How Legacy Fundraising Actually Works

When Ted Turner passed away on May 6, 2026 and most of his $2.8 billion estate went to conservation and the United Nations Foundation rather than to his five children, the mechanism behind that transfer had a quiet, technical name that almost no one outside the nonprofit world uses in conversation: legacy fundraising.

The same mechanism, at vastly smaller scale, moved approximately $45.84 billion to US charities in 2024 alone — about 8% of all charitable giving in the country — and an additional £4.5 billion to UK charities in the same year, the highest figure on record. Across both markets, legacy gifts are now growing faster than living donations, and forecasts indicate the trend will accelerate over the next two decades as baby boomer wealth completes its transfer to the next generation.

Legacy fundraising is the practice of asking, accepting, and stewarding gifts that come to charities through wills, trusts, and estate documents. It is one of the most consequential funding categories in the entire nonprofit sector, and one of the least understood by the donors who fund it. This is how it actually works — from both sides.

What "Legacy Fundraising" Actually Means

A legacy gift (also called a planned gift or charitable bequest) is any donation to a charity that is arranged during a donor's life but received by the charity after the donor has passed. The most common form is a clause in a will leaving money, a percentage of the estate, or a specific asset to a named charity. Other forms include naming a charity as a beneficiary on a retirement account, a life insurance policy, or a transfer-on-death bank account.

The defining characteristic is timing. The donor decides now, in writing, but the charity receives later — sometimes decades later. This single feature changes almost everything about how the gift is made, how the charity asks for it, and what it ends up being worth.

For perspective: the average single annual donation to a charity in the US runs in the hundreds of dollars. The average specific-dollar charitable bequest is $9,389, and the average residuary bequest works out to roughly 14% of the donor's estate, or about $47,600 in mean value. For most donors who include a charity in their will, the legacy gift is the largest single donation they ever make to any cause — by a factor of ten or more.

That asymmetry is the entire reason legacy fundraising exists as a specialised practice. Charities that ignore it leave their largest individual gifts on the table.

The Scale: $45.8 Billion US, £4.5 Billion UK

The numbers describe a steadily growing income stream that has roughly quadrupled in 30 years and is forecast to keep growing through the late 2040s as the baby boomer generation completes its wealth transfer.

United States (2024):

• $45.84 billion in charitable bequests
• 7.7% of total US charitable giving
• Bequests have consistently represented 7–9% of all giving over the past four decades
• Bequest volume grew about 15% in 2024 alone according to FreeWill industry data
• Roughly 6–7% of all American will-makers include a charitable bequest; 31% of those who already have a will report including a planned charitable gift in the 2023 Legacy Giving Consumer Benchmark Study

United Kingdom (2024):

• £4.5 billion in legacy income — the highest year on record
• +9% year over year
• 145,000 individual charitable bequests completed, also a record
• For the 1,000 largest UK charities, legacy gifts now represent approximately 30% of fundraising income and 14% of total income — a structural dependency, not a side stream

The gap between "6–7% of will-makers" (US) and "30% of fundraising income" (UK top charities) is the entire opportunity legacy fundraisers are working on. A small percentage of estates produces a disproportionate share of charitable revenue, and there is significant room for that percentage to grow.

The Four Ways to Leave a Charitable Bequest

Almost every legacy gift falls into one of four categories. The choice matters more than most donors realise — both for the donor's intent and for how reliably the gift reaches the charity.

1. Residuary bequest. The donor leaves a percentage of whatever remains in their estate after specific gifts, debts, and taxes have been paid. This is the format charities prefer and the format that tends to produce the largest gifts in practice, because it grows with the estate. A donor who leaves "20% of my residuary estate to the American Cancer Society" in their will is making a gift that will be worth different amounts depending on when they pass, but the proportion stays the same. This format is also inflation-resistant in a way the other formats are not.

2. Pecuniary bequest. The donor leaves a fixed dollar amount. "I leave $25,000 to my local hospice." This is straightforward and feels concrete, but it carries one significant drawback: the value erodes with inflation. A $25,000 bequest written in a will in 2010 is worth roughly $17,000 in 2024 purchasing power. Many donors rewrite these every few years to keep the value current; many do not.

3. Specific bequest. The donor leaves a named asset — a piece of property, a collection, a particular investment account, a vehicle. The charity typically receives the asset and sells it, with proceeds funding their work. This format is useful for unique assets but creates complexity: if the donor no longer owns the asset at their passing, the gift simply fails.

4. Contingent bequest. The charity is named as a backup beneficiary — receiving the gift only if a primary beneficiary (typically a spouse or child) has predeceased the donor. This is common in family wills where the donor's first priority is loved ones but they want a default destination for their assets if those loved ones are no longer around to receive them.

