More charitable wills are being made, says Charity Monitor
Howard Lake | 12 June 2004 | News
The latest survey by Charity Monitor has good news for legacy fundraisers.
Charity Monitor’s latest research finds that the percentage of adults in Great Britain claiming to have made Wills has risen to a record high. At 38.5% it is up almost two per cent since the last survey in December 2003 and up about 3.5 per cent since a year ago. Projected onto the UK population this equates to 17.9 million Wills, up 1.5 million since last April and up 660,000 in the first four months of 2004.
The new Wills seem to be coming particularly from men, 35-54 year-olds and from the ABs.
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Even better is the news that the percentage of those Wills which include at least one charitable bequest has returned to a record level. It was as low as 10% as recently as late 2002 but has now hit 15%. It has not been this high since late 1997.
Consequently, by April 2004 almost 6% of GB adults had charitable Wills, up from only 4% a year ago and 4.3% four months previously. The figure was as low as 3% in August 2000.
Andrew Papworth, who runs the Charity Monitor, says: “Even allowing for the possibility of sampling variation and a freak result, this looks very promising. The projected numbers are quite mind-boggling in terms of a growing market for fundraisers to aim at. A year ago the figures were indicating that there was a total of about 2 million charitable Wills and now there are about 2.8 million. It’s a great reward for those who have been battling away to make the case for bequests as a method of helping charities.”
Papworth expects that the August Charity Monitor will throw further light both on the strength of the turnabout and the types of individuals who are suddenly thinking of charitable bequests in their Wills. The early signs are that it is particularly the over 65s, ABs and men slightly more than women who are making the running.
“Assuming the trend is confirmed by future surveys,” said Papworth, “the prospects are very exciting. To have achieved these results either a very high proportion of new Wills must include a charitable bequest or a lot of existing Wills must have been changed (or both). In any case it suggests that it is possible to push the percentage of Wills containing a charitable Will way beyond 15% in the future.”
The fieldwork research for the April 2004 survey was carried out between 15 and 20 April 2004.
The Charity Monitor was designed and launched by Andrew Papworth for the RNLI fourteen years ago and has been running every four months since then. As well as data about Wills and charitable bequests, the Charity Monitor collects information about the spontaneous and prompted awareness of about thirty major charities, likelihood to give and perceived effectiveness data for a few selected charities, preferences in methods of helping charities and newspaper readerships.
For some years the RNLI have allowed Andrew Papworth to syndicate the general data from the Charity Monitor to other charities at about a quarter of the cost of going it alone at full market rates. So far, five major charities have subscribed to the data.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.