Beyond the pledge: what great legacy stewardship looks like

Beyond the pledge: what great legacy stewardship looks like

Remember A Charity Week 2026 kicked off on Monday 7 September with our new TV ads landing on screens across the UK and a members' webinar that got straight to the heart of the matter: how do we look after the people who've promised us their most significant gift?

Chaired by Kerry McMenamin, Head of Public Fundraising at Christian Aid, the session brought together three fundraisers with very different-sized teams and very similar instincts. Emma Hazlewood, Head of Legacy Giving at Cats Protection (and formerly of the National Trust), Rosie O’Connor, Strategic Lead for Planned Giving at VSO, and Naomi Hall, Legacy and In Memory Manager at Dementia UK, spent 45 minutes swapping honest, practical advice on legacy stewardship - and then handed the floor to the room for even more.

What stewardship actually means

Kerry opened with the foundational question: what is legacy stewardship, and why does it matter? Emma explained that there isn’t one tidy answer, but that stewardship is how we look after supporter relationships, aiming to leave a relationship in a better state than we found it.

For Emma, that might mean pure thanks, other ways to get involved, or knowing when a supporter actually wants a hands-off relationship. "It's ideally tailored, and that's where it gets tricky to deliver."

"Fifty percent of legacy pledges will fail," Emma pointed out, "and we want to minimise that", and she was clear that stewardship isn't only about protecting income. "They have essentially said, you're one of the most important charities in my life... we need to reciprocate and respect the commitment that they have made."

Rosie agreed it's a two-way street: "It's our time, when someone's pledged a gift in their Will to us, to show them that their decision was right."

A framework worth borrowing

Asked how VSO approaches this, Rosie offered what Kerry called "everybody's legacy stewardship strategy" in one answer. VSO's approach rests on two guiding principles - deep understanding and thoughtful creativity - delivered through four pillars:

cross-seeding - where else is stewardship taking place across the organisation, and how can we be part of that?

1. a direct pillar covering wider pledger activity like events and legacy community emails

2. a bespoke pillar for high-value pledges

3. and internal investment in promoting stewardship across the whole charity.

"Strong stewardship is a whole-organisational thing," Rosie said. "It needs all organisational buy-in... but it's important to recognise that's a stage process, and it's iterative."

Finding the right moment

Naomi talked about how Dementia UK – with a much smaller database than she'd worked with previously - identifies the right time to raise legacies:

1. starting with a prospecting model built from data on people's previous ways of supporting,

2. testing moments like post-event stewardship,

3. and offering a Will-writing conversation to regular givers who don't want to upgrade their gift.

Remember A Charity Week itself is one of those key moments, she noted, alongside Free Wills Month activity in October and March.

Getting people to actually tell you they've left a gift is its own challenge.

"No one's going to ring up your supporter care team and say that they've left a gift in their Will," Naomi said. "I think people are only going to do it if they're prompted."

Free Wills services, telemarketing conversations, and simple tick-boxes on prospecting mailings all help - but so does showing supporters you genuinely want to hear their story, not just tick a box.

When stewardship doesn't start well

Rosie shared a story about a long-standing VSO supporter got in touch wanting to give a major gift in memory of his late wife - and was initially told no, because of an out-of-date restricted gift matrix.

He was persistent, called Rosie directly, and the gift went ahead, with a formal agreement covering interim reports and regular meetings, alongside "bespoke and highly personalised communication channels" behind the scenes.

When the funded project ended and VSO presented the final impact report in person, the donor said it was "beyond my wildest dreams." Five years on, he passed away - and his family got in touch to say he'd left VSO its biggest gift of the year so far, a six-figure legacy.

"Sometimes things don't always start perfectly," Rosie reflected, "but if you can nail stewardship and use it as an opportunity for learning, and an opportunity to connect more deeply, then it can be really powerful."

High value, high touch - but not always an event

Does stewardship change for high-net-worth supporters?

"Yes," Rosie said, "in the nature of the communication... to the point of it being like one-to-one," often working with families or a supporter's wealth advisor.

Rosie was quick to add a caveat that "not everyone wants to be stewarded. Not everyone wants to come to an event." At a previous university role, she found high-net-worth supporters skipped the gala dinner in favour of visiting the research centre itself. Listening to what your supporters want, always beats assuming you know.

Bringing colleagues along

Emma's advice on engaging colleagues beyond the fundraising team was to segment internal engagement just as carefully as external.

"Supporters are never really particularly interested to talk to me, a fundraiser," she said. "They're interested to talk to the people who are on the ground doing the work."

Frontline colleagues who host events need to understand the future value they're protecting - Emma's team would follow up with the pledged value represented by attendees. Senior leaders and trustees, meanwhile, landed best when their message was purposeful, such as sharing a new ten-year strategy.

On proving stewardship works, Emma pointed to income protected, pledge reconfirmations, movement through the pipeline, and rising lifetime value across other ways pledgers engage - as volunteers, members and donors. One simple tactic paid off repeatedly: inviting supporters to reply to a purely stewardship mailing with the story of why they're leaving a gift. "We would get back regularly, 60 to 80 stories from supporters... ready-made content to put into the next mailing."

Starting with small actions

For charities just beginning, Naomi's advice was to map existing touchpoints, focus on the initial enquiry journey, and treat the moment of finding out about a pledge as a key opportunity to say thank you - while piggybacking on activity other teams are already running.

Emma offered what might be reassuring to those in smaller charities: "The superpower of a small charity is that you can know all of your pledgers... perhaps we should all be measuring success based on some kind of relationship strength factor."

Three closing thoughts

Asked for the one thing any charity could do to strengthen legacy stewardship, the panel kept it simple.

1. Rosie: "A rolling annual stewardship audit as part of the annual budgeting planning process."

2. Naomi: "Really it's just keeping in touch... so they don't forget about you."

3. Emma: "At every opportunity, tell supporters why their gift is important and will make a difference."

As Kerry put it in closing comments, whatever size charity you're from and whatever stage you're at, "it's all down to relationships... how we can really listen to our supporters, find out what they need, and work out ways to really show our value."

Remember A Charity members can watch the full and in-depth discussion in the webinar here.

AI statement - This article was created using the support of AI, based on the transcript from the session recording. It has been reviewed, edited and approved by a member of Remember A Charity staff and the speakers mentioned in this article.