Welcome to Legacy Fundraising Chat, where I talk about everything Legacy related to help you as a fundraiser, generate more interest amongst your supporters in Legacy giving.

I’m your host, Sanita Guddu, producer of this podcast, founder of Persuasion, a Legacy marketer, providing legacy consultancy, legacy training, coaching, and interim legacy support to charities of all sizes.

Welcome to part two of my interview with Gaynor Lanceley.

So, Gaynor, you and I have talked extensively in the past about various services that fundraisers offer. As someone that’s worked with me will know, I love a free Will service.

However, there’s a time and place for it. I really want you to be as honest as you feel you can be about your thoughts around using vetted solicitors within a geographical area. It’s kind of ‘make your Will with these solicitors as we’ve got an appointed solicitor.’ Let’s talk about that.

From a solicitor’s point of view, I used to always be very pleased to be on a panel of solicitors to help with any Will promotion. The more solicitors that were on a panel, the happier I would be. If you came to me with your charity, and you said, ‘Will you take part in our maker free Will month?’ Theoretically, yes, I will.

If you are a big charity and you want me to take part, then obviously I’ll do that. But I might only have the capacity to write a set number of Wills.

I don’t want to spend an entire month or a week just doing free Wills where I could actually have clients that would be paying for that kind of work. I like it where you see panels with a number of solicitors on them. We can all take two Wills each and share the work between us.

From a solicitor’s point of view, I don’t want to be the only solicitor on your panel because I haven’t got the capacity to be able to do that work. I’m talking about me personally. In the firms that I’ve worked with, there might be other people that just want to offer free Wills, and that’s grand if they’ve got the opportunity to do it. But as a busy solicitor, it’s really hard to do that and accommodate everybody from a charity’s point of view.

Choose your solicitor panel carefully

I would be very cautious if anybody approached me and asked if they could be on my panel of solicitors. To me, that looks as though they’re building up caseload and don’t have that many clients. That might be absolutely fine but, if I was in a charity, I would create a hit list of the people that I would love to have on my panel and the reasons why.

What to look for in a solicitor

What I would look for is an organisation that was called Solicitors for the Elderly. We’ve changed our name now to the Association of Lifetime Lawyers, so we are for all rather than just for the elderly. Both names cause their own issues.

If you have this qualification, you are a legally qualified person that specialises in Will writing and dealing with vulnerable clients and all the things that come with it. For me, I would be looking for a solicitor that’s got that badge.

If I was looking for someone and I had high net worth clients, I would be looking for a STEP badge. That’s the Society of Trusts and Estates Practitioners and that is the tax and trust qualification I mentioned in the previous episode. They’re the two specialist badges that I would look for.

If I had someone offering to write free Wills and they had either of those badges, absolutely – I would love them on my panel of solicitors.

Give your potential pledgers options

I would never, as a charity, want to offer one provider. If I’m only offering one option, I’m not really making an offer as I’m telling you to use that one provider.
Options may also help to protect your charity’s reputation

If you only have one provider and there is an issue with them for any reason, then any potential risk of reputation could come back on the charity. For example, if you’ve been using someone that is found foul of whatever regulations they’re practising under.

Solicitors can be struck off, their firms can be intervened, there could be all sorts of issues going on. If you’ve got an intervened firm, it might not have anything to do with the solicitor working there. There could be an issue somewhere else in the firm but, until you’ve clarified it, you don’t want your reputation as a good charity to be on the line.

How many solicitors should make up your panel?

If you’re trying to get panels of Will writers and solicitors, whatever you’re going to use, always make sure you’ve got more than one option. The more options, the better. I think when you start having more than six or seven options, it starts getting quite difficult to manage and it starts to be confusing for your client, customer or donor. I would say anywhere between about four and eight or ten.

I would not have more than ten because that’s just too much. I don’t think I’d have fewer than four because you need to give your donors the choice as to who they use.

How about accountants?

You might be looking for an online Will or a Will done by a solicitor or a Will writer, but don’t forget accountants. Firms of accountants have solicitors that sit within them. Financial advisors might have solicitors that sit within them.

You might have a STEP qualified advisor, that’s an accountant who can write Wills. Bear that in mind.

