10 tips for great online legacy fundraising

In 2013 I wrote about online legacy fundraising content. Although well written persuasive copy is still key, digital trends move on. So four years later it is time to see whether the web pages about legacy fundraising have improved and what has changed.

I looked at a random sample of over 50 large, medium and small charities. In most cases the pages were pretty dull, especially from smaller charities. It is hard to write warm, engaging copy about legacies as we often fall over ourselves trying to be sensitive. But the charities who get it right have a confidence and a clear sense of themselves and their audience.

Here are ten ingredients for emotive and effective online legacy fundraising.

Be clear and persuasive

WaterAid’s legacy site stood out as the go-to example of a persuasive and well designed site. The page starts with a clear call to action – leave the world with water – which sets the tone. They use eye catching and engaging links and headings (leave your mark / what would you like to pass on?) which include and challenge the reader. Images are positive and inspiring. They also include a photograph and name of a person to contact as well as a legacy promise which are both reassuring and clear.

Save the Children UK also use clear and inspiring headings (write a child’s smile into your will) and use bold to highlight important words. They use beautiful pictures of smiling children to reinforce their words. Their writing is confident, concise and persuasive (make a lasting difference, your kindness).

Use social proofing

Campaigns like Remember a Charity week help to promote legacy fundraising. Many charities reinforce this message in their copy. They show that remembering a charity is something that everyone can do.

The Migraine Trust makes a clear statement which makes leaving a legacy accessible – “a gift of just 1% will make a real difference to supporting our charitable work”. This is a clearer way of what they were saying in 2013.

Many charities talk about ‘thousands of people who leave a legacy’ or ‘thanks to people like you’. Use social proofing to validate someone’s decision.

Use video

Since 2013, many more legacy pages include videos. Take a look at this personal message from a supporter on Prisoners Abroad. Or this slick video from ActionAid showing Mrs Harben’s legacy. Or this simple beautiful video from RSPB. Or this speaking from the heart story from Glenys who supports the Alzheimer’s Society.

Talk about impact

What difference will someone’s gift make? Talk big picture about your vision / mission or about specific services. More charities are making big statements about what a legacy means to them.

RSPB’s opening statement is clear and bold: Your legacy is nature’s future.

Refugee Action’s Leave a legacy page goes into more detail. It is beautifully written using storytelling and sense of urgency. It frames the problem and talks about what they can do with a legacy gift. The page is short, concise and powerful. A great example of a small charity getting it right.

East Lancashire Hospice talk about leaving a legacy of love and explain that last year, legacy gifts paid for three months of care.

If your organisation is all about solving a problem or finding a cure, talking about legacies could be difficult. How do you frame the ask when you might not be around or needed in the same way in 20 / 50 years? Don’t avoid the issue – think about how you can present it effectively.

Macmillan Cancer‘s legacy page says: “In the future, doctors and nurses are going to get much better at diagnosing cancer earlier, and treating it.” But stresses that half of us will get cancer at some point so Macmillan will still be needed.

Say please and thank you

Choosing to leave a legacy to a charity is a big deal. The fact that someone is reading your page about this is a good sign. Keep them with you by recognising this. Say please and thank you in the right places. If you come across as kind and thoughtful at the asking stage, it will reassure people that you will behave in the same way when you are processing their gift.

Think about motivation

Why do you think someone might have reached your page? What are they thinking. This page by the Miscarriage Association is written really warmly and in a gentle tone of voice. The quote perfectly positions the ask.

Include appropriate images

Brighten up a serious subject with colourful or inspiring images. Reward visitors to this page and make them want to stay. A collection of several images may work better than a single one. For example, this landing page for the British Heart Foundation includes images of family, medical research as well as a big thank you.

Many organisations seem to rely on stock images of grey-haired couples on their legacy pages. Remember to use images which reflect the demographics of your readers. Also people often write their will triggered by big life events such as getting married or having children. Your audience isn’t just people in later stages of their lives.

