Looking at legacy giving through a behavioural lens
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In this guest blog, Oliver Payne, Founder of The Hunting Dynasty, shares key reflections and practical lessons from his Legacy Festival 2026 session on how behavioural insights can be used to strengthen and grow your legacy fundraising programme.
Asking someone to give money in their Will can be a challenge. You’re asking someone to act now, for a benefit felt by others, in a future they cannot clearly imagine, after an event they’d rather not contemplate. For some, this sounds like a non-starter.
But behavioural science – and the rise in legacy giving over the years - says otherwise.
1. You do need to ask people to make a legacy donation
You do have to tell people they can put you in their Will. There’s a big difference between them not hearing you and disagreeing with you. Both end up with no legacy giving. Hang on though, that sounds obvious – where's the behavioural juice here?
It’s called the mere-measurement effect and it has strong opinions on this. Simply stated, asking a question changes what people do. For instance, a US study saw the probability of voting increase by 25% among people who had been asked about their voting intention for the following day¹. Another study asked 40,000 people about the strength of their desire to purchase a new car: purchase rates among that group in the following six months shot up 35% above those not asked². Why is this so powerful? The question triggers self-reflection. It forces the future outcome to feel concrete and positive – which we are then more likely to act on. It must be a positive question though – such as ‘How likely are you to give a small amount of money to a charity in your Will?’ rather than ‘How would you feel if you did not give money…’ etc.
In short: Asking isn't data collection. It’s an intervention. You aren't just measuring intent – you're creating it.
2. It’s not about you (it’s about them)
You'd think a legator wants their gift to help future beneficiaries of the charity. Not necessarily.
The legator is gaining ‘symbolic immortality’ – a form of persistence after death. It just so happens a charity’s brilliant day-to-day work for its beneficiaries is the engine that delivers the immortality.
In other words, legacy giving isn't about you, it’s about the legacy giver. How do we back this up? Remember A Charity’s 2024 Consumer Tracking Study found that 64% of legacy pledgers haven't let charities know they have included a gift. Of those, almost half (47%) say it never occurred to them to tell the charity, and for 25% of them, they can't see how it would help to inform the charities³. Even so, we must not think of legacy giving as a random input we have little control over. We can influence future income.
Counter-intuitively, obtaining a commitment to a legacy donation isn’t solved by talking about the future, but by appealing to a passion that already exists.
Research available to you in the Remember A Charity knowledge base found that solicitors asking face-to-face, "Would you like to leave money to a charity that you or your family are passionate about?" increased legacy intent by nearly 19 percentage points among childless participants⁴. The phrase ‘you or your family’ does something precise: it pulls the ask back from the abstract and anchors it in something real and felt.
Work that I carried out with Chelsea & Westminster Hospital showed a similar outcome. When patients were sent SMS feedback requests, the version that framed the request as coming from the specific "…staff...who looked after you…" significantly outperformed standard versions⁵. The reciprocity was real and recent - grounded in something that had actually happened, not something imagined.
For charities and legacy fundraisers, this means we can stop talking about what we will do with legacy money in an an abstract 2050 and start anchoring the ask in a supporter’s lived experience of what the charity has already done. There’s also the ‘lived experience-adjacent’ population; Friends, family, and (with correspondingly weaker ties) to colleagues, neighbours, community, clubs, teams, etc.
In short: The charity's day-to-day work is just the machinery. The donor is buying 'symbolic immortality' – a way to stick around after they’re gone. Focus on the persistence, not the machinery.
3. Maturity, moments, and minutes
Maturity: Across populations, happiness follows a U‑shaped curve – high in the teens, bottoming out in the late 40s/early 50s, then rising again from the early 60s onwards. It sounds too neat to be true. However, it’s a famous piece of research by Andrew Oswald (University of Warwick) and David Blanchflower (Dartmouth College), on 500,000 Americans and West Europeans, and further research in East European, Latin American and Asian nations – the kicker, they controlled for all sorts of influences: married or not, wealthy or not, have children or not, and many other factors⁶.
In short: The 50s and beyond isn't just about retirement; it's when the existential clouds part and people start looking for a way to stick around after they've gone.
Moments: From a behavioural point of view, creating new behaviour usually involves reframing messaging or choice in an established, resistant-to-change environment⁷.
