Planned Giving vs. Legacy Giving: Is There a Difference?

Ask ten fundraisers to define “legacy giving” and “planned giving,” and you’ll get ten slightly different answers, half of them defended with real conviction. That’s a problem. Not because the taxonomy is wrong, but because the debate happening inside your organization is not the debate that matters to your donors.

Framing the issue

Technically, there is a difference. Planned giving is the umbrella term: any gift arranged in advance, whether it pays out during the donor’s lifetime (a charitable gift annuity, a charitable remainder trust) or after death (a bequest, a beneficiary designation). Legacy giving is the subset that takes effect only after the donor has passed. Every legacy gift is a planned gift. Not every planned gift is a legacy gift.

That distinction matters for how you structure programs, forecast revenue, and train gift planning staff. It does not matter, at all, to the 74-year-old donor deciding whether to add your organization to her will. She is not weighing “planned” against “legacy.” She is deciding whether she trusts you enough to include you in the most personal document she will ever write.

The core insight

This is where the internal debate quietly misleads us. Fundraisers assume that getting the terminology right is a communication problem. It’s actually a trust problem wearing a vocabulary costume.

Dr. Russell James’ research on planned giving language tested how donors respond to different phrasings of the same ask. “Make a gift to charity in my will” consistently outperformed “leave a legacy gift” and “make a bequest gift,” with donors roughly twice as likely to want more information when the language was plain rather than technical. Phrases that gratuitously referenced death, such as “a gift that will take effect at my death,” measurably reduced interest. The words we use as sector shorthand, “legacy,” “bequest,” “estate gift,” are precisely the words that make donors feel this isn’t for them.

Sargeant & Shang‘s dimensional qualitative research on bequest motivation found similar terrain: donors give gifts in wills for reasons rooted in identity, continuity, and connection to cause, not out of familiarity with estate planning vocabulary. The emotional logic of a legacy gift has almost nothing to do with the technical category we’ve built around it.

So yes, planned giving and legacy giving are different things. But the difference fundraisers should actually be worried about is the gap between the language we use to organize our own programs and the language donors need to hear to feel invited in.

Practical implications

Stop letting internal taxonomy leak into donor-facing copy. If a term exists to help your team categorize gift types, it probably doesn’t belong on a website, in a mailed brochure, or in a conversation with a prospective donor.

Default to “a gift in your will” over “bequest” or “legacy gift” in first-touch materials. Save the technical terms for legal documents and internal reporting, where precision actually earns its keep.

Audit your donor-facing content for accidental death references. “Gifts that take effect upon your passing” sounds professional. It also quietly reduces interest, according to the same research. Reframe toward continuity and impact instead: what the gift makes possible, not when it activates.

Train volunteers and board members the same way. They are often the ones fielding the question “how do I leave something to you in my will,” and they default to whatever term they learned from a training deck, usually the technical one.

Test your own materials the way James tested his phrases. Small wording changes produce measurable differences in response. You don’t need a research budget to notice which version of your ask gets more replies.

At the end of the day …

The real question was never planned giving versus legacy giving. It’s whether your language makes a donor feel like this kind of giving is something people like them actually do. Get the taxonomy right for your own team. Get the words right for everyone else.

If you’re reviewing your legacy communications and want a second read on where the language might be quietly losing donors, that’s worth a closer look.