International Legacy Giving Day sees raft of activity across Europe

International Legacy Giving Day takes place each year on 13 September, with national legacy giving campaigns and nonprofits planning activity on and around this date. The aim? To highlight the impact of legacy giving and encourage more people to consider including a charity in their will. Here’s a brief round up of some of this year’s activity.

In Italy – Testamento solidale held a panel discussion on 13 September on the state of solidarity in Italy, which included a look at the results of new research from Eumetra, ‘Future, wellbeing, solidarity, solidarity legacies. How the orientations of the Italians have changed after two years marked by pandemic and war’.

In the UK – Remember A Charity Week took place from 5 to 11 September. It saw 200 charities working together to inspire gifts in wills, supported by the consortium’s network of legal partners, solicitors and will-writers, and backed by popular UK celebrities Len Goodman and Janet Ellis. As well as a campaign video that shone a light on the impact of legacy giving, activity included a series of ‘How-to’ videos presented by Janet Ellis, a digital campaign inspired by a 70s science show, personalised assets and tools for charities, and a promotional toolkit for legal professionals. The bite-size videos tackled frequently asked questions that the public may have around wills, aiming to help increase understanding of gifts in wills and drive traffic to the Remember A Charity website.

Here’s their campaign video:

This year, Ireland’s annual awareness campaign, My Legacy Month, moved to September for the first time. International Legacy Giving Day is a big focus of Ireland’s month-long campaign, with a campaign video launching on the day, and support from former football player and TV pundit Pat Spillane. Members contributed clips to the video and the day itself was primed to be big focus for them all, especially for the smaller charities without the resources to run an in-house legacy campaign throughout the month.

Overall, My Legacy’s annual campaign comprises a PR campaign led by its launch ambassador and a paid & search digital campaign as well as organic. Its PR agency also provided members with a comms toolkit to support their own supporter campaigns with the campaign video to follow.

In Belgium, group campaign testament.be already has about 150 participating organisations, and is a 360° media campaign that runs all year round, but is strongly intensified on International Legacy Giving Day.

As every year, on 13 September testament.be once again advertised on national and regional television and radio and in various newspapers and magazines. But this year something special was added: the Gouden Goededoelengids (the Yellow Pages Charity Guide) – a parody of a well-known Belgian business telephone directory.

In this Yellow Pages there was no list of companies, but of testament.be’s charities, along with articles and testimonials about remembering a charity. The 40-page guide was distributed as an appendix to virtually all Belgian printed dailies, Flemish and French with a circulation of 750,000 copies. The supplement was also distributed by the various newspapers through their digital version on this date, making the campaign very difficult not to notice.

Testament.be is well known for its quirky take on legacies – here’s a look at a campaign they did in 2020, presented by Lucinda Frostick, director of Remember A Charity in the UK:

In Switzerland, the Alliance for the Common Good (Allianz für das gemeinwohl) held a discussion aimed at stimulating thinking on life, death, what people want to give back and how to do this through writing a will. It also looked at the practicalities of will writing.

The conversation with Michael Kreuzer, lecturer at the University of Bern and Swiss Universities of applied sciences, was moderated by journalist Marc Jäggi.

Other key activity included the creation of a video to raise awareness of charitable legacy giving that will also be used over the coming weeks following its initial broadcast on Facebook on International Legacy Giving Day.

And finally, in Finland, new research by the Finnish legacy campaign Hyvatestamentti.fi was released to coincide with the day. It revealed that the number of Finns with a will has now risen to almost a fifth, along with other statistics on will making and giving preferences. More on this can be read in our coverage of the research.

Image by Public Domain Pictures on Pexels