Take a look at NSPCC’s page which includes quotes and images from supporters at different stages of their lives. Their stories may chime with readers, validating their own idea to leave a legacy to NSPCC (see social proofing above).

Think about a hook

What could make your legacy fundraising stand out? What stories do you have to tell? Has a legacy gift allowed you to do something special or unusual? Is there someone you could write about or feature to make your ask come to life?

Mencap’s gifts in wills page is based around the inspiring story of Lord Brian Rix. The page says that he “helped change the future for people with a learning disability. With a gift in your Will to Mencap you can too.” It uses beautiful images from their archive and talks about what he achieved in his lifetime. It says that although lots has changed, people with learning disabilities still face challenges so by leaving a gift in your will, you can help change the future too.

Similarly, Leonard Cheshire, marking its centenary say “Leonard’s legacy became our legacy. It could be your legacy too.”

Great Ormond Street Hospital Charity includes information about JM Barrie’s legacy gift in their pages. Roald Dahl’s Marvellous Children’s Charity talks about your final chapter and how to write your own ending.

Include practical information

Make it as easy as possible for someone to actually get the legal stuff right. So include:

• information about different types of gifts (see this handy guide to the types of legacies by Demelza Hospice)
• your official name (and any previous names) and charity number
• suggested wording
• information to help someone work out the detail of their estate
• information for executors
• contact details so a potential donor can get in touch.

A promise can offer reassurance about how a legacy will be dealt with when the time comes. A few charities included these – see WaterAid’s promise, RNLI and Breast Cancer Now.

Be interesting

There were a few examples of charities who’d produced interesting supporting content. For example:

• Blue Cross reminds readers to think about their digital assets (passwords, data, photos, social media etc)
• Cancer Research’s campaign with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra – Two Thirds of a Spring reflects the vital impact that one third of funding has on their life-saving work
• Alzheimer’s Society has an online book of remembrance
• visitors are invited to make a personalised video with Unicef UK. (NB Unicef UK have been running a campaign of promoted tweets about this recently, the only social media content I spotted about legacy fundraising during the research for this post.)

 Get the navigation and terminology right

Think about where your legacy pages sit. How easy are they to find within navigation or search? Be your own mystery customer and check.

Don’t bury your pages – make them prominent, especially if legacies make up a sizeable proportion of your income. Don’t just stick them under ‘Other ways to give’.

Check where they appear in your content rankings on your Google Analytics. Are you using the right terminology for your audience? Test whether the word legacy or will works best. Many charities use both.

See my previous post on legacy fundraising (persuasive and engaging writing in online legacy fundraising) for some tips on terminology and placing of legacy pages. Also how to talk about legacies on social media.

How do you measure up?

Is your online legacy fundraising content strong enough or is it dull and unconvincing? Give your copy a facelift before Remember a Charity week in September. If you are not sure how well it comes across, get your mum to read it or do a page swap with someone else from another charity. Get some feedback and think about how you could bring your content to life.

Share your examples

Have you seen (or written) any good or bad examples of digital legacy fundraising? Please do share them here.

My top five online legacy fundraising sites are listed in a JustGiving blog post. I’d love to hear what yours are.

 

January’s charity content highlights

Come out from underneath your desk / duvet and catch up with some of the latest creative charity content.

Innovation

Cancer Research are continuing their trend of using World Cancer Day (this Saturday – 4 February) to launch new uses for contactless fundraising. Ten ‘smart benches’ across two London boroughs will take £2 donations.

Are you planning to look in to contactless fundraising in 2017? NSPCC recently announced impressive results of their contactless fundraising and many other organisations are using it too. I gathered some examples of contactless giving in my blog post for Zurich Insurance and spoke to Haven House Children’s Hospice who are running trials at the moment.

