More solicitors and will-writers are telling their clients about leaving a legacy than at any time in the last decade, research commissioned by Remember A Charity shows.
Researchers, SPA Future Thinking produced the report for the consortium of 140 charities, which campaigns to promote legacy giving. It found that 65 per cent of solicitors and will-writers said they ‘always or sometimes’ made the charitable prompt to clients – the highest level since monitoring began in 2002.
The research is based on a telephone survey with 232 solicitors and will-writers.
Studies shows that those advisors who prompt people about charitable legacies have a higher proportion of their clients leaving charitable legacies in their wills.
A test by the Cabinet Office’s Behavioural Insights Team found that three times as many people left a gift in their will if prompted.
The SPA Future Thinking report also found that overall awareness of Remember A Charity’s campaign and communications on charitable legacies among solicitors is significantly up on last year at 89 per cent compared with 73 per cent in 2013.
It also found that just over a third of solicitors and will-writers always advise clients of the inheritance tax benefits of leaving money to charity.
Rob Cope, director of Remember A Charity, said: “There has been a large disconnect between the 35 per cent of adults who say they’d be happy to leave a gift in their will and the 7.3 per cent who go on to do it.
“Solicitors and will-writers play a crucial role in informing their clients about this form of giving. This report shows that our campaign is helping to shift charitable prompting to become a social norm, potentially generating millions for good causes a year.”
Cope said support for boosting legacy giving is growing. A further 250 solicitors signed up to support the legacy-giving campaign during Remember A Charity week in September, which was supported by the Law Society for the first time this year.
A letter went out to all key probate solicitors during the week, co-signed by the then minister for civil society Brooks Newmark, asking them to support the campaign by making their clients aware of the option to leave a legacy gift.
Cope said: “Prompting practice among solicitors is a quite a contentious issue due to concerns about ‘undue influence’, so their support this year was a big step forward for the charitable sector.”
The government also changed its gov.uk’s ‘making a will’ pages to directly link to Remember A Charity’s website. The government’s site is actively searched by almost 60,000 unique visitors a month.
