Legacies – could your church or charity benefit?

How could legacy gifts build your cause?

In 2023, an estimated £3.9bn was left to charities in England and Wales and 14.9% of wills admitted to probate included at least one gift to charity (Smee & Ford Legacy Trends Report 2024). In Scotland, legacy giving is growing and now accounts for one fifth of donations to Scottish charities (Scottish Legacy Market Report 2023). With the baby boomer generation ageing and the cost-of-living crisis hitting lifetime giving, legacies could help to provide more resilient income for your church or charity. Yet many churches and Christian charities don’t proactively talk to their supporters about legacy giving.

How can we talk to our supporters about legacies?

As Christians who believe that this life is a prelude of what is to come, we don’t need to be fearful of talking about giving on death. We can encourage our supporters to exercise prayerful stewardship in distributing their estate, which is likely to be the largest single financial decision they make. As we encourage our supporters to consider a gift in their will, we are helping them to store up treasure in heaven.

‘But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.’ - Matthew 6:20-21 (NIV)

Churches could include legacy giving in their regular teaching on Biblical generosity. Charities can include legacy messaging across a wide range of channels and touchpoints. Your website should include information about legacy giving alongside other ways of supporting your cause financially. One of the most powerful legacy fundraising tools is to share stories – explaining what past legacies have helped your cause to achieve and what has inspired supporters to pledge a legacy. This helps potential legacy donors to understand the impact their gift could have.

At Stewardship, we’ve used the ‘My giving journey’ series to tell the stories of some of our donors as an inspiration to others.

How do we administer a legacy?

You may be notified by an executor or family member that a donor has left a legacy to your charity. You will of course want to contact them promptly to offer your condolences, express your thanks for the legacy and perhaps find out if the family would like the legacy to facilitate a specific aspect of your work.

You will then need to liaise with the executors, or the professional administering the probate on their behalf. The executors must collect in the deceased’s assets, pay any inheritance tax, apply for probate and then distribute the estate in accordance with the will. This can all take a surprisingly long time and it may be a year or more after the death before you receive funds. You may receive one or more ‘interim payments’, with further amounts to follow later once the estate is finalised.

If you’ve been left a legacy of a fixed sum of money, you will simply need to check that you’ve received the amount stated in the will. If you’ve received a legacy of a property, shares or other assets, you might want the executors to sell the assets on behalf of your church or charity and send you the proceeds. If you’ve been left a percentage or the residue of the estate, you may need to request and check the estate accounts in order to confirm that your church or charity has received the correct amount.

How can Stewardship help?

Our legacy Briefing Paper Leaving a legacy: Making charitable gifts in your will covers all the matters your donors will need to think about in making their will - biblical, ethical, legal and tax. We’d love you to share this free resource with your donors.

Stewardship can also make it easy for a donor to remember charities in their will. The will can then include just one gift to Stewardship, rather than separate gifts to different charities – significantly simplifying the administration. The donor can complete an Expression of Wishes form ahead of time to let us know about the legacy and tell us how they would like it to be used (see Expression of Wishes).

On the donor’s death, Stewardship will work with the executors to collect in the funds and then distribute them as requested by the donor. This saves the costs of the executors liaising with multiple charitable beneficiaries.

In their Expression of Wishes, the donor can:

• ask us to distribute legacy gifts to their church or charity and other favourite causes
• appoint a friend or family member as their successor to request donations from their legacy, or
• entrust their legacy to Stewardship to distribute at our discretion.

A significant benefit of doing it this way is that the donor can make changes to their Expression of Wishes at any time without the hassle and cost of amending their will. It also offers discretion: A will becomes a public document after the donor’s death, whereas an Expression of Wishes remains private and could even request that any donations from the legacy are made anonymously.

Further resources

Stewardship webinar: Growing legacy income through collaboration

Remember A Charity - a coalition of charities working to encourage gifts in wills: www.rememberacharity.org.uk

Fundraisers in Christian Organisations - a special interest group within the Chartered Institute of Fundraising: ciof.org.uk/about-us/groups/fico

Institute of Legacy Management - the membership body for charity legacy professionals: legacymanagement.org.uk