Not sure what the technical term for this is but the National Lottery did a very smart bit of Twittering by launching this 7second video and inviting people to RT it ‘for a surprise’. The surprise was a personalised video, with the RTers’ Twitter profile image in a gold frame, with the words ‘National Treasure’ underneath. Nice! This was similar to a thanks reply from Save the Children I got in December.

Today it is Time to Talk Day (#timetotalk). Why not use Time to Change’s template to make your own graphic?

• Here are Luke from RNLI’s slides from NFPtweetup32 about their approach to innovation including live video and chatbots.
• Buzzfeed have launched a search tool for volunteering opportunities using Do-It’s APIs.

Good reads

• Heard the one about the powerful force for change? (Charity Comms) – about the role of humour in charity comms including examples from Water Aid and my personal favourite worm, Dave.
• 6 skills no one teaches you in charity digital – but should (Just Giving blog) – Zoe Amar describes the non-technical skills essential for digital success.
• Sharing the moral high ground? (Charity Connect) – about the wave of activism
• Highlights from the Agile Content conference from James Gadsby Peet and a recording of one of the presentations by Sarah Richards on content design. (more at #agilecontent)
• Easy alternatives on disabilist language and handy reminder about designing for screen readers.

If you get a moment, don’t forget to fill in the Charity Digital Skills Survey which is open until 17 February.

And follow #smex17 on Monday if you are not going to the Social Media Exchange in person.

Re-brands / new websites / charity content

• Alzheimer’s Society lanched their new brand and website. Here’s more about the reasons behind it: Alzheimer’s Society rebrands to show that dementia is a problem for everyone (Design Week)
• Action for Children also launched their new look, complete with lovely 404 error message. (I like a good error message – see here)

• The King’s Fund’s The NHS if… site explores hypothetical scenarios for the future of health and social care.
• This campaign video from Street Support in Manchester super-imposes stats on street scenes to show the impact of homelessness.
• Great pictures in the Guardian from Crisis’ midwinter swim.

To brighten your day

• Mum covers anti-homeless spikes in Manchester with cushions (BBC news)
• Twitter Twins: a history of social media mix-ups (BBC Three)
• Budapest spiral staircases – dreamy!
• Trump Draws

What have you seen?

What have been your charity content highlights from January? Do share! I’d love to hear from you.

Content Curation – how to use Storify and live blogging

Got a big social media campaign or event coming up? Or want to tell your story in a new but authentic way? You need to get up-to-speed with content curation. Here’s how to capitalise on all the great content, comments and good feeling around your charity.

What is curation?

Curation is a fancy way for describing how you bring lots of different assets together to tell a story. In the old days you may have written a press release or general page about what happened. Now you can show what happened by including the tweets, videos, links etc. The storytelling is more authentic as you are doing it through the voices of other people, not just your organisation.

Curation can be done manually through your blog or you could use free sites such as Storify or Pinterest.

Campaigns and awareness raising

Time to Change produced a live blog through yesterday’s massively successful #timetotalk campaign. It gave them a place on their website to collate and share all the news coverage, tweets, pictures and messages of support as the campaign spread.

Curation is a good way of collecting everything together after the campaign, to say thank you and to celebrate achievements. Take a look at this example from Girlguiding of their Say No to Page3 campaign. They used Storify to share messages of support for the campaign as well as links to the petition and press coverage.

Curation is also great for telling a linear story, ie this is what happened as it unfolded. A great example of this is Mind’s Storify about the #MentalPatient outcry last year. They produced it really quickly after the event so once the twitter noise had died down, the media had somewhere central to look for information.

Other inspiring awareness-raising uses of Storify

• NSPCC curated a story to raise awareness of what they do (more than just a helpline and Full Stop).
• AmnestyUK asked ‘what does freedom mean to you?‘ and curated the answers.
• RNLI handed over their twitter account to Grace Darling to tell her rescue story from 1838 in real time. Storifying it meant they had a permanent record of it.
• DiabetesUK have produced 33 stories to date on a variety of topics – from soap storylines to blog post reactions.