If you are doing corporate fundraising and you have got financial advice or accountancy firms supporting your charity, ask them, do they write Wills? Check them out, see if you think they’re good enough to join the panel that you’re going to create. If you think that they’re good enough, then invite them. By invitation only

I would only get people on a panel if I’ve invited them on. I would never allow them to join if they’ve asked, unless they’re on my target list. That’s why I like looking at the strategy from a legal point of view, so that you know that all those boxes have been ticked and you’re OK to carry on using what you’re using or changing your strategy to suit.

Do your due diligence or outsource to someone who has

Our legacy fundraising code of conduct says that we cannot recommend just one solicitor. It says that if somebody comes to you with an enquiry, you are meant to send them at least three solicitors within their geographical area.

I always try to be unbiased and give as much information as possible and a balanced view, but I absolutely think that due diligence lacks on a charity’s part when they do not take responsibility for setting up these cohort of solicitors. This is why I’m a big fan of using companies who do their own due diligence around getting the right solicitors.

Everyone that listens to the show or reads my transcripts will know that the National Free Wills Network sponsors my podcast, but I am in favour of all services like them, whether that be Free Wills Online, Guardian Angel (who are now Octopus Legacy) and Farewell, because they have all done their due diligence. T

here is a distinct difference between going out and getting your own solicitors rather than trying to outsource to these companies. Gaynor, what’s your view on this? Because as you can tell, I’m quite vocal on this subject. I’d love to hear your perspective.

I know the National Free Wills Network really well, and I was very honoured to have been one of the first panel solicitors when they first set up. I’ve used National Free Wills Network as a panel solicitor, a service user, as a charity that has signed up to their service, and I’ve written my own Will using them.

Trial the service you’re thinking about offering

If you’re offering a service to your donors, I would strongly recommend that you use that service yourself. If you’re the legacy officer in a charity and I said to you, ‘This is the product that you’re thinking of using, have you tried it?’ Lots of people will say no.

Some people will say, ‘I’ll go and try it now’, but they never do because they don’t actually want to write their own Will. Although we all say we will, do we?
I challenge the listeners particularly and everybody generally, if you’ve got a free Will option that you are recommending, as part of the due diligence and within work’s time, you should use it as part of your research.

It’s not about you doing your own free Will, it’s about you using yourself as an example to check the service that you’re providing to your donors is robust enough that you actually ended up with a Will that you have signed.

If you have generated a Will online or offline, however you’ve done it, you’re happy with the way it’s been done and you have legally signed it (so it is a legally binding document) then you’ve tested that service. If you haven’t done it, you have not tested the service that you’re using. I would always advocate that everybody does that. If you end up with your own perfectly written free Will out of it, all the better.

Do your test Will according to your real life

If I dream up the circumstances and pop it in a Will, it’s never going to go wrong, is it? Whereas if I put my own circumstances in, and what would happen if my children died or we all died in a car crash, I get asked the questions I need to consider. We could all pass away at the same time.

You need to make sure that whatever product you’re using, it asks you these questions. If you all died together, then what? What do you really want to happen? If it’s not asking you those questions, I don’t think it’s a robust enough system.
I would always rather take the time out to go and get advice in person. It’s not about the document. My Will could say, ‘I’ll leave this to my husband and this to the kids,’ but you might not see how much thought has gone into that and how many plan Bs have been considered.

You might not even know what I’m leaving because we might have things in joint names that don’t form part of my Will. You wouldn’t know that so, for me, it’s about the advice.

Never, ever underestimate the value of the advice

We can all pull our own teeth out, but I go to a dentist. I could get a divorce online, but I would probably get legal advice for that. Although Wills are reasonably cheap, if you look at the general cost of legal fees here and there, they are very cheap for what they are.

They’re a loss leader to all the solicitors that write them, they do not make money on writing Wills. Make sure that you take advantage of that, because it could be a very costly thing to get wrong for your family and friends. That’s where contentious probate solicitors recoup all their losses when the estates are being claimed over.
Sanita agreed how important it was to test free Will services.

A lot of my clients use free Will services, so I will actually test that service before I work with them. It’s really important for me that I’ve done my due diligence, even though it’s not actually my responsibility to do so. I feel that, on behalf of the charity, I can say I think this is a great service for your supporters. Unless I’ve tested it, I cannot say that.

