As Remember A Charity Week approaches, Rob Cope takes the opportunity to remind us why taking risks with your legacy fundraising might be the safest option
How noisy is your charity about legacies? Does legacy fundraising quietly sit in the corner of your office, waiting for the money to come in, or do you proudly position legacy giving in your shop window?
Remember A Charity works both within, and outside of the sector. The IoF help us to encourage best practice, while our legacy promotion work raises public awareness. In the 18 months that I have been director, it has become apparent that the biggest challenge legacy fundraisers face is being heard by a wider audience – both publicly and within their own organisations.
Fundraisers use a drip, drip approach to slowly but surely get the legacy ask out through all marketing channels such as donor newsletters and websites. But dig a little deeper and the art of legacy fundraising is arguably a much bigger challenge.
No one wants to think about dying, talk about money, or discuss who they would leave their money to. “I’ve never really thought about it”, said one respondent to a Remember A Charity survey. “You don’t want to think about dying”, said another.
However, the survey also revealed that if you spend 45 minutes with each donor explaining legacy giving, they will actively consider leaving a gift in their will. Sadly, very few of us have that amount of time to dedicate to our donors. So how do you get people to talk about something they haven’t considered?
Talkability
My earliest memory of a public campaign is the BBC’s ‘Grange Hill’ storyline of heroin addict Zammo. It took Nancy Reagan’s ‘Just Say No’ anti-drug campaign and pushed it out through the channel’s flagship youth programme, sparking a nationwide debate.
But what would that campaign look like today? A fragmented media landscape has led to a challenge for organisations that want to reach out to the public and that includes fundraisers. Destination TV shows are the exception rather than the norm, national newspaper circulations continue to fall and one in nine people now have a Facebook account. Creating cut-through for fundraising campaigns is tough but arguably it’s even tougher for topics that people don’t like talking about.
Remember A Charity launched an integrated campaign this summer to overcome the legacies taboo. It teamed up with Rocky Taylor, a 64-year-old stuntman, who has good reason to understand the importance of writing a will.
Rocky is performing a series of stunts, broadcast live on Facebook, in the run-up to this month’s Remember A Charity Week. The campaign has been designed to reach millions more people through earned PR coverage, in particular the over 50-year-old ABC1 audiences. Of course, the campaign has risks but taking no risk in a constantly changing world is arguably the riskiest thing anyone can do.
The professionalisation of fundraising has led to an increasing number of charities promoting legacy giving. However, the most dynamic and talked-about campaigns often remain in corporate partnerships, events or community fundraising. Why not legacies?
The Institute’s Legacy Fundraising Code of Practice is an interesting reference point for charities that wish to be more daring. It recommends paying particular attention when communicating with vulnerable people such as bereaved relatives or friends and the terminally ill. Fundraisers therefore should consider keeping the needs of these individuals uppermost and be prepared to provide extra detail or explanation about legacies or the charity’s work where appropriate.
The Code also warns that any marketing communication should minimise the risk of causing harm or serious or widespread offence. In short, there’s a fine line between creating a talked-about campaign and one that contravenes good practice.
In practice the question isn’t whether charities can afford to find new ways of being noisier about legacies, but rather whether they can afford not to.
Rob Cope is director of Remember A Charity
This article first appeared in The Fundraiser, Issue 9, September 2011
