St. Andrew’s Hospice has long been a haven for families during their most challenging times. With a mission to provide compassionate palliative care, the hospice relies on donations, legacies, and community support to fund its work.

Recognising the growing importance of legacies (Gifts in Will) for long-term sustainability, St. Andrew’s Hospice partnered with Dataro to optimise its legacy outreach and maximise potential legacy donors. The hospice wanted a smarter, more personal approach to engage with supporters most likely to be interested in leaving a legacy gift, avoiding a blanket outreach and ensuring a considerate tone to this sensitive ask.

Key results

Using AI to identify donors likely to be interested in legacy giving, St. Andrew’s Hospice uncovered:

• 30 donors who pledged to leave a legacy gift (Gift in Will)

• Based on average gift sizes, £367,000 secured in future revenue

• Doubled total legacy pipeline as a result of the campaign

How we did it

Instead of relying on basic segmentation methods that focus on factors like donor age or recent giving history, St. Andrew’s Hospice used Dataro’s AI audience insights to identify supporters within their existing database who were most likely to consider leaving a legacy gift.

Dataro’s software uses a powerful machine learning model that has been trained on data from 300+ global nonprofits to recognise the subtle data patterns leading to a realised legacy gift and predict which donors are most likely to leave a legacy gift in the future. Using the model on the charity’s own database, Dataro ranked donors based on their likelihood of being interested in leaving a legacy gift.

With these targeted rankings, St. Andrew’s Hospice planned a mail-based fundraising campaign aimed at reaching donors with a high likelihood of legacy interest. The results proved just how effective this approach was – not only in identifying already committed legacy donors but also in driving positive responses through the direct mail channel.

The campaign reached approximately 3,100 highly ranked donors, uncovering 30 confirmed legacy intentions that the charity was previously unaware of. Of these confirmations, 21 were among Dataro’s top 650 ranked donors – a testament to the accuracy of Dataro’s AI in identifying audiences most likely to be interested in leaving a legacy gift.

The campaign drew upon the moving story of a long-time supporter whose wife had received care at the hospice. This story allowed potential legacy donors to connect on an emotional level, seeing firsthand the difference their legacy could make in the lives of future families.

Assuming an average legacy gift of £17,500, the 30 supporters identified in this campaign could contribute an impressive £367,000 to support the hospice’s essential work.