Is your solicitor asking the right questions?

Also, what I love about testing these services is exactly the thing you were saying. Are they asking me the right questions? Because, and I’ve said it on my podcast before, all of my estate is distributed to charities.

That is very unusual, so I would expect any self-respecting solicitor or online service to double check that with me. Is that exactly what I intended, or did I make a mistake somewhere along the line? That’s the minimum that I would expect them to acknowledge.

Whilst they’re asking me that question, they’re also checking my ability to make decisions. And am I of sound mind? Because if I cannot answer that question in a comprehensive way, I think that is a red flag.

By them asking the question, the answer is then also documented. Therefore, my Will can never be contested.

I think it’s really difficult for charities to understand that anything to do with Wills is really convoluted. You could be really young, you might have no need in your own mind to ever make a Will. You haven’t thought about it, and now you’re trying to promote a product that you’ve not used.

Build your confidence as a legacy fundraiser, legacy officer, legacy marketing administrator, whoever you are – testing is a really good tuition opportunity.
See testing your Will writers as a learning opportunity

Basically, what you’re doing is going on a course to learn how to write a Will, which is why I advocate doing it within work’s time. Otherwise, it will end up being put one side and you might never do it.

If you do it as part of your job, it’s a really good training opportunity for you. It’s a due diligence operation for the charity, and it just makes the job so much better if you can use that product properly and you’re confident with it. You understand what the questions are and what you had an issue with.

Maybe that would be something that you could speak to the provider about and say, ‘It didn’t work for me because of this.’ It might help them make their systems more robust.

Yes, definitely. I always think that those conversations with donors are always so much easier when we’ve been through it yourself. I remember having a legacy manager who was horrified that I didn’t have a Will. I thought, I’m promoting Wills and legacies, and I haven’t done one myself. Once I started the process, I totally got it. I understood why people do not write their own Wills.

Testing also teaches you to understand that writing a Will is an emotional process
It’s very little to do with time and money. It’s emotional barriers. We need to understand the emotional process that many people go through, because nobody wants to think about their own demise, especially if somebody has children.

There are other people that would say, because I have children, I have got a Will. That’s actually not that common. From my experience, people are less likely to want to have a Will in place if they’ve got children, and that is understandable. I have so many emotional barriers about who I leave what to, because there are people that have been hugely influential in my life. We’ve got to get inside the donor’s head, haven’t we? As much as possible.

Gaynor had something to confess…

The first time I did my Will, I had been in private practice and I didn’t have one. I wrote my first one out of embarrassment. Some of your listeners who know me will know that already. I wrote my first one out of embarrassment because the client asked if I had a Will, and I was mortified that I didn’t. I made one out of embarrassment and I found it really quite an emotional thing.

Reviewing your Will is important too

I did my Will and forgot all about it, then five years later I reviewed it, and it was great. The property prices had increased. All of a sudden, I thought, ‘I like you, but not that much’ because of the value of the gift. I wasn’t married at the time, so it was all left to friends and family. The value of the gift had skewed because of the value of the property, and that changed everything.

All of a sudden, it stopped being an emotional exercise and it was more of a tactical one. It was so empowering!

Deathbed Wills

I’ve written a lot of what we call deathbed Wills, where I’ve been called out at the very last minute and people have died very quickly after signing their Wills. Those people will always stay in my mind, because they were the most empowered people at that time. It was the one thing that they had control over, where they didn’t have control over everything else.

It was an absolute blessing being able to do those Wills for them, because it meant the world to them. It meant the difference between their dreams being carried out and their dreams not being carried out. I used to think of myself as a fairy godmother, that if you wanted a dream coming true, at least I could help you with that.

It’s an honour for Gaynor to support people this way

I see people at different points in their lives making Wills for different reasons. I think it’s a real honour to be able to do that rather than not talking about gifts in Wills or being a bit scared, because we all are a bit.

Maybe you’re superstitious that if you sign something, something might happen. You might be thinking, ‘I don’t need one yet’, but just do it and get it over with. Once you’ve done the first one, when you review it, it will be a really empowering exercise for you.

Everybody has a bucket list, and the one thing you should have on a bucket list is writing your Will. When you’re doing your yoga retreat in Thailand, you can laugh thinking, ‘I did the Will before I came here.’

