How Legacy Fundraising Actually Works

You may have noticed, somewhere along the way, that the charities you give to most consistently start asking a slightly different kind of question after a few years.

It usually arrives gently. A letter that doesn't ask for money. A line at the bottom of a fundraising appeal: "Have you ever considered including us in your estate planning?" A conversation with someone from the organisation that doesn't seem to have any agenda other than thanking you and keeping in touch.

What you're being invited into has a quiet, technical name almost nobody outside the nonprofit world uses out loud: legacy fundraising. It's the practice of charities receiving gifts that you arrange now but they receive after you're gone, usually through a clause in your will.

For most causes that matter at scale — hospices, hospitals, universities, religious organisations, conservation groups, medical research — these gifts are the financial backbone. Roughly $46 billion flows to US charities this way every year, and a record £4.5 billion moved this way in the UK in 2024. But that's the macro view. The reason it's worth understanding is much more personal: if you ever decide to do this yourself, you should know exactly what you're walking into.

This article is that walk-through.

The Quiet Mechanism Behind a Disproportionate Share of Charitable Income

If you make a $200 donation once a year to a cause you care about, that gift sits in a giant statistical category alongside millions of similar gifts. The charity is grateful. Your gift is meaningful. But it is also, in the larger arithmetic of how that charity stays solvent across decades, not the part that funds the building, the research grant, or the endowment.

The part that funds those things is increasingly coming from people who made one decision — once — to include the charity in their will.

For the largest UK charities, gifts arranged through wills now make up around 30% of fundraising income. In the US the average is lower but the trajectory is the same, and bequest volume grew about 15% in 2024 alone. The total has roughly quadrupled in 30 years, and the forecast for the next two decades is more growth as the baby boomer generation finishes passing wealth on.

Two things matter inside those numbers, both of which affect you directly if you ever consider doing this.

First, the size of an individual legacy gift is enormous compared to lifetime giving. The average pecuniary (fixed-dollar) charitable bequest in the US is around $9,400. The average residuary bequest — a percentage of the estate, more on that in a moment — works out to roughly 14% of the donor's estate, which in mean terms is something close to $48,000. For most donors who include a cause in their will, that legacy gift is the largest single donation they ever make to anything, by a factor of ten or more.

Second, only about 6–7% of American will-makers currently include a charity at all, even though roughly a third of Americans say they would consider it if asked. The gap between "would consider" and "actually did" is where every legacy fundraiser in the country spends their working life.

That gap is also where you sit if a cause has mattered to you for years and you've never quite put it in writing.

Your Four Options, If You Decide to Do This

Almost every charitable gift in a will takes one of four forms. The choice matters more than most people expect, because each one behaves differently between the time you sign and the time the charity actually receives the gift.

Option 1: A residuary bequest — a percentage of what's left.

You leave a percentage of your residuary estate (what remains after specific gifts, debts, and taxes) to the charity. For example: "I leave 20% of my residuary estate to the American Cancer Society."

This is the format charities prefer, and the one most experienced estate attorneys recommend if you want your gift to keep its meaning over time. A percentage grows or shrinks with the estate, so if your assets appreciate over the next twenty years, your gift appreciates with them. If your circumstances reverse, the percentage stays fair to your family.

Option 2: A pecuniary bequest — a fixed dollar amount.

You leave a specific sum. "I leave $25,000 to my local hospice."

This format feels concrete and is easy to understand. The trade-off is inflation. A $25,000 gift you write into a will today will not have the same purchasing power in twenty years. Many people who choose this format update the figure every few years; many people forget, and the gift quietly shrinks.

Option 3: A specific bequest — a named asset.

You leave a particular thing — a piece of property, an investment account, a vehicle, a collection. The charity typically sells it and uses the proceeds.

This is useful for unique assets but carries one specific risk: if you no longer own the asset at the time you pass, the gift simply fails. There's no automatic substitute. If you sold the property and forgot to update the will, the charity receives nothing in its place.

Option 4: A contingent bequest — the charity as a backup.

