With a survival rate of just 7%, pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest forms of common cancer. Pancreatic Cancer UK was set up in 2006 to support people with pancreatic cancer and to research better treatment and care.
Over the last five years, we have seen steady income growth with an average annual increase in legacies of 16%. Significantly increasing our legacy income is essential to achieve our five-year plan and cultivating our legacy prospects at every part of their supporter journey is a major part of this.
The meaning of effective stewardship
I believe taking time to understand and respond to your supporters’ motivation is the key to effective stewardship. We spend time picking up the phone to pledgers or sending a handwritten card with a pin badge enclosed, so they understand how much we value their support.
Digital is easier and cheaper and there’s a place for that, but to develop one-to-one relationships you need to take the time to be personal. In a digital age, it’s unusual for people to receive something physical, so people really appreciate the extra effort.
For example, I received a call from a supporter in response to my handwritten card, saying how grateful she was. The timing was very poignant, as it arrived on her late father’s birthday. Her father had died of pancreatic cancer and he was the reason why she supported us.
Opportunities like this are rare but very powerful. Now I have the date of her father’s birthday, I can send her a card every year, making sure she stays connected to our charity and keeps the gift in her will.
Going the extra mile
While I wouldn’t describe our stewardship approach as completely unique, we are also prepared to go the extra mile and that’s appreciated by our supporters.
One of our pledgers wanted to host a fundraising event at his local theatre and we supported him by spending a lot of time on the phone assisting him and travelling to his event to tell the audience about pancreatic cancer and run a stall. This pledger told me he’d updated his will this year and increased his legacy to us, so it’s definitely been worthwhile.
As I’m the sole legacy fundraiser at Pancreatic Cancer UK, I don’t currently have the capacity to hold legacy events.
However, our philanthropy team organises an annual Christmas carol concert and my legacy enquirers and pledgers always receive an invitation from me. So far, none have been able to attend, but I’m hoping that sometime in the future these events will give me the opportunity to meet some of these very special supporters face to face.
Retaining close relationships
As Pancreatic Cancer UK grows, I hope there will be more opportunities to have that face-to-face contact through events.
Some things we do now will become more challenging as the number of legacy contacts grows, but having experienced the impact that personal communication can have, it’s something I really hope we continue.
We’re thrilled to have been chosen as charity of the year for the TCS London Marathon next April and hope to raise £2m from this amazing partnership. While this is a milestone for us, it won’t change the efforts we go to in stewarding our supporters.
It’s those close relationships that have helped us experience the growth we have over the last 14 years, and will no doubt be the catalyst for our continued growth in the future.
Our biggest legacy campaign
We run our biggest legacy campaign of the year during Remember A Charity Week – a national awareness week, which helps promote and normalise the idea of leaving a gift in a will to charity.
As members of Remember A Charity, the week is a great opportunity to share stories from supporters who have already pledged a gift. Those close relationships with supporters, achieved through stewardship, provide us with lots of really powerful stories about why supporters choose to leave us a gift in their will, encouraging others to support us in this special way.
We share stories in our annual newsletter mailing, as well as organic social media posts, and e-newsletters for supporters and volunteers. A story from one of our supporters, Terence, is also shared on the Remember a Charity website, enabling us to reach a wider audience.
We’ll also be sharing 10 of our projects across the UK through Remember A Charity’s Great Map of Willanthropy – an interactive map which shows the impact and reach that gifts in wills to UK charities have had on causes all over the world.
Internally, we are using Remember A Charity’s Be Remembered campaign to engage staff to share in a light-hearted way, how they’d like to be remembered. This is part of a week-long competition to find three Remember a Hero charities who will each win a badge and a box of Heroes chocolates.
While our focus on gifts in wills is heightened during Remember A Charity Week, our stewardship programme is always on and we recognise how crucial it is at all times of the year to steward supporters. I believe that our personalised responses to all new pledgers from Remember a Charity Week will lead to many more personal relationships formed and stories shared.
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