Case study: Remember A Charity, normalising legacy giving

Market background

Lots of good people (over 70% of adults) give lots of money to charity every year. But when it comes to leaving a gift to their favourite charities in their will, almost all reject the idea (only 7% leave a legacy). Giving to charity is a normal activity in the UK, giving a legacy isn’t. Our strategy successfully challenged this and took a major first step to reposition legacies as socially-acceptable, for the benefit of charities across the UK.
 
Objectives

The objectives were two-fold:
 
1. Change the nation’s attitudes toward legacies: reducing negative perceptions and making legacy-giving socially acceptable.
 
2. Make more people positively consider leaving a legacy and through this, drive people to visit the Remember A Charity website to find out more information.
 
Strategy

The legacy marketing challenge is a well-established one. We needed to look at the issue from a fresh perspective.  
 
Research revealed three major barriers that didn’t exist for other giving methods:

• Most people thought they could not afford a legacy because they are perceived to require huge sums of money.
• Family always came first. Legacies were rejected by the majority of people who felt that such a gift would mean sacrifice for their family.
• Legacies were a taboo subject, too close to death to think about. 
   

Quantitative research showed us the seriousness of this situation: 43% of UK 40+ ABC1 adults would not consider leaving a legacy, 45% were unsure, and only 12% were open to the idea.
 
Our strategy had to appeal to a mass audience, and remove significant barriers. We did this by repositioning legacies to be an approachable, simple option for all. Critical to this was embracing family rather than trying to compete with it.
 
Media strategy
 
We used broadcast media to get the topic of legacy-giving out in the open instantly making it feel more popular, acceptable, and worthy of consideration.
 
Media included 2 x 40 second TV spots on daytime TV, and radio commercials on Classic FM (the 40+’s favourite station). And a press campaign in their favourite weekend supplements. These all drove people online for more information.
 
For those that were in the process of making a will we created ambient media to target them in solicitors’ offices.
 
The campaign

Legacies are a heavy subject to talk to people about. Nobody wants to think about dying.
 
To make leaving a legacy feel normal, we needed to be abnormal about how we approached the creative. We chose, instead of the traditional focus on death, to celebrate people’s lives by telling interesting stories of their last wishes.
 
And we used humour to make the topic feel light-hearted.
 
Target audience

UK 40+ ABC1 adults who either have never thought about legacy-giving or are unsure as to whether it is something they see themselves doing in the future.
 
Results
 
A. Change the nation’s attitude toward legacy-giving.
 
40% of people in our tracking survey thought the advertising made them think they personally could leave a gift in their will.
 
20% said that since seeing the campaign they are more likely to leave a gift to charity in their will. If only 1% of them subsequently leave a legacy, it would mean an extra £50m for UK charities.
 
B. Increase traffic to the Remember A Charity website
 
We achieved over 100,000 page views (an uplift of over 33% month-on-month) with visitors spending an average of three minutes on the site - over 50% longer than before the campaign.
 
Finally we set out to use humour to engage the audience in a difficult conversation.
 
The radio ad won the Classic FM Listeners’ Award.

Winning formula

Firstly, we decided to do something brave, stepping away from showing the usual charity imagery and using light-hearted humour.
 
The campaign worked harder than any previous campaign with advertising recall levels of 40%.
 
We achieved more than 100,000 page views (an uplift of over 33% month-on-month) with visitors spending an average of three minutes on-site – over 50% longer than before the campaign. When you consider that the average value of a legacy gift is £52,500*, this is valuable time spent contemplating a legacy, and the foundation for changing the face of charity in the UK.
 
*Legacy Foresight Monitor