Your legacy campaign is not a strategy

When a charity decides it wants more gifts in wills, the first question is almost always about marketing. Which channel should we use? Should we send a mailer, redesign the web page, or run a digital ad? It’s a reasonable instinct, because marketing is visible, it feels like progress, and it gives the board something concrete to approve.

It is also the fastest way I know to spend a limited legacy budget on a program that has not yet decided what it is.

If you’ve attended a fundraising conference, you’ll find the sessions offering a case study on a marketing campaign of some sort is typically full of eager fundraisers eager to see the magic bullet that helped the organization raise a sh*t ton of money and convert a bucket load of new donors. You can see it in people’s eyes “how can I replicate this in my charity?”. Don’t get me wrong, I also enjoy hearing these case studies, they fuel my own creativity but here’s the problem:

A sexy marketing campaign cannot support a program strategy that does not yet exist.

Marketing amplifies whatever is already there

A campaign does not create clarity. It scales whatever clarity, or confusion, already exists. If your program has no defined audience, no clear offer, bad data, and no one ready to respond to enquiries, a well-designed campaign simply delivers those gaps to more people, faster.

Let that sink in for a minute!

Legacy giving is also unforgiving about timing. Because income from gifts in wills often arrive years later, it means that you cannot judge a legacy campaign the way you judge a regular appeal. A strategy that only becomes visible in the results two quarters later was never a strategy. It was a hope with a production schedule.

Let me put it to you this way: in the past I’ve worked with organizations that ran a legacy program for decades. They worked with marketing vendors that produced their legacy campaigns annually – you know, your typical prospecting campaign and maybe another one in or around the holiday season. The organizations came to me to try to understand why they were struggling to increase their legacy pipeline. When we started digging into the internal mechanics of the program, it became clear they didn’t have an actual program strategy. Important things such as clearly defined donor personas, a donor journey with data-informed engagement touchpoints with clearly defined action triggers, policies and procedures that guide how the program is rolled out, donor recognition program for the legacy program; and more importantly, a trained professional to manage the entire legacy program. Ouf!

Five questions to answer before you launch

These are the questions I ask first, long before anyone opens a design brief.

1. Who are we talking to, and why them?

“Our donors aged 55 and over” is a demographic, not an audience. A real answer draws on your own data about who has already pledged, who shows the behavioural signals that tend to precede a legacy conversation, and where your best prospects are hiding in plain sight.

2. What exactly are we asking them to do?

Notify you of an existing gift, write a will, update a will, or simply have a conversation are four different asks. Each one needs different messaging, different materials, and a different follow-up. A campaign that tries to cover all four usually persuades no one.

3. Can we handle the response?

This is the question that gets skipped most often. If a supporter calls on Tuesday and nobody knows who owns the conversation, you have not run a campaign. You have run a trust experiment on your best supporters. Capacity covers staff time, systems, stewardship, and the unglamorous work of administering bequests when they arrive. Trust me, this is my number 1 mistake when I was first learning about legacy giving many many moons ago!

4. Do our supporters have a reason to trust us with this conversation?

Asking someone to name your organization in their will is among the most personal requests a charity can make. It depends on how you have communicated with them for years, including whether you have shown them what their giving has actually achieved. Marketing can invite the conversation, but the relationship decides whether it happens.

5. How will we know it is working, and how long are we prepared to wait?

Agree on the measures before launch. Include the early indicators (enquiries, pledges, conversations) alongside the eventual income, and get the board to accept the timeline in writing. Otherwise the program becomes a casualty of the first budget squeeze, which is the orchard-for-groceries trade all over again.

What an unclear strategy looks like from the outside

You will recognize it when you see it. The messaging changes with each new staff member. The mailer goes out, but nobody tracks who responds. Excessive reliance on the marketing vendor without clear understanding of what’s happening. Enquiries trickle in and sit in a shared inbox. Leadership asks whether legacy giving “is working” and nobody can agree on what that means.

None of this is a failure of effort.

It is what happens when activity runs ahead of decisions.

The order matters

Strategy first, then capacity, then marketing. It sounds obvious, yet it is the reverse of how most programs are built, because the other order produces something to show sooner.

Each step is what makes the next one work. Strategy tells you who you are talking to and what you are asking them to do. Capacity makes sure someone is trained, equipped, and ready to respond when a supporter answers. Marketing then does what it does best, which is to amplify a program that is ready to be amplified. Flip the order, and you pay to send people to a door that nobody is standing behind.

The order also changes how you judge success. A legacy program will not pay off in two quarters, and no strategy can make it. What a sound strategy can give you is early signals, such as enquiries, conversations, and pledges, that show the program is heading in the right direction long before the gifts arrive. If you cannot name those signals before you launch, you are relying on hope, no matter how polished the campaign looks.

The good news is that none of this requires a bigger budget. It requires a few honest conversations, held before the money is spent rather than after. Start there, and the marketing question gets a lot easier to answer.