Events

There are lots of examples of charities using curation to gather content around a fundraising event (runs / cycles / jumps etc). These are great ways of connecting with the fundraisers doing the event as well as their supporters. Take a look at BHF’s London to Brighton Bike Ride 2013.

Events such as conferences, meetings, parties, lectures, galas are prime for curation. You can add so much value to an event by showing behind the scenes, what participants got out of the event as well as general comments and pictures.

SoundDelivery produced an excellent Storify of the Social Media Exchange, not just the usual collection of tweets and resources from a conference. It punctuated the sections with a couple of sentences giving context. They included video, photos, Vines and audio to bring the day to life. They also added links to other useful resources which had been mentioned on the day. It is quite long but it’s the kind of Storify you’ll go back to again and again for inspiration.

Grayson Perry’s Radio 4 Reith Lecture last year was a brilliant example of live blogging. Links, pictures and comments were all being added in real time alongside the 40 minute programme. It generated a rich experience.

Other curation examples

• The British Museum shared birthday wishes from around the world to mark their 255th anniversary.
• The Horniman Museum in South London use Storify to curate their hashtag events.
• NCVO use Pinterest to share news and what’s new around the sector under a number of headings.

Top tips for content curation

• Have fun and be creative. You don’t always have to produce content which is related to your cause (for example Beat Blood Cancer’s Laugh for Leukaemia joke competition). Reward your supporters with content they’ll like.
• Do you have any linear (success) stories you could tell? Think about Rethink’s Find Mike – this is perfect for curation as it started small, got lots of press and social media coverage and then had a happy ending.
• Think about the stories and messages you have within your organisation, which would work told in this way? What assets (video / photos / comments etc) do you have which could be collected together to tell a story? Curating just tweets isn’t enough.
• Does your audience use Storify (or other similar sites)? If you don’t know, ask them. Also look at how many views and followers similar organisations have if they are on Storify. If your audience are not there, would you reach more people by using your blog for curation?
• Invite supporters to contribute. Don’t forget to tell them they’re included and ask them to share.
• Be selective about what you include. It’s not curation if you include everything.
• Devote time to get the skills within your team. Look at lots of examples to help you understand how you could best use curation.
• Don’t underestimate how much time it takes. It’s hard to get it right.
• Include a donate link / button if this is relevant (eg Save the Children’s Philippines response).

Don’t forget to promote your Storify channel (if you have one) prominently on your website. If you have share follow us / join us buttons Storify should be included alongside all your other social media channels (NB I didn’t find anyone doing this, even those with successful channels). People won’t follow you if they don’t know you are there.

Conclusions

Curation is generally free but time consuming. It takes practice to do it well but it is a great way of re-using content which has a short lifespan.

Further reading

• Beth Kanter’s guide to Content Curation shares the 3s’s which help you to evaluate what and how to curate, as well as linking to tools to help you curate.
• Take a guided tour of Storify.
• How can charities use Storify – includes lots of great examples.
• Make the most of Storify – CharityComms guide by the Queen of Storify LondonKirsty.
• Complete Guide to Live Blogging.

Please do share your examples and top tips as a comment or via Twitter and I’ll add them here. There must be loads of examples of other museums or galleries doing interesting things with curation.

Can I help you?

Please also get in touch if you’d like me to help you think about how to use your content. I am a freelance web editor and can help you give your communications a healthcheck and ideas injection.

Is your SMT/trustees page inspiring?

How to give the pages about your senior managers and trustees a digital facelift.

Most charities have a page introducing their senior managers and trustees. These are mostly dull and uninspiring. The pages come across as part ego boost for the subjects and part nod to transparency. But they could be so much better. They could boost transparency and trust (especially in this climate of ongoing rumblings about CEO’s pay). They could be inspiring. Supporters may actually want to read them.

