Legacy giving: the high-value channel built for a predictive approach

Legacy giving is hard to target, and that's the opportunity

Most fundraising teams know gifts in wills matter. Few can say with confidence who in their file is most likely to leave one. The usual signals, age and giving recency, only get you part of the way, so legacy programs tend to rely on broad lists and hope.

That gap is the opportunity. Legacy giving is large, stable and growing, and it sits on top of the biggest wealth transfer in history. It's also one of the best fits for a predictive, ranked approach, because the donors who go on to leave a gift often don't look like the ones you'd pick by hand.

The numbers make the case

The scale here is hard to ignore.

In the US, charitable bequests have held between 7% and 9% of total giving for four decades. They reached an estimated $45.84 billion in 2024, making gifts in wills a reliable long-term revenue source.

In the UK, legacy income rose 9% in 2024 to £4.5 billion. Legacy gifts now average 30% of fundraising income across the top 1,000 legacy-receiving charities, and reach as high as 50% in some sectors.

Public openness is rising too. By March 2025, 91% of the UK public knew they could leave a charitable gift in a will, and 41% said they would consider it, up from 34% in 2020. A third of will-makers now include a charitable gift, up from 25% five years earlier.

Why legacy giving resists old targeting habits

Despite the scale, most teams target legacy prospects with the same coarse rules they've always used: a certain age, a certain tenure, a certain recency. Those rules miss people. A loyal mid-level donor with no obvious wealth signals can be far more likely to leave a gift than a recent major donor.

That gets harder, not easier, with what's coming. Cerulli Associates projects $124 trillion in assets will change hands by 2048, with $12 trillion or more flowing to charity. Finding the right supporters in a file of tens of thousands, without over-contacting everyone to feel safe, is exactly the kind of focus problem a predictive approach is built for.

Legacy gifts are bigger and they deepen relationships

Two findings should reshape how teams think about this channel.

First, scale. More than 9 in 10 planned gifts arrive as bequests, and a typical bequest can be 200 to 300 times larger than a donor's lifetime contributions. Even modest annual donors can become major supporters.

Second, retention. Longitudinal research by Russell James found that after a donor adds a non-profit to their will, their annual giving rises an average of 75% and stays elevated for years. A legacy commitment tends to deepen giving, not end it.

Online will-making widens the pipeline further. Legacy Futures research in 2025 found about one in 10 people have made a will online, one in five non-will-makers intend to, and online will-makers are more likely to leave a charitable gift.

Why legacy giving is a strong fit for a predictive approach

Bequests are rare events spread across a large file, which is precisely where ranking helps most. A model that sits on top of your CRM can rank supporters by their likelihood to confirm a gift in a will, so you focus conversations on the people most likely to say yes, rather than blanketing the file.

The signal is also richer than age and recency. Dataro's Gift-in-Will model is trained on more than 1.3 million records and weighs 126 predictive features per supporter, not just the handful a manual approach can hold. That's what surfaces the loyal donor a rules-based list would skip.

This works well even for smaller files, where confirmed bequests are too infrequent to model alone. Pooling anonymised data across hundreds of charities gives the model enough examples to predict a rare event your own history can't.

The proof is showing up in campaigns. Teams using a ranked legacy approach have run targeted digital campaigns that secured dozens of confirmed pledges, and bequest pilots that identified confirmed gifts in wills already in the pipeline. The point of the rankings is precision: contact fewer people with confidence, and focus stewardship where it will matter most.

Practical takeaways

1. Treat legacy giving as a core revenue line, not a footnote. The data supports steady, long-term returns.

2. Move past age and recency. Those signals miss loyal supporters who are likely to leave a gift.

3. Prioritise, don't blanket. Use ranked lists to find supporters most likely to confirm a gift in a will, then steward them well.

4. Lean into online will-makers. They're a growing, more receptive audience.

5. Keep nurturing committed legacy donors. Their annual giving often rises after they commit.

The bottom line

Legacy giving is large, stable and growing, and it's hard to target with the rules most teams still use. That combination makes it one of the best fits for a predictive, ranked approach. The teams that focus on the right supporters, with clear targeting and steady stewardship, will build relationships that compound for decades.