Free wills, what’s the catch pauline mayer - jack visser - cancer research uk
1. FREE WILLS, WHAT’S THE
CATCH?
Jack Visser and Pauline Mayer
Cancer Research UK
2. Agenda
What is a Free Will Service for?
• Recruitment and Fundraising, Reward or
something else
• FWS going forward
3. What is a Free Will Service for?
Legacy teams know less people leave a legacy
than give during their lifetime
• Is a Free Will offer a tool for direct action to engage,
convert or upgrade?
Later
• How do we engage the legal profession?
Now
• Some history….
4. How it started
• 1993 Cancer Research • To grow the market
Campaign (CRC) • Cold Acquisition Only
• 1994 Imperial Cancer • Generate Legacies for the
Research Fund (ICRF) charity
How it’s changed over time
• Still Cold Acquisition Only
• More targeted
• CRUK model to generate Legacies for the charity
• Cost control
• Only for over 55s
5. Cost v. Income pre-merger
£2,500,000.00
£2,000,000.00
£1,500,000.00
£1,000,000.00
Costs
£500,000.00
Income
£0.00
6. Cost v. Income post-merger
£14,000,000.00
£12,000,000.00
£10,000,000.00
£8,000,000.00
£6,000,000.00
Costs
£4,000,000.00 Income
£2,000,000.00
£0.00
11. FWS Marketing
• Currently only used as a cold acquisition tool
• We continue marketing to our warm
supporters as all other charities do
• A development in this will be to market FWS
to our warm supporters too...
12. Solicitor Engagement
• A key area of overlap between Legacy
Marketing, Development and Administration
• FWS Will Writers are now also the Executors
we deal with on a daily basis
• Of the 5000 notifications we receive a year
900 of these are from Wills written through
the FWS
13. Solicitor Recruitment
• Over 1200 registered firms
• About 850 very active firms
• No current recruitment programme
14. Solicitor Relationships
• Getting these solicitors closer to our cause will
be the focus of our strategy to grow the
service and its impact for the charity
• Listening to them is as important as
communicating our need for Legacies to
them, like any other potential supporter
15. Working as a team
• Legacy administration are crucial when
developing relationships with law firms
• Thanking at end of case
• Following up with a ‘how did we do?’ survey
sheet ensuring that communications are
always positive
• Solicitors are potential donors!
16. Sector Will-making promotions
• Free Wills Month and National Free Wills
Network run by Capacity Marketing
• Will Aid
• Will Relief Scotland
• And other charity schemes you may see
17. Opportunities for all charities
• Various will writing schemes – some
investment needed but fairly quick data back
• Creating your own links with local solicitors –
Free but needs someone to project manage it
• Members of Remember a Charity can link with
Co-op Legal Services – Free
18. Conclusions
Free Wills - “What’s the catch”
• Investment and long term focus
• Used for Recruitment and Engagement
• Proof that continued activity reaps long
term results!
Thank you all for staying for this last session – we hope we make it worth your while!JV five years at CRUK managing FWS and now at GDPM head of Leg Dev
We will take you through the story of the FWSWe want to discuss the impact of long term Legacy marketing today and ....Using Free Will Service data we hope to illustrate how continued activity does reap long term results Our aim is to share some of the data we collected over almost 20 yearsWe will show you how FWS and Leg Admin work together to ensure we capture all possible learnings and can communicate appropriately with our participating solicitorsWe understand that not every charity feel comfortable with spending charitable funds on Wills for people and hope that you will see that we approach the product as a fundraising tool like direct marketing and in line with the Charity Commission’s requirements, can show you that it works but with a better ROI
A free will service is just one element of a well rounded legacy strategy and cannot make up for a short fall in another areasIt is a useful tool to start and continue to have a productive discussion with solicitors to ensure their clients know about the impact of legacies for charitiesSolicitors are a crucial cog in the mechanism through which charities benefit from the public’s generosityBUT we as fundraisers still need to make the most passionate case for our respective causes before the solicitor will have much of an impact
The legacy that started it all, for FWS , was not a supporter but the staff members of CRC (Philip Black)I’m sure we all know how hard it is to get a new product/idea of the ground in any charity. Imagine selling the idea of massive investment over many years with little initial return. WAIT! – that’s what most of us do every year during budget planning.For them to have such an impact at two big charities is incredible
The first 10 years of the scheme 1993 - 2002Both cost and income is the sum total for both CRC and ICRF in this first ten year periodOn the graph we can see just what the investment and returns were in the initial yearsThe first of two big blue spikes shows when the ICRF product was launched and by late 2000 both organisations were at full speed promoting their respective servicesWe can also see by 1995/96 how the income starts climbing for the first time about two and a half years after the first responsesYou will have noticed how the cost in 2001/02 have climbed to almost £2mil as both charities ramped up their activities
And in this graph of the second ten year period it dropped to around £1milAt merger we had almost ten years of data to establish best practice from two different approachesAs you can see from this graph, our spend has stayed fairly flat over the last ten years while income has increased significantlyThe sharp rise in income between 08/09 and 09/10 is due to a single estate of £2.4mil that we received in Jan 2010. Big estates account for just 6.2% of our volume but 84.71% of the pledge value (>£10k) Residuary average value £29kFor Pecuniary the average value is £1077
And what it looks like cumulatively so that we can understand when “break-even” point was reachedImagine how much impact this graph could have with your boards to help them see that Legacies is a long term investment that can have a significantly higher ROI than any other form of fundraisingLegacies have always suffered from a lack of information at the pledge point or lack of a pledge point. This kind of info could help us all to make real inroads and change the conversation from “should we invest in Legacies (if it just comes in by it self)” to “how much should we invest for the optimal return”So in year-by-year terms it is a profit of £2.25mil a year over the 20 yearsIt took us ten years to generate £10mil with the offerThe second decade generated another £60mil
Here we have a chart that shows the income as it relates to the year of the activity i.e. the return of each of the campaignsWhile we’re talking about long term investment this is the slide in my five years at the charity that changed the most views about FWS and Legacy MarketingThis is the type of chart that first indicated that the FWS campaigns break-even within 2 years and 6 months. That’s faster than any direct-debit campaign and both are cold-acquisition.What does this mean?With modern direct marketing methods we are mostly talking to the right audience and not just every body anymoreEven Ten years down the line we have not received any where near all the pledged incomeWe know the other pledgers are still alive as we use Mortascreen like most charities
Same as most free will services, you are under no obligation to leave a Legacy if you use the serviceOur terms and conditions do require you to give us your name, address, date of birth and IF you pledge to tell us how muchThese figures look impressive but….