For most charitable donors who are also providing for family, the residuary bequest is the most flexible and most charity-friendly choice. It allows the donor to specify primary family beneficiaries first, then direct a percentage of what remains to one or more charities. Anyone writing a will — using any of the approaches discussed in the guide to writing your own will — can include this kind of clause.

How Charities Actually Run Legacy Fundraising Programs

From the outside, legacy fundraising looks like a brochure in the mail and a paragraph at the bottom of a donation appeal. From the inside, it is a long, patient, low-pressure operational practice that runs across years and sometimes decades.

A well-run legacy program at a mid-sized charity tends to follow a recognisable pattern:

Identification. The charity identifies which existing donors are most likely to include a planned gift. The most reliable predictor is not wealth — it is longevity of relationship. Donors who have given consistently for 10+ years are far more likely to leave a bequest than larger but newer donors. Surveys of past donors, demographic analysis, and direct conversations all feed into a "legacy prospect" list.

The soft ask. Unlike annual fundraising, legacy fundraising never opens with "will you leave us money in your will?" The standard opening is far gentler — something like "have you ever considered including a charity in your estate planning?" or "I want to make sure you know we accept gifts through wills, in case that ever fits your situation." The conversation can take years to ripen, and patience is built into the system.

Information without pressure. Charities produce simple guides explaining how a bequest works, sample wording donors can give to their attorneys, and explanations of the tax implications. The goal is to make it easy — not to overcome resistance, but to remove friction for the donors who already want to give.

Legacy Society / Recognition Circle. Donors who confirm they have included the charity in their will are often invited to join a named recognition group — a "Legacy Society," "1907 Circle," or similar. Members receive invitations to special events, briefings on the charity's long-term plans, and direct relationships with leadership. The recognition is meaningful, but the more important effect is stewardship: keeping the donor connected so the bequest stays in the will as life circumstances change.

Ongoing stewardship. Bequest donors can change their wills at any time, and many do — through divorces, remarriages, new grandchildren, financial reversals, or simply changes of mind. Legacy programs that lose touch with their bequest donors quietly lose the gifts. Programs that maintain regular, low-pressure contact retain them.

The five-step framework that nonprofit consultancies typically teach — unify development and communications teams, invest in tools, identify prospects, build a sustained marketing plan, acknowledge donors — is the formal version of what experienced legacy fundraisers do mostly through relationships.

The Counterintuitive Finding That Drives the Whole Industry

The single most important academic finding in legacy fundraising came from Russell James, a professor at Texas Tech University who has studied charitable bequest behaviour for two decades. James's research demonstrated that donors who include a charity in their will subsequently give an average of $3,000+ more per year to that charity during their lifetime — not less, not the same, more.

The finding is counterintuitive enough that it changed how charities run these programs. The intuitive worry — that asking for a bequest would cannibalise annual giving, because donors would feel they had "already given" — turned out to be backwards. Donors who plan a future gift become more committed to the cause in the present. They give more, they engage more, they stay longer.

That is why charities pursue legacy giving patiently rather than aggressively. The gift in the will is not the only return on the conversation. The conversation itself often produces more giving during the donor's life than a hard ask for annual support would have done.

Why Donors Actually Choose This Path

The donor-side psychology of legacy giving has been studied extensively and is consistent across both US and UK research.

Identity and meaning. A bequest is, more than almost any other financial decision, a statement about what the donor stood for. It is often described by donors as the part of estate planning that "feels like the real legacy" — the one decision that is fully theirs rather than a transfer to family members who would have inherited anyway. This is the same instinct that drives the values-letter version of legacy — the difference is just whether the legacy is expressed in words or in dollars.

Affordability that was not possible during life. Many donors describe their bequest as the gift they always wanted to make but could never afford while needing to support themselves and their family. The will allows them to give what would have been impossible mid-career — without changing anything about their financial security during life.

Tax efficiency. Charitable bequests reduce the donor's taxable estate dollar-for-dollar in the US, and qualify for similar inheritance-tax relief in the UK (where leaving 10%+ of an estate to charity can reduce the IHT rate on the remainder from 40% to 36%). For donors with estates large enough to be taxable, the after-tax cost of a charitable bequest is significantly lower than the face value.

Connection to a person. A surprising share of bequests are anchored to a specific person — a parent who passed of a disease, a child who was helped by an organisation, a teacher who changed the donor's life. These gifts are often described by donors not as "giving money" but as "honouring someone." The bequest is the form the honouring takes.

Duty and belonging. Survey data consistently finds that around 96% of regular donors report feeling a "duty to give back to society." For donors who have spent decades active in a cause, the bequest is the natural completion of that relationship — closing the loop on a lifetime of involvement.