You name the charity as the recipient only if a primary beneficiary (often a spouse or child) is no longer alive when your estate is settled. This is common in family wills where your first priority is loved ones but you want a meaningful default destination if those loved ones aren't around to receive it.

If you're already providing for family and want to add a charity without disrupting that, a residuary bequest at a modest percentage is usually the cleanest path. Family receives what you've designated for them. The charity receives a stated percentage of what remains. Nothing about your spouse's or children's inheritance changes — except slightly, by the percentage you've allocated.

You can structure any of these inside the kind of will most adults can write following the basics of writing your own will, or you can ask an attorney to add a single clause to a will you already have.

What Charities Are Actually Doing When They Ask You About This

If a cause you support has ever brought up legacy giving with you, you may have noticed something unusual about how the conversation goes. There's no pitch. No urgency. No follow-up email a week later asking if you've decided.

That gentleness is on purpose, and there's a specific reason for it.

A study by Russell James, a professor at Texas Tech University who has spent two decades studying charitable bequest behaviour, found something counterintuitive: donors who include a charity in their will then go on to give noticeably more to that charity during the rest of their lifetime — on the order of $3,000+ more per year. Not less. More.

The intuitive worry — that asking for a future gift would cannibalise current giving, because you'd feel you'd already done your part — turned out to be backwards. Once people make a future commitment to a cause, they engage with it more deeply in the present. They give more. They stay involved longer. They tell their friends about it.

This finding changed how charities think about legacy programs. The bequest in your will isn't the only return on the conversation. The conversation itself often produces more lifetime giving than a hard ask for an annual donation would have done. Which means there's no reason for the charity to push you. The patient relationship works better than the aggressive one — for everyone.

So when a cause you support invites you, gently, into this conversation, that's not them being shy. That's them having read the research.

What You'll Actually Experience If You Say Yes

Most people imagine that telling a charity "I've included you in my will" leads to a flood of awkward attention. In practice, the experience is closer to the opposite.

Typically, you receive a thank-you letter, sometimes signed by the head of the organisation. You may be invited to join the charity's "Legacy Society" — a named recognition group with its own communications, occasional events, and direct connection to leadership. You're not asked for anything. The relationship shifts from one of solicitation to one of stewardship: they're keeping in touch because they want to honour the commitment, not extract more from it.

You can also remain anonymous. Many people prefer to leave the gift in their will without telling the charity, and roughly half of all charitable bequests arrive that way — discovered for the first time during probate. That's also fine. The gift still works.

The reason charities like being told in advance isn't because they want to ask you for more. It's because knowing about expected future gifts helps them plan their work across decades rather than just across fiscal years — and because they want to be able to thank you for it while you're still here to be thanked.

Why People Like You Actually Do This

If you talk to a few people who've made this decision, you'll hear similar reasons coming up in different words.

Many describe it as the most "themselves" part of their estate plan. A will mostly distributes to family — which, while important, is also largely automatic. A charitable bequest is the one piece that is fully your choice, an explicit statement of what you stood for and what you wanted to keep going after you. For many people, this part of the plan ends up feeling more meaningful than the rest of it combined.

Some describe it as the gift they couldn't afford in life. During working years, you have to support yourself and your family. There are limits to what you can give while staying solvent. A bequest in a will lets you give what would have been impossible at 45 or 55 — without changing anything about your financial security right now. The cost lands on the estate, not on the life.

Many anchor it to a specific person. A parent who passed of a particular illness. A child who was helped by an organisation. A teacher who changed your direction. The bequest, for those donors, is less about giving money and more about honouring someone. The charity is the form the honouring takes.

And tax efficiency is part of the picture, though rarely the main reason. Charitable bequests in the US reduce your taxable estate dollar-for-dollar. In the UK, leaving 10% or more of your estate to charity can reduce the inheritance tax rate on the rest from 40% to 36%. For estates large enough to be taxable, the after-tax cost of a charitable gift is significantly lower than the face value — which can make a more generous gift feel surprisingly affordable.