So We have about 35% non-includersWho are they? Free loaders?No, as it turns out the vast majority of them are cancer survivors – so not just our supporters but the people that actually benefited from our work. We found this out by sending a survey to all non-pledgers from 2009We’re ensuring a good experience of the charity with out it being the intent a percentage of users are now deceased and we can currently see around 10% of estates have failed, but the rest have delivered 110% of the total pledged value. ( Confirming our belief that supporters don’t lie when advising us ”)We just need to make it easier for people to act on their intention to support the charityYou can see that not everybody just says “yes” to get us off their backsWe have a stewardship programme for both types of respondersHand over to Pauline to cover the marketing and development of FWS
The marketing is now heavily targeted to specific postcodes therefore we have reduced the marketingspend but with no impact on the inclusionrateThe main part of the budget is the legal costs. We use normal direct marketing tools such as door drop for this areaWe continue legacymarketing communications to our warm supporters as all other charities do.. For the future a development in this will be to link the two and market FWS to our warm supporters too...
A key area of overlap between Legacy Marketing, Development and AdministrationFWS Will Writers are now also the Executors we deal with on a daily basis Of the 5000 notifications we receive a year 900 of these are from Wills written through the FWSApart from the normal way Leg Mark & Dev & Admin work together to share knowledge – FWS also gives additional communication opportunities that have actual penetration past the reception desk at Law firms, particularly through the invoicing and other communicationsLeg Admin are key partners in developing appropriate messaging targeted at solicitors to ensure we get the residuary message across effectivelyMore than 500 firms have been on this journey with us from the origins of the FWSSo how many solicitors are on the scheme?
Every time we mail a campaign we get between 15 and 30 calls from other firms in the area wanting to sign up to the schemeWe do monitor and in extreme circumstances remove firms if we feel there is some abuse of the scheme – we have key data now on the average inclusion rate so if we drop to 20-30% then we hear alarm bells . It’s not always the firms fault though so we may speak to them and ask them if they are asking if their client wishes to include a charitable gift... Or we may not renew our agreement with themSo moving forward...
We have moved the physical marketing element from the role of the FWS manager into Legacy Marketing – although overview of areas and other key decisions are still being part of the role - this will free them up to work hard on the relationship building and also to review the spread of the scheme which may mean further recruitment in the future
Ensuring our admin team work hard with solicitors to maintain a good and positive relationship including all communications and calls to them... We can do whatever we like to develop beautiful materials, actions plans, communications but if solicitors don't have a good experience in their daily encounters with our charity then all our plans are not worth anything
This is all CRUK so we thought we would look at the wider market place - There are several Will Offerings in the market place right nowWe have highlighted a few on the screenSome are limited to specific times of the year, some can be offered to warm supporters as part of their legacy journey to develop them along and others are used as cold acquisitionCapacity - Stephen and team, this is a scheme which is great for national charities but it is limited to just 10 charities per consortium – gives you data on your investment so good for showing short term results – but also has other positive impact over time if you are also marketing this offer to warm supportersWill aid again limited spaces but well known scheme and a part of an annual calendar of opportunities to write a Will for the general publicas mentioned with localised schemes you can contact local legal firms and ask them to offer a reduced rate for a week or a monthThere are other possibly cheaper options; online wills are becoming popular and accepted and we may need to move more in this direction if it looks like our audience want it as an optionThere are also some specific schemes one being a localised scheme which charities like a hospice who work with local law firm's to set up their own free wills scheme and also Barnados who work with a specific consortium of law firms to offer free wills
as mentioned with localised schemes you can contact local legal firms and ask them to offer a reduced rate for a week or a monthThere are other possibly cheaper options; online wills are becoming popular and accepted and we may need to move more in this direction if it looks like our audience want it as an optionAnother tool to use is as members of RAC we can offer the link to Co-Op Legal Services which gives your supporter unlimited legal advice and a lower rate to write their Will if they go through the RAC linkAnything we can do which encourages people to write a Will – but alongside legacy communications which put your charity at front of mind
so from Jack’s first slide Free Wills what is the catch? the long and the short of it is ....investment. Financial investment, an investment of time and also an investment in having a long term focus - a belief that it will impact on future income. The investment bit is always going to be the hardest part I appreciate! Just like all Legacy promotion/fundraising/marketing we need to make the long term case to our own charities for this Last year our FWS income was over £13 million - We use this data to show the overall impact of Legacy Fundraising and how investing in today will have an impact for your tomorrowsI recently saw a question put by Claire Routley on the LMG page asking “If academics could provide you with one piece of research on legacy giving, what would you like to know”.. And Chris Millward from Save the Children said he would like to know how to have some Proof of the causal relationship between legacy marketing spend and legacy income as “In an evidence based culture results speak louder than actions.”Hopefully this presentation has given you some evidence... Thank you!