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| 18 Sep 2026 | |
| Written by Mark Hughes | |
| Charity Sector News |
Charities Institute Ireland’s first Legacy Exchange brought together charity leaders, fundraisers, trustees, legal experts and sector specialists for a morning focused on one of the biggest long-term opportunities facing Irish fundraising: how we grow legacy giving in Ireland.
The event, held at The Dean Hotel in Dublin, was designed to move the conversation beyond simply recognising the potential of gifts in Wills and towards the practical decisions, investment and organisational commitment required to build successful legacy programmes.
That challenge is becoming increasingly important.
Legacy giving has the potential to make a significant contribution to the long-term financial resilience of Irish charities. Yet for many organisations it remains an underdeveloped income stream, often competing for attention with fundraising activities capable of delivering a more immediate return. As highlighted in Cii’s recent work on legacy giving, building this area successfully requires sustained leadership, confidence and an organisation-wide commitment rather than a series of short-term campaigns.
The Legacy Exchange explored what that commitment looks like in practice.
Opening the morning, Ursula McMahon, Partner in Charity Law at Mason Hayes & Curran, explored the relationship between trust, governance and the stewardship of legacy gifts.
One of the strongest themes was that good governance should not be seen as something that makes legacy fundraising more complicated. Clear policies, agreed procedures and appropriate oversight can instead give staff the confidence to manage legacy gifts consistently and professionally.
Legacy giving is, after all, an extraordinary expression of trust.
For charities, that means thinking carefully about issues including the management of restricted gifts, potential conflicts of interest, relationships with solicitors and executors, and clarity around who within an organisation has responsibility and authority when managing a legacy.
Importantly, legacy fundraising cannot sit entirely with the fundraiser. It requires engagement across leadership, finance, governance and the board.
This echoes one of the central themes emerging from Cii’s wider work in this area: legacy giving needs to be understood not simply as a fundraising tactic, but as a strategic conversation about an organisation’s future sustainability.
Richard Millar of the Free Wills Network, Lucinda Frostick, Director of Remember A Charity, and Christine Reidy, Legacy Fundraising Consultant and Project Manager with Your Catholic Legacy, brought three complementary perspectives on what Ireland can learn from the development of the more established UK legacy market.
Richard explored how initiatives such as free Will-writing services can help remove practical barriers, create opportunities for conversations about charitable giving and make it easier for supporters to act on their intentions.
Lucinda brought the perspective of Remember A Charity, where charities work collectively to grow awareness of gifts in Wills. Her contribution highlighted the importance of collaboration, sustained public awareness and consistent messaging in helping to make legacy giving a normal and understood part of the Will-writing conversation. The UK experience demonstrates that individual charities do not have to build that culture alone; there is significant value in organisations working together to increase public understanding and confidence in legacy giving.
Christine provided another powerful example of collaboration through her work with Your Catholic Legacy, a consortium of charities working together to increase legacy giving within the UK Catholic community. Over many years, the initiative has combined shared campaigning, training, research, resources and peer learning to strengthen members’ confidence and capability around legacy fundraising.
Together, the three contributions reinforced that the development of the UK legacy market has not happened through one campaign, initiative or organisation. It has been supported by years of investment, collaboration, supporter engagement and activity designed to make gifts in Wills increasingly familiar and accessible.
The lesson for Ireland is not necessarily to replicate the UK model wholesale. Rather, it is to understand the factors that have helped create a stronger culture of legacy giving and consider how those approaches can be adapted to the Irish context.
One particularly important theme was collaboration.
Growing legacy giving is not solely a challenge for individual charities. There is a wider opportunity for the Irish sector to work collectively to increase awareness and confidence among the public and make considering a charitable gift in a Will a much more normal part of the Will-writing process.
The practitioner panel brought together perspectives from organisations at very different stages of their legacy journey.