The barriers, when they exist, are usually about discomfort rather than reluctance. Many donors hesitate to write a charity into their will because the conversation feels morbid, complex, or like it requires legal expertise they do not have. In practice, adding a charitable clause to an existing will often takes a single sentence and one signature. Most of the discomfort is anticipated rather than real.

Common Myths That Hold Donors Back

Myth 1: "You have to be wealthy to leave a charitable bequest." Not true. The average pecuniary bequest is under $10,000. Some of the most consequential legacy gifts in nonprofit history have come from donors who were genuinely middle-income during life but had no remaining direct heirs at passing.

Myth 2: "Once it's in the will, it's locked in." A will can be updated as many times as the testator wants during their lifetime. A charitable bequest written today can be modified, increased, decreased, or removed entirely at any point.

Myth 3: "It will reduce what my family inherits." This is true only in the simplest sense — every dollar to charity is a dollar not to family. But for taxable estates, the tax-saving effect means the effective reduction in family inheritance is often 50–70% of the face value of the gift, with the rest coming from taxes that would have been paid anyway. For non-taxable estates, the trade-off is more direct, but most donors structuring residuary bequests do so after providing for family, not instead of.

Myth 4: "I can just tell the charity." A verbal commitment, no matter how sincere, has no legal effect. Only the will (or a codicil, or a beneficiary designation on an account) actually directs the gift. Donors who have told a charity about a planned gift but never put it in writing routinely have those gifts fail at probate.

Myth 5: "The charity will harass me once I tell them." Modern legacy fundraising is built on the opposite principle. Once a donor confirms they have included the charity, the relationship typically becomes less about asking and more about stewardship and recognition. The hard part of the program is not the ask — it is staying meaningfully in touch over years without becoming intrusive.

How to Actually Do It

For a donor who has decided they want to include a charitable bequest in their will, the mechanical steps are simpler than most people expect:

1. Decide on the type. Residuary (percentage) is the most flexible. Pecuniary (fixed amount) is the most concrete. Specific (named asset) is the most complex. Contingent (backup) is the safest for donors whose first priority is family. Most donors who want to give meaningfully without specifying an exact amount choose a residuary bequest of a stated percentage.

2. Confirm the charity's legal name and identifier. Use the official legal name (which often differs slightly from the public-facing name) and the EIN/charity registration number. Charities provide this information on request — most have a "leave a gift in your will" page on their website with the exact wording to use.

3. Add the clause to your will. If you are writing or updating a will with an attorney, this is a single conversation. If you have an existing will and want to add a charity without rewriting the whole document, a codicil (a short amendment) can accomplish it. Either way, the clause itself is usually one or two sentences.

4. Tell the charity (optional but valuable). Letting the charity know enables them to acknowledge the gift during your life, invite you to their Legacy Society or equivalent, and ensure the gift is processed smoothly when the time comes. It also helps the charity plan its long-term finances. Many donors prefer to remain anonymous and simply leave the gift to be discovered at probate — that is fine too, and roughly half of all legacy gifts arrive that way.

5. Update with life changes. Like every other part of your will, the charitable clause should be reviewed when major life events occur — marriage, divorce, births, deaths, significant changes in financial position. The same annual-review discipline that protects every other beneficiary applies here.

The relationship between this single clause and the rest of your estate plan is covered more broadly in the will basics guide and the beneficiary designations guide — both of which apply identically whether you are leaving assets to family, charity, or both.

The Quiet Engine of the Nonprofit Sector

Legacy fundraising is the slowest, most patient, most cumulative form of philanthropy. It does not make headlines. It does not produce immediate impact metrics. The gift you make in your will today will not be received by the charity for years or decades, and you will never see what it funded.

But in aggregate, it is the financial backbone of an enormous share of charitable work. Hospices, hospitals, universities, religious organisations, conservation groups, medical research foundations, and countless smaller community causes depend on a steady, predictable flow of legacy income to plan their work across decades rather than just across fiscal years.

For donors, the appeal is the inverse of every other kind of giving. The money is given when it can no longer affect your own security. The decision is made once and then quietly persists. The impact lands on people you will never meet, in years you will never see, working on a cause you cared about long enough to keep it in your will.

The largest single gift most lifetime donors ever make to any cause is the one they make through their will. Charities have built an entire patient, low-pressure profession around making sure those gifts are easy to give and faithfully received.

If a cause has mattered to you for years — financially, personally, or both — the single sentence in a will that makes it part of your legacy is often easier to add than it feels from the outside. The donor side of legacy fundraising is, in the end, just the inheritance you choose for the world, alongside the inheritance you leave for your family.

Both kinds are part of the plan. The only difference is who they are addressed to.