It’s a myth that older people aren’t online, one that many legacy teams are waking up to. My Nan and Grandad are aged 80 and 83 respectively and have both just bought smart phones!

The first thing they did was join Facebook and our family WhatsApp group. They’re still learning, but really enjoying the new technology.

I’m the Legacy and In Memory Manager at St Mungo’s and digital has been a big part of our legacy strategy over the last two years. Below are three great ways you can integrate digital into your strategy.

1.    Think digital to support your offline legacy activity

This is one of the easiest ways to integrate digital and won’t break the bank. Many legacy teams share amazing beneficiary stories of how legacies make a difference or share supporters’ own reasons for leaving a legacy. These stories are usually shared in newsletters, leaflets or part of a legacy postal appeal, but are rarely extended to the digital sphere.

Creating a social media post or adding the story into your e-newsletter can help you extend the reach of your message to different audiences with minimal extra work and resources. If you have the budget, you could also test boosting your social media post to increase that reach.

Adding a clear call to action to your social post or email will also help you track engagement. Try linking to your legacy webpage or including a link for supporters to request a gifts in Wills guide.

2.    Free Will offers

Many charities now offer free Wills as part of their legacy marketing strategy. These can form very successful digital campaigns.

St Mungo’s has tested this over the last couple of years, developing different types of creative and calls to action at different times of the year. We’ve found that our warm audiences (people who have viewed our legacy webpage or who already like our Facebook page) respond better to imagery related to our cause and language around the difference their legacy can make. Colder audiences (people who are new to our cause and people over the age of 45) respond better to the more direct ‘free Will offer’ ad.

We also recently created a dedicated landing page for free Wills, which has helped increase registrations overall: www.mungos.org/free-wills 

This might be different for every charity, depending on your cause and supporters, so it’s important to test and develop the creative that works best for you.

3.    Creating a legacy focused digital campaign

If you’re looking to invest more in your legacy marketing strategy, developing a digital campaign is a great place to start. Digital is easier to track and report on, which can be useful when making a case for investment.

In spring 2018, we launched our first digital legacy campaign, ‘What does home mean to you?’ By asking this question we were encouraging people to think about how easily we can take our homes for granted, while inspiring them to think about legacy giving to help end homelessness. The aim of the campaign was to create a new pool of supporters and talk to them about legacy giving at the very beginning of their journey with us.

We used a wide range of digital marketing techniques and assets, including social media ads and videos on Facebook and Instagram, and we experimented with Pinterest for the first time. Pinterest worked really well for us and was our third biggest traffic driver to the landing page after Facebook and Instagram.

We also linked to an interactive quiz encouraging email sign ups. The campaign as a whole resulted in 2.3 million impressions, and over 600 people completed the quiz, with a 60% opt in rate for email. We put those who opted in on a supporter journey and sent them emails about our work and strengthening the legacy message.

We re-launched the campaign on 8 March 2019 with a new focus on women’s homelessness to align with International Women’s Day. This campaign is still ongoing and this year we recruited celebrities and social media influencers to help extend the reach of the campaign.

Legacy Strategy Summit 2019

The definition of what "digital" means continues to change as new technologies, user devices and methods of interaction develop. Digital is all around us, and it’s important to make sure legacy marketing is part of the digital world.  

I’ll be sharing more insight and learnings from how St Mungo’s has integrated digital into our legacy strategy on 13 June 2019 at the Legacy Strategy Summit.

Written by Katie Wimpenny, Legacy and In Memory Manager, St Mungo’s