Back to deathbed Wills

I have a question about people who are making their Wills on their deathbed. Have you done any analysis into what percentage of those people actually had a Will in place already and were changing it because of being in the moment of reflection, or were these people generally people who never had a Will and thought, I need to get this sorted now?

I have had a very tiny percentage who wanted to change a Will that already existed. I would say at least 95% had never made a Will before, because they are the people that we all are.

Everyone should have a Will

Nobody really wants to make a Will but, if you’re going to do one as a training exercise through work and you’ve got something in place, when you actually then come to update your Will, you know what you’re doing and it takes all that stress off.
Will your dreams come true?
I’ve had clients that were so phobic about seeing me that when they actually did come and see me, they laughed and said, ‘We should have done this years ago because it was fun.’ I would always want to be supported writing my Will. That’s how I have learned how to write other people’s Wills for them. My joy as a solicitor would be sitting with you and understanding you to make sure that your dreams come true. That is such a lovely thing to be able to do with someone, because I know what you want will happen.
It doesn’t matter if someone sues, someone claims, if you end up with lots more people in your family or fewer people in your family, if you’re a millionaire or a pauper. We know that whatever I’ve written in your Will is exactly what you wanted at the time. It’s the bond that you have between you and your client.
Make the most of this bonding experience for your charity

It would also be a bond between your charity and the donor’s family. You’ve got to really steward them through that process.

I don’t mean encouraging them to write Wills and knowing all their personal information. You don’t want to be involved with them like that. You need to be aware that they might be making a Will and you need to follow up with them afterwards and say, ‘I don’t know whether you did or not, or maybe I do because I’ve got some feedback from my provider, but thank you.’

Show them the difference their gift will make and tell them you really appreciate them doing that. Ask if there’s anything more if they’d like to share. Don’t just switch off at that point and say, they’ve got a Will, so we won’t talk about it anymore or maybe we’ll invite them to an event once a year.

Acknowledge what they’ve done. They’re so proud of what they’ve done. They’ve left you an amazing gift and they probably would love to tell you about it. They just need to trust you. It’s a big thing to share personal information with someone that you don’t know. It’s all about relationship building, which I know the listeners are all fantastic at because otherwise they wouldn’t be doing the jobs that they’re doing.
Of course, my listener is amazing. They want to learn and really grasp the information and relish in the guests that come on the show.

There’s still work to be done. It seems to me that, as a sector there’s so much more work that still needs to be done, isn’t there? I mean, there’s one around normalising legacy giving, which we’re all advocating for, and then there’s this other piece of work around actually getting your Will in place. I also heard, and perhaps you have a more up to date figures, that 54% of adults don’t have a Will in the UK right now.

Does that sound correct to you?

I think it’s really difficult. I posted on LinkedIn recently that Shakespeare Martineau had done a massive piece of research into who had Wills and their ethnicity, age and livelihood. We have these figures. I think that your figure could be quite high. I think there’s a lot of work to be done. If you look at the number of notifications that Smee and Ford advised you about, legacy income is over £4 billion.

I know the charities give information but, say, if my mum passed away and we didn’t need to get probate on her Will because it was a small estate or it was easy for me to access her bank account, you might never have formal notice of that gift. There could be far more gifts out there than we expect.

The more people we can sign up to get Wills in place, the better. And the more normal the conversations are, the better.

I think that we should appeal to younger people to get their Wills done and I think we should market them at a younger age group. It needs to be on your bucket list; Thailand yoga retreat, make your Will. It needs to be the new cool thing to do because it really is.

Yeah, definitely. I feel that there’s two massive society changes we need to make. One is people need to have a Will in the first place because otherwise the charity’s got no chance of getting their gift. I guess there’s this thing around normalising legacies and I am an advocate of separating the two. I do not feel it’s a legacy fundraiser’s responsibility to make sure their donors have Wills – it’s the donor’s responsibility to ensure their Will is in place.

This is where you, as a solicitor, are hugely valuable because I imagine, with every client that comes through your door the question is, ‘Do you have a Will in place?’ They need to be the shop window.

Everybody in the country over the age of 18 needs a Will

We’ve got organisations such as Remember a Charity. They do fantastic work across the sector, but you need to have made your Will or be making your Will to actually get to that point.

