Episode 8: A chat with Katie from Guardian Angel - Give your legacies a leg up this September.
Episode 8 A chat with Katie Wimpenny from Guardian Angel: Give your Legacies a leg up this September!
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, Founder of Persuasion, a Legacy marketer, providing consultancy training, coaching, and interim support to charities of all sizes.
I’m delighted to bring you details of a legacy marketing campaign to give your legacies and leg up this September. It’s brought to you by Guardian Angel. So my guest today is Katie Wimpenny from Guardian Angel, Katie. welcome to the show.
Katie: Thank you so much for having me. Really excited to be here right now
Sanita: For my listener that may not have heard of Guardian Angel, could you tell me a little bit about who Guardian Angels are? And what your plan’s are for this coming September?
Katie: Yeah, absolutely. So Guardian Angel are a Will writing service and we were founded by Sam and he unfortunately lost his Mum suddenly in a car accident. So he experienced first-hand how important it is to get your ducks in a row and how tough it can be when you don’t.
So we essentially want to help people plan and make the bereavement journey easier. And one of the best ways to do that is to get your Will sorted.
We now work with over 150 charity partners providing a Free Will writing service. We help them to promote legacy giving through providing that Free Will offer.
You can write your Will on-line,, over the phone or face-to-face with a solicitor. And this September we are launching a ready-made Free Wills campaign, giving charities, the assets and the tools they need to effectively promote a Free Will service and hopefully increase the number of legacies that they receive through it.
Sanita: Interesting. So I didn’t realise that Guardian Angel was multi-channel. Is that something that’s been developed as a result of the pandemic?
Katie: All those channels have always been available but when Guardian Angel was first founded, it, did start on-line only. The off-line services, the phone and face-to-face kind of came about because we knew people wanted different options.
We know that on-line isn’t really for everyone. We also wanted to create an easier user journey so if someone starts on-line or visits our service and then realises that maybe they have a more complex estate or would rather speak to a solicitor over the phone or face, they can still do that with Guardian Angel and we can put them in touch with one of our panel of solicitors.
We still see the majority of people using the on-line product. But those additional services just help, create a better experience for users and supporters.
Sanita: So our listener might have perhaps an older donor base and they might be thinking actually is on-line really the way to be talking about Free Wills. What are you finding in terms of the demographics of the people that are using on-line versus the in-person or the other channels that you’ve got?
Katie: We see quite a mix for our on-line product, though, we do see a peak of ages between 40 and 60 using the service. But we do have people who are 70 plus and people in their 90’s using the on-line service.
I wouldn’t say that it’s not for older generations. It just depends on what’s best for them but we do see that peak between the 40 and 60 year olds’
Sanita: Okay, that’s great. It’s something I was actually very curious about as well. You ran this campaign back in January, can you tell us a little bit about your findings? And what charities got out of it?
Katie: Yeah, definitely. so we ran a campaign back in January, as you said, with our current partners, we used it as a bit of a test, a campaign just to see if this format would work and how we could scale it up for more charities to take part in the future.
We worked with 45 charities back in January and we reached over a quarter million people through our ads via Guardian Angel, driving new audiences to an overarching campaign landing page and giving charities some additional exposure. And then we gave them a range of assets for social media, email templates, and print materials as well.
They could then directly promote it to their audiences. One of the charities we worked with back in January was Avon Wildlife Trust and they sent a very targeted email to long-term members who were with them for at least five years plus and it wasn’t huge numbers. It was a few hundred people that they sent this to and they used the assets that we provided to do social media activity alongside it.
They got some good traffic to the landing page and 10% that visited the page went on to complete their Will but what was even more exciting to see is that 75% of them actually left a legacy, which is a really high inclusion rate. Our overall average is around 35%. So it was a really successful campaign for them.
And it was great to see their members engaging with the offer and using it to leave them a legacy.
Sanita: Well, that’s quite a small file at 200. And I’m sure my listener is thinking, well, I’m sure we can get that many people together. I mean, even if they could get a hundred warm supporters, it would be worth doing the campaign would you say Katie?
Katie: Yeah, definitely. I think if you’re strategic with it and looking at who has been supporters of your charity the longest, maybe those who are slightly older, so over 40’s and 50’s they’re more likely to potentially use the service to leave a legacy.
It’s the next step potentially when they’ve been giving and are warm to you already. They’ve obviously supported you for awhile, so being a bit targeted with it, can help get better results rather than promoting it to everyone.
Sanita: So, what did you learn in January that you’re now going to change in September for charities? I think it’s good for charities to know that you’ve been on some kind of journey and the testing has been done. This is the real launch, I suppose.
Katie: Yeah. And so this is the first time we’re offering this kind of the campaign outside of those who aren’t already partnered with us.
So you don’t already need to be a partner to get involved in the autumn campaign. But we got loads of takeaways from January that we’re going to embed into September’s campaign.
So there’s two that I’ll just touch on today. The first one is re-targeting. we saw a 10% uplift on uncompleted Wills when we ran the Facebook ads. Charities were obviously promoting it to their supporters. They were driving their own traffic to their own unique pages. And we were able to re-target those people who were visiting and then dropping off and that just helped nudge people to take action or reinforce the message that actually it does not take you a long time and it does feel good to tick off your list.