This is the same instinct that runs through the bigger version of the same conversation in the recent piece on Sting calling inheritance "a form of abuse" and the Ted Turner estate piece — except, in your case, the question isn't a billionaire's philosophical one. It's a practical one about whether a specific cause that has mattered to you for years belongs in a specific clause in a specific document.

The Worries That Stop Most People — and What's Actually True

If you've thought about doing this and not done it, you may recognise one of these.

"You have to be wealthy to leave a charitable bequest." Not true. Some of the most consequential legacy gifts in nonprofit history have come from people who were genuinely middle-income during life but had no remaining direct heirs at passing. The size of the gift scales to the size of the estate, but the principle works at any scale.

"Once it's in the will, I'm stuck with it." Also not true. A will can be updated as many times as you want during your lifetime. A charitable clause written today can be modified, increased, reduced, or removed entirely whenever you like. Most people who include a charity update their will at least once during the rest of their life anyway, for other reasons.

"It will reduce what my family inherits." Strictly, yes — every dollar to a charity is a dollar not to family. But for taxable estates, taxes would have taken a meaningful portion of that dollar anyway, which means the effective reduction in family inheritance is often 50–70% of the face value of the gift. For most donors, the charitable percentage is also chosen after providing for family, not instead of.

"I can just tell the charity verbally." This one matters: no. A verbal commitment, no matter how sincere, has no legal effect on what happens at probate. Only the will (or a codicil amending it, or a beneficiary designation on a specific account) actually directs the gift. People who have told a charity about a planned gift but never put it in writing routinely have those gifts fail when the moment arrives.

"They'll bother me once they know." As covered above — the opposite usually happens. The relationship typically becomes less about asking and more about stewardship once you're a confirmed legacy donor.

How You'd Actually Do It

If you decide you want to do this, the mechanical steps are simpler than the worries usually make them sound.

1. Decide on the format. Residuary (percentage), pecuniary (fixed amount), specific (asset), or contingent (backup). For most people providing for family while wanting to include a meaningful charitable gift, a residuary bequest at a chosen percentage is the cleanest fit.

2. Get the charity's exact legal information. The official legal name (which is often slightly different from the public-facing name) and the EIN or charity registration number. Most charities have a "leave a gift in your will" page on their website with the precise wording you can give to your attorney, or you can call and they'll send it.

3. Add the clause to your will. If you're writing or updating a will with an attorney, this is one conversation — usually a single paragraph. If you have an existing will and don't want to redo the whole document, a short amendment called a codicil can add the charity without touching anything else.

4. Decide whether to tell the charity. Optional. Telling them lets them thank you and include you in their stewardship programs while you're still here. Not telling them is also fine, and the gift still works exactly the same way at probate.

5. Review every few years. When something significant changes in your life — marriage, divorce, a new grandchild, a major change in financial position — review the charitable clause along with the rest of the will. The same annual-review discipline that protects every other beneficiary applies here.

The mechanics of how this fits with everything else in your estate — your beneficiary designations on retirement accounts, your life insurance, your account titling — sit inside the broader guide to beneficiary designations, and the consequences of leaving any of this undone show up clearly in what happens when there's no will at all.

The Sentence That Outlives You

For most of estate planning, the work is technical. Beneficiaries, titles, tax structures, executors. Most of it is plumbing.

The single line in your will that names a cause you cared about is the one part that isn't plumbing. It's the only part that says, in writing, that something specific in the world mattered to you enough to keep funding after you weren't around to fund it any more. Your family inherits what they were going to inherit anyway, in roughly the proportions they were going to inherit it in. The charity inherits something that wouldn't otherwise exist — your continued participation in a cause, after the participation itself has ended.

The largest single gift most lifetime donors ever make to any cause is the one they make through their will. Most people who decide to do it describe it later as the easiest part of the entire estate plan, and the part they were most glad they hadn't put off.

If a cause has mattered to you for ten or twenty years and you've never quite put it in writing, the sentence that does so is shorter and simpler than the worry around it. You don't have to be wealthy. You don't have to tell anyone. You don't have to disrupt anything else about your plan.

You just have to decide that the answer to "have you ever considered including us?" — the question they've been gently asking you for years — is yes.