I might love your charity, but I’ll just give you a cash gift now or I’ll mean to leave it in my Will. Unless I’m making the Will, you’re not going to get the gift.

When the donor is sitting with their solicitor, or however they do their Will, they need to know all about your charity. It’s about brand awareness, about asking for gifts in Wills, for making people aware that you gratefully accept gifts in Wills, and they make a difference to you.

Solicitors can encourage their clients to leave legacy gifts

The other thing you need is the solicitor, if you use one, to ask, ‘Would you like to leave a gift to charity in your Will?’ Because if that question is not asked, unless you come in armed with all of the information to go in your Will, you might not consider it.

Building relationships with solicitors

Get in touch with them to teach them. Get all your local solicitors around, have an event and say, ‘This is what we like.’

Encourage your solicitor to encourage the donor to leave unrestricted gifts to you. We have it often where people will leave their personal effects to your charity. They might not be worth lot of money, or they could be unsalable. As a solicitor, no charity ever said to me, ‘Gaynor, that’s really nice, but we would rather not have it so can you encourage any other kind of giving, such as a pecuniary gift?’

I was never approached by a charity who said they just want cash. I just thought any gift to a charity would be hugely appreciated by them.

If I was giving you a million pounds for a set thing that you might never be able to use, I wouldn’t realise that gift was giving you a headache or was going to be sitting in an account having less buying power as the years go on. As a solicitor, if I had a client that says, ‘This is what I want to buy for this charity,’ I just think they’d be very grateful. I didn’t realise, actually, it was a headache.

If a charity had said to me, ‘Please just always encourage cash gifts,’ I would have done, but nobody ever did.

Steward your solicitors to fly the flag for giving gifts to charities in Wills. Have that conversation. They can’t be seen to recommend who the clients leave money to, but they could always ask if their client wishes to leave a gift to charity and, if so, could they make it an unrestricted gift for all these reasons?

Also, if a gift is made in a Will, could the solicitor ask their client to get in touch and let you know or send a legacy pledge form? The client sometimes has asked me whether I’m going to notify the charity. No, I don’t notify them what is confidential, but I would never say, ‘Tell you what, here’s a pledge form or there’s the details, just give them a call – they’d love to hear from you.’ I never went that far because I didn’t realise how important that was to a charity. That’s the benefit of having worked in private practice and within charities.

You begin to see that there’s a lot of conversations that should be had that aren’t had because neither understands the other one’s job

Thank you so much. I imagine I’m going to get lots of questions, so can I ping anything I can’t answer your way? And you do have your helpline as well, don’t you?
I do. If your listeners need just a quick chat about anything, drop me a line. I’m on LinkedIn and it’s all about us sharing information.

It’s all about best practise, good information and ensuring that you are doing your due diligence properly. And if I can help, I’d be delighted to be part of it. And if you get help from someone else, I’m just pleased that your listeners have got the help that they need.

Hello, reader. What did you think to that interview? As always, I’ve got some key takeaways for you from both parts of my chat with Gaynor:

• First of all, think about the fact that your legator might have actually been a long-term client of the solicitor, especially if they have been appointed as the executing solicitors. It’s really nice if you can actually mention that upfront. Acknowledge the fact that your legator was a client of theirs, and that it might actually be a difficult time for them as well. Tell them that you will be doing as much as you can to support the process

• Number two, personalise. I think it’s so easy to take a very standardised approach when working with suppliers or solicitors. The more we can move away from the generic letters to a more personal touch, the more we’re likely to get a better experience. Whether that’s a swifter conclusion of the estate administration or gaining a case study which, as we know, is fundamental to the legacy programme

• Finally, for me, is to really thank the solicitor. This really needs to come across as genuine, doesn’t it? Thank them for the work that they’ve done in bringing the matter to a conclusion, especially if it’s something that has taken a long time. Acknowledge that there were a number of factors outside of their control, which there often are, because there are several organisations involved. Not necessarily just charities, but they also deal with HMRC, Department of Pensions and banks, etc. I think it’s really nice to acknowledge this hard work

As always, if you need any more support, drop me an email at sanita@persuasion.org.uk. If you haven’t yet signed up to my e-newsletter, you can do that via the contact page on my website which is www.persuasion.org.uk

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