Legacy Giving: How Small Charities Benefit from Gifts in Wills
A single legacy can outweigh years of raffles and cake sales combined, yet many small community charities never mention the option at all, out of a caution that is understandable but often costly.
Published July 2026Community fundraising tends to think in small, repeatable amounts: the money raised from a quiz night, a raffle, a sponsored walk. Legacy giving works on an entirely different scale, since a single gift left in someone’s will can be larger than an entire year of routine fundraising activity put together. For national charities, legacies are already one of the largest single sources of income; for small local groups, they remain comparatively rare, mainly because the option is rarely raised at all.
What a legacy gift actually is
A legacy, in this context, is simply a gift to a charity written into someone’s will, to be paid out after their death alongside gifts to family and other beneficiaries. Legacies generally take one of a few forms: a pecuniary legacy, a fixed sum of money; a residuary legacy, a percentage of whatever remains of the estate after other gifts and debts are settled; or a specific legacy, a particular named item or asset. Residuary legacies tend to be the most valuable to charities in practice, since they rise in real terms with the value of the estate rather than being fixed at a sum decided years or decades earlier that inflation may have eroded by the time it is actually paid out.
Why it matters for a small local charity
Local and community-scale charities are often better placed to benefit from legacy giving than people assume, particularly among long-standing supporters who have attended events, volunteered, or benefited from the charity’s work over many years and feel a personal connection to it that a national charity rarely offers. A supporter who has attended a candlelit charity evening every year for two decades, or whose late spouse is remembered at a community event, is often someone for whom a modest legacy gift feels like a natural and meaningful way to continue that connection after their death.
The difficulty is that most people simply never think to include a small local cause in their will unless someone gently raises the possibility. Solicitors drafting wills routinely ask clients whether they wish to leave anything to charity, but they generally cannot suggest specific causes, and clients without a strong existing connection to a large national charity often leave the charitable section of their will blank by default, not from a lack of generosity but from a lack of a specific thought.
Raising it without being awkward about it
Community groups understandably worry that mentioning legacy giving will feel presumptuous or uncomfortable, particularly with an older or long-standing donor base. In practice, the approach that tends to work best is gentle and informational rather than a direct ask: a short note in a newsletter or on the charity’s website explaining that legacy gifts are welcomed and how they are used, without pressing any individual supporter to act. Framing it around impact — what a legacy gift of a given size would let the charity do — tends to land better than framing it around the charity’s need for money.
It also helps to be specific about the mechanics: charities should be able to provide their correct registered name and charity number, since a legacy that names an organisation incorrectly or ambiguously can cause real delay and difficulty for executors trying to identify the intended recipient after the donor has died. A small printed card with this information, available at events and on request, removes a genuine practical barrier that otherwise sits between good intentions and an actual gift.
The tax position
Gifts to registered charities left in a will are generally exempt from inheritance tax, and in England and Wales, leaving at least ten per cent of a taxable estate to charity can reduce the rate of inheritance tax charged on the rest of the estate. This is a genuine, meaningful incentive that many people are simply unaware of, and it is one of the more persuasive, factual points a charity can make when explaining legacy giving to supporters and their advisers, rather than relying on sentiment alone. Full and current detail on how these rules apply is set out in official inheritance tax guidance, which any charity discussing legacies with supporters should point people toward rather than attempting to give tax advice itself.