Legacy giving creating ripples of impact across the world

September is Wills Month - Blog Series

Eleanor Cater
Philanthropy and Membership Services Director, CFANZ
13^th September 2024

Across the world, legacies - or gifts in wills - are providing powerful fuel for community-led change and legacy giving is on the rise, a shift which is not happening by chance. Many countries, including most of Europe, UK, Canada, Australia, South Korea and Japan, run national legacy campaigns - for a day, a week or a month - timed to coincide with today, September 13^th, International Legacy Day.

Legacy giving is powerful, not only for the transformational difference it can make to communities, but also to the people who make these legacy gifts. It’s a purposeful act that can involve deep introspection:

• What do you want to change in the world?
  
• What matters to you and your whānau?
• What does your community need to thrive?
• How do you want to be remembered?

There is something really special that happens when people realise they can do something quite extraordinary, which will continue on long after they have gone. The act of giving a gift in your will can change people, and it certainly can change communities.

In New Zealand, the Community Foundations network has been leading the charge for at least the past six years*, promoting September is Wills Month and encouraging people to think about their will and the legacy that they want to leave behind. And, with close to 700 legacy gifts already across our network, we know that this opportunity to have an impact beyond your lifetime is really resonating with Kiwis.

What has also been encouraging in New Zealand over the past few years are the number of charities that are now joining in this September is Wills Month campaign. We see ‘Wills Month’ permeating the charity sector more and more, both at a local and at a national level. Philanthropy New Zealand are also getting behind this year’s campaign, which increases the campaign reach and influence across the wider sector. It strikes me that what we are doing, in collaboration with many sector partners, is proactively shifting our culture of philanthropy: legacy giving is becoming more normalised as we talk about it and purposefully shift perspectives and cultural norms.

With the intergenerational wealth transfer of the baby boomers on our doorstep, the time is now in New Zealand for a funded sector-wide campaign, since internationally the success of these efforts is evident. In short, legacy campaigns work. In the UK, Remember A Charity, a pioneering campaign which has been running since 2002, has seen remarkable success; back in 2013, 13% of UK’s population included charitable gifts in their wills, a figure that has now risen to 21%. Similarly, at the Toegift.nl campaign, in the Netherlands, has nudged the percentage of people leaving charitable gifts to almost double, from 4% in 2017 to 7% today. Australia has also reported a 40% increase in legacy gifts, in part from the efforts of their national campaign, Include a Charity*, run in association with the Fundraising Institute of Australia.

While we are short on research data in New Zealand, 2022 Fundraising Institute of NZ (FINZ) research found that 6% of New Zealanders have made provision for a gift in their will to charity (with a further 21% likely to, or seriously considering, doing so). This, coupled with the intergenerational wealth transfer, signals a significant opportunity to encourage legacy giving, with the potential to strengthen the entire community sector across New Zealand, at the same time helping Kiwis discover that they can do something really extraordinary, making ripples of impact across future generations.

Read stories of generous Kiwis who are leaving a legacy gift in their will to their local community >>

*Of note, New Zealand attempted its own version of Include A Charity Week, which ran through FINZ from 2013-2017 and failed to gain significant traction, relying on an overstretched charity sector to fund it.