How Remember A Charity helps us be noisy about legacies

In 2013-14, our total income was £154,805,000 of which £26.4 million was from legacies. When I joined Marie Curie I was tasked with renewing our legacy strategy and Remember A Charity was on my radar. We joined early in 2014 and the movement is something we are proud to be involved with. Part of our strategic plan is to deliver a balanced approach to promoting legacy giving, which is important for a charity dealing with terminal illness. Collective benefit We signed up to Remember A Charity primarily because of the wider movement to raise awareness. As a big charity with a known brand, we thought it was important to get involved and work together with charities to achieve a larger goal: increase the legacy giving market for the wider sector. Being noisy about legacies Remember A Charity helps us to raise the profile of legacy giving within our supporter base and internal audiences. As part of the wider noise the campaign makes, we create an integrated message about legacy giving that reaches as far and wide as possible. Throughout the year, Remember A Charity provides opportunities to talk about legacy giving and normalise the conversation about charitable Will-writing. As well as Remember A Charity in your Will Week, we get updates from the campaign which I share with the teams, including its work with the Government’s Nudge Unit on behavioural economics, such as tests around solicitors approaching charitable Will-making with clients. Making the Living Legends theme our own Last September was our legacy month and Remember A Charity Week helped us to create a lot of noise using the Living Legends theme. We delivered a digital campaign that blew away the success of our normal legacy activity on social media. Supporting collateral included the message: “Be a Living Legend today to help people tomorrow. Read. Watch. Click,” which helped us reach a huge number across Facebook and YouTube. We also promoted the Living Legends theme internally. Our community fundraising team wore a ‘Badge of Legends’ displaying a handwritten legend of their own choice, whether it be their mum or the Queen. This proved a fantastic way to start a conversation with the public that led to talking about the purpose of Remember A Charity. Working to a common goal Together we can do so much more. Remember A Charity unifies organisations within a movement that aims to grow the legacy giving market. It enables members to be noisy about legacies and continue the conversation throughout the year. Find out more about Marie Curie here. Dan Carter, Individual Giving Manager for Legacies at Marie Curie