The Hospice Legacy Circle.
Richard Hill is the programme manager for the Hospice Legacy Circle. Here, he explains how the Legacy Circle works and how important collaboration is during these challenging times.
Hospice legacy income is currently worth £190 million (NCVO 2021/22) and is a vital source of income for hospices, who are more dependent on legacies than any other sector, with funds from legacy gifts making up 41% of total voluntary income, compared to 38% for the health sector, and 28% of all charities (NCVO).
Challenging times
What’s concerning is that income growth over the last 10 years for the hospice sector is lagging behind other local/ specialist health charities at 4.9% compared to air ambulances at 13.9% and all heath charities at 5.3%.
If we look at the graph below, we can see that after peaking in 2015, hospice sector share of the legacy market has been declining ever since. It went from owning 25% of the health sector legacy market share to just 20% in the five years that followed.
This is a worrying trend, and one which the Hospice Legacy Circle sets out to address, by arming its members with the knowledge to implement the changes needed to start moving the pendulum the other way.
What is the Hospice Legacy Circle?
The Hospice Circle is now in its 2nd year, and we currently have 19 members, with a good mixture of adult and children’s services (some combined), covering the length and breadth of the country, who come together to learn and share about all things legacy.
The programme delivers best-of-class training in legacy fundraising and administration, expert technical advice, and valuable market intelligence. It provides a forum to share experiences and ideas through facilitated online workshops, as well as the opportunity to collaborate on common initiatives such as pooled research projects and benchmarking.
The main elements of the Circle are centered around 6 workshops. The work shop themes are chosen at the start of the year from a long list of different topics, covering everything from strategy and communication, to legacy administration. It’s wonderful that the members get to define what we talk about and the level of depth we go into for each topic. It’s fascinating to hear different experts from across the group talk about, implementing a legacy strategy one month, then the methods of forecasting legacy income the next. It gives a tangible tool kit of takeaways that each of the members can put into practice in their own hospice.
For this year, we’ve added data dashboards to make it easier to benchmark hospice legacy data against peers and other ‘local heroes’ including air ambulances and NHS Trusts. We’re also having some 121 time with each of our members to talk about what’s keeping them awake at night — challenges that are common to the sector but more importantly to their specific hospice as well.
Collaboration in action
I absolutely love the workshops; everyone is so engaged and it’s great to see the high level of input from the members in each of the sessions. My favourite part of the workshops are the hospice case studies. Each session, we ask one of the members to talk about their experiences related to the topic and how they’ve gone about implementing it and the effect it’s had on their hospice. We hugely appreciate the time and effort it takes to put together the presentations — our members get so much out of the shared learnings. And as you can imagine, we quite often overrun with the Q&A!
Come and join the circle
We’re currently planning for year 3 and would love for any hospice reading this article to consider joining our circle. It’s a fantastic format to learn about all things legacy.
And we’ve had some lovely comments from our members:
“We found the session on engaging with hospice staff very helpful. We’re looking at developing a survey for those in clinical and non-clinical roles to help empower them to talk about gifts in wills in the long-term.”
David Pond – Individual Giving Manager Keech, Hospice Care
“It’s been fascinating within the Circle to hear from other hospices and experts. We’re now armed and tooled up with lots more information to go forward and launch our appeal.”
Teresa Nightingale – Income Generation and Marketing Director, Wirral Hospice St Johns
“We found the session on stewardship particularly helpful and found the whole programme really underlined the importance of treating people as individuals rather than putting them in boxes as defined by the hospice or legacy team.”
Gary Moyle – Head of Legacy, Statutory and Trusts Giving, Martlets
The programme runs from October to September. If you’d like to chat further about how it works, please contact me at richard.hill@legacyfutures.com.
We’re also looking at developing Learning Circles for other sectors. If you’re an NHS Trust, an air ambulance, part of the higher education sector, or another sector and you think bringing your peers together would be a good thing, please let me know and we’ll try to make it happen!