Legacy Marketing Benchmarks - Now Welcoming New Members

This benchmarking project is designed to help charities better understand the world of legacy marketing, benchmark their performance across a range of marketing metrics and to provide them with data to build a robust business case for legacy investment.

We run this project every two years and try to keep the benchmarks collected consistent across years to allow data comparison over time. This proposal updates and refines the 2023 benchmarking project, analysing data for the period ending March 2025. It also details an additional section we plan to add this year, looking at legacy products and the role they play in legacy marketing.

Our latest legacy forecast estimates that the legacy market, worth £4.5b in 2024, could be worth over £10b by 2050, due mostly to the increasing number of deaths as the large population of baby boomers come to the ends of their lives. This presents a huge opportunity for charities and now is the time to be talking to potential legators to try and secure your share of this market.

To do this, legacy marketing will almost certainly be required. Our previous benchmarking projects have highlighted the fact that legacy marketing is very underinvested in, but last cycle we saw that (while still very small), legacy marketing investment had jumped significantly – from 3.6% to 6.2% of fundraising spend. This increase is good news but also creates challenges - the legacy marketing space is becoming more crowded as more charities are taking part in some form of legacy marketing, often using innovative new channels or approaches. Charities are having to work harder to stay still and investment will be needed to try and grown their share of the legacy market.

But securing this investment is no easy task. The continued pressure on charity finances as the cost-of-living crisis continues is making it harder than ever for charities to get investment for legacy marketing. A lack of consistency, both within individual charities and in the sector more widely, makes it difficult to evidence a causal link between what is spent on legacy marketing, and the legacy income received as a result. Not to mention the time lag that exists between the investment and receiving a gift. And charities are required to compete with other forms of fundraising that are able to provide faster returns and more measurable ROIs.

This project aims to help demystify and quantify legacy marketing and provide charities with the evidence they need to gain sustained legacy investment that will help secure their future financial stability.