That’s something we want to build upon in September and we will be using the creative content that really worked well in general.
And then the second one is around storytelling, lots of fundraisers use storytelling to engage their supporters. But this is something that came out in January that we need to do that more. And obviously we’re working with lots of different charities and we want to make sure that they can really share their story and stand out through our creative concept.
We also found that Trust-pilot quotes worked really well. And so people who have already used our service, sharing those quotes as well again, just demonstrates how easy it is to use the service and encourage people to take that action.
Sanita: That’s great. And it really pleases me that you’re talking about storytelling. It’s something that I do talk about a lot on this podcast around we shouldn’t be leading with Free Wills.
We need to inspire our supporters to want to give, and then how they choose to give is naturally up to them.
So whether that’s in a Will or through a collection box or running a coffee morning, we really need to give donors choice.
What do charities get when they sign up?
Katie: Yes. They get a range of benefits that are different levels of packages, the higher the pay package, the more you get. But, everyone will get unlimited Wills during the campaign. And it’s an 8 week campaign from the beginning of September to the end of October, you’ll get your own unique landing page and a set of co branded assets.
As I mentioned before, there’ll be a range of different assets. You can promote it to your supporters, but also your staff, volunteers, or any different audiences that you might want to test. You’ll be featured on a separate overarching campaign landing page, and we’ll be driving new audiences through our ads, giving charities some additional exposure.
And then as I mentioned with the higher price packages, we’ll also do those re-targeting ads to help increase conversion that we found successful, in the January campaign. And then as well as that, we’ll also be able to support charities so I can talk to them about their plans.
We can provide them with a reporting dashboard so they can easily evaluate the results of the campaign. We can also provide a separate landing page or coupon codes for different audiences.
Sanita: So 8 weeks is probably a long period of time for a fundraiser to commit this type of campaign. How much time realistically, would you say that you need charities to set aside during that period to make the most of it?
Katie: Yeah, sure. So we decided to make eight weeks just to give charities a bit more flexibility. So we know sometimes it’s hard to get space within the marketing calendar, for example, on your social channels.
This just makes it a little more flexible. We would like to suggest a few hotspots areas to make sure you’ve got activity going out at the beginning and then you can use some at the end of September. Also again at the beginning of October, that can act as a nudge or a reminder communications and then like a final nudge towards the end of the 8 week period encouraging people to take up the offer before Christmas.
But the assets are designed to be really easy for you to edit and implement so it won’t take too much time in terms of implementing.
Sanita: So the 8 weeks is really about guiding supporters through that journey of thinking about writing their Will at the very beginning, and then sending people reminders if that’s how they’re interested in giving. And then letting them know at the end of the 8 weeks that we will need to withdraw the offer because it was only available for that period of time. Have I summarised the campaign and given the campaign justice?
Katie: Yeah, you’re right. And people in charities can use it in those 8 weeks as they want to. So that’s just one example of how they could manage that comms throughout that period.
Sanita: Right. And when do charities need to sign up by to make the most of that 8 week period?
Katie: Charities need to sign up by Friday 29th July, so we’re able to get all the assets out to charities by the end of July so the sooner you sign up, the sooner you might be able to receive your assets. But that will be the latest deadline, just to make sure we have enough time to add them onto the landing page and get the assets to them.
Sanita: That’s great. And what piece of advice would you give my listener who might be thinking about getting involved in this campaign or any Will writing service?
Katie: There are so many different ways you could use a Free Will, you can use it as an acquisition tool to reach new audiences, to try and get them to take action and encourage them to think about legacy giving.
Or you can use it to nudge to those who are already thinking about leaving a legacy. So your enquirers and considerer’s for example, and it can also be used to improve internal buy-in by offering it to staff and volunteers. But what I would say is it isn’t a silver bullet or it won’t solve all your legacy marketing problems.
You really should think about how it fits within your overall strategy, who you want to market to and how you’re using it to make sure you get the results that you want to see.
Sanita: Is that something that you work with charities on or would you simply signpost them to another organisation?
Katie: That’s done within Guardian Angel. We’re more than happy to help support our partners, if they’re just starting with legacy fundraising, but want to also utilise a Free Will Service we can work with them on how they promote the service while they’re still building up their legacy programme.
We have a community called Leg Up for Legacies and we post lots of how to guides, tool-kits, case studies, webinars, and all things legacy fundraising.
We use that as a way to help support our partners, but also charities across the sector are welcome to join.
Sanita: Brilliant. And that’s all information that we can pop in the show notes as well for the listener. That’s a great resource. Well, thank you so much for coming along.
It’s been a great interview, even though it’s taken a while for us to get to this point, but it was definitely worth it for sure.
Katie: Yeah. Thank you so much.
Sanita: So that my listener is all for this episode. I hope that gives you everything you need to know, to decide whether signing up for the campaign is right for you. And as you’ve heard, Katie is absolutely lovely to talk to so do reach out to her if you want to get some more information and to find out if Giving Legacies a Leg Up this September is right for you.
Thank you so much for listening to Legacy Fundraising Chat brought to you by Persuasion, a consultancy training and coaching organisation helping fundraisers, just like you.
Thank you also for everything that you do for your cause and the charity sector, making it an inspiring place to work.
I’m your host, Sanita Guddu championing your Legacy fundraising efforts.
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