Bog standard

A standard ‘meet the team’ page has a photo and biography information for the CEO and other senior managers. There may be a separate page for trustees using a similar style. This usually helps to highlight the lack of diversity in the organisation’s management and doesn’t give any insight into the cause, or an understanding what and why these people do. They are very static and a website dead-end.

Let’s look at some examples of how these pages could be the start of a deeper insight or conversation.

1. Promote social media

Zoe Amar and Matt Collins are currently on a mission to get CEOs tweeting. They have produced a brilliant how-to guide available from The Guardian’s site and list of the top 30 Charity CEO tweeters. More and more senior managers are embracing social media as a way of sharing successes, challenges and connecting with others. Steve Bridger’s list of CEO tweeters shows how many there are out there. But if you look at the charities they head-up, how many are promoting the CEO’s Twitter addresses (or blog or LinkedIn profile) on the website? Only very few. How are supporters meant to be able to access the insights of the CEO tweeter if the addresses are not publicised?

Breast Cancer Care win the gold star here. Everyone listed on the senior managers page has their own Twitter profile.

I have not managed to find a similar page on any site of trustees who tweet (next project Zoe / Matt?).

NB While thinking about transparency and contactability, what is your organisation’s policy on publishing the email addresses for senior managers or trustees? How contactable are they? Contact information for trustees is especially rare to see.  Nottingham CVS publish a contact form and generic email address for their trustees which is a great solution.

2. Think about biogs

Cutting and pasting information from someone’s CV just isn’t interesting or engaging, especially when it is replicated in a long list of trustees. Of course senior managers and trustees have impressive backgrounds and experience but supporters may also want to know about motivations, personal experience and skills. Equally, including information about someone’s CAMRA membership or love of ballroom dancing may not be appropriate. Here are some alternatives:

• add quotes from each person – Breast Cancer Care’s trustees share quotes rather than CVs
• include stats about what someone has achieved in their role – see this inspirational example from the CEO of Parkinson’s UK
• US charity Do something.org share a strange fact nugget about each member of their team next to their cartoon character profile picture
• publish some kind of skills profile for the team (think LinkedIn endorsements)? This would give a much better insight.

See more about writing great staff biogs in this nonprofithub post.

3. Get good photos

Getting a photographer in to do individual head-shots of everyone in the same style is worth it. A page where people have supplied their own photos of varying degrees of quality, looks dreadful (see this example from the NSPCC).

A group picture of the team working together might be even better? (See this team photo of The Brain Tumour Charity.)

4. Think about your audience

Like with any page on your website, you should think about who is reading this page. Who is it for? What do you want them to do as a result (donate / feel sure that the charity is in safe hands / apply to become a trustee / want to know more)? It may be that all this biography information is not relevant, reading the detail of someone’s career can be quite alienating.

Keeping it simple might be the best answer. Try limiting each person to one paragraph or a certain number of words. Or just including their role and a brief summary. Beanstalk here do a mixture of both but it’s really clear.

You could test what works best for your audience by looking at your page statistics. Make some changes and see how it influences traffic and bounce rates. Change it back or do something different if it has a negative effect.

You could also try putting a call to action (donate / sign up to newsletter etc) at the bottom of the page and see whether anyone acts.

How to convince your boss?

Of course the internal politics connected with tweaking these pages is not to be underestimated. Showing senior managers these examples may help to convince them that it is time for a digital facelift?

(As an example, Parkinson’s UK spotted me tweeting about Breast Cancer Care’s page and now plan to add twitter addresses to their senior management page.)

And going back a stage, if your boss needs convincing to get on board with social media, send them:

• Why use social media (Grow Your Charity Online webinar)
• Why CEOs should adopt social media (CTN blog)
• How small charities can get big benefits from social media (Alex Swallow)

What do you do?

How do you make your staff pages useful? What difference has improving your staff pages made? Please share good and bad examples you have seen. Go-on, add a comment!

Please also get in touch if you’d like me to help you improve your staff pages.