Assia Buono of ActionAid Ireland, Grace Kelly of Trócaire, Helen McVeigh of St Vincent’s Healthcare Foundation and Alice Murphy of Mason Hayes & Curran explored everything from supporter relationships and legacy administration to budgeting, internal buy-in and the realities of working with limited resources.
The discussion highlighted an important tension.
Legacy fundraising demands long-term thinking, but charities are operating in an environment where leadership teams and boards understandably face immediate financial pressures.
For smaller organisations in particular, it can be difficult to invest today in an income stream where the return may not arrive for many years.
But the panel also highlighted the importance of beginning somewhere.
Even establishing a legacy line within future income and expenditure budgets can change the conversation. It creates visibility, encourages boards and leadership teams to ask questions and helps establish legacy giving as part of an organisation’s longer-term income strategy.
For charities trying to build the internal case, unrestricted income is also particularly significant. At a time when organisations face increasing pressures around core costs, governance and service delivery, the potential for legacy gifts to provide flexible income strengthens the strategic case for investment.
Perhaps one of the clearest messages from the day was that legacy fundraising is fundamentally about relationships.
Unlike many other fundraising activities, it is rarely transactional. Supporters may have a relationship with an organisation stretching back decades, while others may choose to leave a significant gift despite never having been a major financial donor during their lifetime.
That changes how charities need to think about stewardship.
The discussion explored the importance of recognising legacy supporters as some of an organisation’s most valued relationships: inviting them to events, sharing the impact of the organisation’s work, creating opportunities to engage with services and, most importantly, ensuring that they feel genuinely connected to the mission.
As our earlier analysis of the opportunity noted, legacy giving is built on long-term trust, values alignment and relationships that can develop over many years.
Closing the morning, Damian O’Broin and the Ask Direct team led an interactive session examining some of the most persistent assumptions surrounding legacy fundraising.
“Donors don’t like being asked.”
“Legacy income is impossible to predict.”
“There is no point investing because you cannot control when gifts will arrive.”
“There are more urgent fundraising priorities.”
These are familiar concerns across the sector, but the session challenged delegates to distinguish between genuine risks and assumptions that may be preventing organisations from investing.
The central message was that making the internal case for legacy fundraising requires evidence.
Boards and leadership teams need realistic expectations around timelines and return on investment, but they also need to understand the cost of doing nothing. Legacy growth does not simply happen because demographic conditions are favourable. Charities still need to communicate the opportunity, develop supporter relationships and invest in the people and systems required to manage those relationships effectively.
One of the reasons Cii established the Legacy Exchange was the clear appetite among charities for practical support.
Ahead of the event, delegates identified a remarkably consistent set of challenges: knowing how to get started, building the internal business case, having sensitive legacy conversations, developing effective campaigns, stewarding supporters and learning from organisations already doing this work.
The conversations throughout the morning reinforced that there is no single blueprint that will work for every charity.
Organisations have different supporter bases, missions, resources and levels of maturity.
But there are common foundations: leadership support, appropriate governance, long-term investment, good data, thoughtful communication and genuine stewardship.
Ireland has a significant opportunity to grow legacy giving over the coming decades, but potential alone will not deliver that growth.
As we have said previously, the organisations best positioned to benefit will be those prepared to act now: investing in capability, strengthening leadership understanding and embedding legacy giving within their long-term strategy.
The first Legacy Exchange demonstrated that there is a strong appetite across the sector to do exactly that.
Our thanks to Ursula McMahon and Alice Murphy of Mason Hayes & Curran, Katie Roberts and Richard Millar of the Free Wills Network, Damian O’Broin and the Ask Direct team, and our practitioner panellists Assia Buono, Grace Kelly and Helen McVeigh for sharing their insight and experience.
Thanks also to everyone who joined us and contributed so openly to the discussions throughout the morning.
We look forward to continuing those conversations through Cii’s Major Gifts and Legacy Forum and to reconvening the Legacy Exchange in 2027.
