It’s well recognised that large legacies can be transformational to charities. In 2023/24, gifts of over £250K accounted for 35% of legacy income and came from just 3% of gifts.

As the number of legacies is set to increase, as Boomers take over from War Babies as the next generation of legators, legacy giving in the UK is an area of increased interest and importance to charities.

Our Growing High Value Legacies Programme set out to understand more about major donors and High Net Worth Individuals and to explore how legacy teams could better engage with these audiences around legacy giving, to generate growth of high value legacies in the years to come.

Marketing and stewarding high value legators is less well understood than marketing to lower-value mass-market legacy audiences. Previous Legacy Foresight analysis has shown that wealthy people are more likely to leave charitable gifts and are more likely to leave large gifts, but we don’t know as much about what drives this giving and how legacy giving fits in with their lifetime giving.

This programme looked at the differences in approach needed for more affluent high value audiences, to engage them around legacy giving marketing and communications strategies.