Every now and then, life events rip open the pattern book – such as buying a house, having a child, getting married, being brave enough to have the television volume on an odd number (okay one of those is not a major life stage event – but might feel like that to some of us) – and it's far easier to introduce a legacy conversation into freshly disrupted mental furniture.
In short: Trying to create or change a legacy plan out of the blue is like trying to make a cup of tea in a stranger's kitchen. It’s high-friction, low-reward, and honestly, you’d rather just go without. Target the moments of disruption when the mental furniture is already being shifted.
Minutes: Legacy giving isn’t an impulse buy at the checkout, it needs quiet deliberation. Daily life is often a spaghetti-mess of stimulus, punctuated by the ‘quiet minutes’. We need to find the quiet minutes after the day’s chaos is over and the kids and pets are finally asleep, but before the Netflix binge begins⁸ and our brain turns into a happy, low-resolution puddle. Those are the moments to aim for.
In short: People have their own ‘quiet minutes’ in their life. Keep trying until you hit theirs.
4. Make it easy (it’s not cheating, honestly!)
Making something easier feels like cheating, but it is an important part of behaviour.
We do this instinctively. If you want to drink more water at work, you put the glass on your desk, not across the office. The same logic applies to legacies. If the process is hard, or there’s no guidance, you’re creating anti-behaviour.
Classic proof is at Yale University, information alone about tetanus shots led to a few percentage points of uptake. Adding a simple map to the clinic increased uptake nearly tenfold⁹.
In short: Information alone rarely works without a clear path. Be the map to the materials, not just the brochure.
Look at your legacy strategy through a behavioural lens and you’ll succeed more often:
- Ask for a legacy gift
- Find a connection to some form of community
- Sell the immortality journey not only the ‘engine’ of your cause
- Try different times to message – before the Netflix binge, at life stages, and the over 50s
- Be the map, not just the materials
(And, of course, check your TV volume is on an even number.)
About the author
Oliver is the author of Inspiring Sustainable Behaviour: 19 Ways To Ask For Change (Routledge, 2012), founder of the award-winning behavioural science consultancy The Hunting Dynasty, an adviser to businesses, and an award-winning ex-advertising creative at Ogilvy, Tribal DDB, and Saatchi & Saatchi, and awards judge. He speaks around the world on behaviour change and communication, including to serving NATO soldiers, appears on media outlets such as BBC Radio 4’s Thought Cages series and many books and newspapers.
References
¹ Anthony G. Greenwald, Catherine G. Carnot, Rebecca Beach, and Barbara Young, ‘Increasing voting behavior by asking people if they expect to vote’, Journal of Applied Psychology, 72, 1987, 315–18.
² Vicki G. Morwitz and Gavan J. Fitzsimons, ‘The Mere Measurement effect: why does measuring intentions change actual behavior?’, Journal of Consumer Psychology, 14 (1–2), 2004, 64–73.
³ Remember A Charity (15 April 2024), ‘Legacies on the rise: tracking study out now’, online, (accessed April 2026)
⁴ Remember A Charity (18 October 2016), ‘Research sheds new light on the role of solicitors in facilitating legacy giving’, online, (accessed April 2026)
⁵ Hunting Dynasty | The Behavioural Science Consultancy, (2018), ‘…Chelsea & Westminster NHS Hospital Trust…’, online, (accessed April 2026)
⁶ Blanchflower, David G. and Oswald, Andrew J. (2008) Is well-being U-shaped over the life cycle? Social Science & Medicine, Vol.66 (No.8). pp. 1733-1749.
⁷ Habitual behaviour can be ‘considered as a form of behavioral lock-in,’ says Kevin Maréchal in his paper: K. Maréchal, ‘An evolutionary perspective on the economics of energy consumption: the crucial role of habits’, Journal of Economic Issues, 43(1), 2009, 69–88.
⁸ Oliver Payne, ‘Why your Netflix watchlist is full of films ‘for later’’, (May 11, 2025), online, (accessed April 2026)
⁹ Leventhal, Howard & Singer, Robert & Jones, Susan. (1965). Effects of fear and specificity of recommendation upon attitudes and behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 2. 20-29. 10.1037/h0022089.