had already told me that they planned to donate in their own wills. It was particularly interesting to hear them discussing how differently they felt we should proceed, with approaches ranging from gung-ho to softly-softly. Negotiating their collective buy-in has had an impact well beyond this small number of people.

• I made sure that we have clear information online, always understanding that prospective donors will want to think of their loved ones before considering any charitable donation, and emphasising that they should also seek professional legal advice.

• I researched will-writing services, and after testing several, we signed up for a limited six-month period with a service which offers in-person appointments with local solicitors rather than an online-only approach. We offered free wills to a few hundred supporters, which around a dozen pursued. Some were delighted: ‘Absolutely first class. She sent me a draft for approval, then visited with a colleague to act as a witness. They will keep a copy of the will – there was NO CHARGE for any aspect of the process – Simple, very pleasant, timely – all one expects! And I added a donation too’. Others reported that their assigned solicitor had no available appointments or didn’t reply at all. So results were mixed, but the most valuable outcome was arguably that several further supporters were motivated to include us in the wills they were preparing independently, and some others told us that they had already thought of us in this way. If you’re reading this and are considering using a will-writing service, please get in touch via LinkedIn and I’ll happily share feedback about the various suppliers I looked into.

• I created a tag on our CRM for everyone who’s pledged and scheduled ongoing personal updates to those who’ve told us about their specific interests. As part of the overall campaign, we’re also creating case studies of existing gifts in wills, including impact statements and quotes from the donors themselves.