Remember A Charity Week: Building the Supporter Journey

8 September 2026

A Digital Dispatch by Paul Galinsky, Director

CiviCRM Data Privacy Digital Strategy

This year’s Remember A Charity Week campaign encourages charities to focus on an important question: What will you be remembered for?

Most peoples’ answers focus on ideas like our ‘sense of humour’ or our ‘love of music’. Within the third sector however, we need to develop another answer: ‘Our generosity’.

Legacy giving (donating after death via a person’s Will) is an enormously important source of income. In 2025, legacy income was worth an estimated £4.4 billion to UK charities, spread over more than 43,000 estates.

At Pooka, we work primarily with charities on their digital and CRM needs, and because of this we regularly see the difference that a legacy can make. Even a modest sum can have a noticeable impact, but there are also times when key projects are entirely enabled by a single gift.

What’s often misunderstood by charities however, is that a legacy gift rarely comes out of nowhere. It’s the final stage of a relationship that has developed over many years — perhaps beginning with a £10 donation, a membership, an event ticket, a volunteering opportunity or simply signing up for a newsletter.

That makes legacy fundraising not just about Wills. It is about supporter journeys.

From Donor to Supporter to Legacy Giver

Imagine someone discovers your charity for the first time.

Perhaps they make a small online donation. You thank them, keep them informed about the difference their gift has made, and invite them to stay connected.

Later, they might become a regular donor. They could attend an event, become a member, volunteer, take part in a campaign or increase their giving.

Over time, your charity becomes part of their life.

Eventually, perhaps many years later, they decide to include your organisation in their Will.

There isn’t necessarily a single moment when someone changes from being a “donor” into a “legacy prospect”. Instead, there is a gradual development of trust and engagement.

This is why it can be useful to think about fundraising as a journey rather than a series of individual transactions.

The question for a charity isn’t simply “How much did this person give us?”

It might instead be: “What is our relationship with this person, and how can we make it meaningful?”

The Importance of the Data Behind the Relationship

This is where a CRM can make a significant difference.

A good CRM should provide a picture of the whole relationship between an individual and an organisation, rather than keeping each interaction in a separate system or spreadsheet.

CiviCRM for example, can record one-off and recurring donations, memberships, event participation and other forms of engagement against an individual’s contact record. It can also record interactions such as emails, meetings and phone calls as activities.

That means a fundraiser can potentially see much more than the fact that someone donated £25 last month.

They might see that the person has:

been a supporter for ten years;
made regular monthly donations;
attended several events;
volunteered for the organisation;
renewed their membership every year;
responded positively to previous communications; and
indicated an interest in leaving a gift in their Will.

That history matters. It allows a charity to treat someone as an individual rather than simply as a record in a database.

Good Stewardship Starts Long Before a Legacy Conversation

Legacy fundraising can sometimes feel like something that belongs to a specialist team. But the relationship that eventually leads to a legacy gift may have been built by dozens of people across an organisation.

The person answering an enquiry.
The volunteer coordinator.
The events team.
The regular giving team.
The membership administrator.
The communications team.
The fundraiser who sends a thank-you letter.

Every one of those interactions can contribute to a supporter’s perception of an organisation. And in lots of organisations, it’s just a couple of people that do all of the jobs above. In either case, it’s vital that the data is recorded securely and consistently, to paint the full picture of the donor’s engagement.

CiviCRM’s ability to bring different types of engagement together is therefore valuable not just for fundraising teams, but for the organisation as a whole.

It can help create an organisational memory of the relationship.

And that becomes particularly important when staff change. A supporter shouldn’t have to start their relationship with a charity again every time the person looking after them moves on.

Don’t Treat Legacy Donors as a Different Species

There is also a danger in thinking about “legacy donors” as a completely separate category of supporter. You don’t need to fill a Legacy Fundrasier job post to handle them.

Someone considering a gift in their Will may still be making regular donations. They may still be a member. They may still attend events. They may still volunteer.

Their legacy giving is another dimension of their relationship with the charity — not a replacement for everything that came before.

That means your CRM needs to be capable of representing the complexity of real supporter relationships.

CiviCRM is designed around this idea of a central contact record, with different types of contributions and relationships connected to that person. Paid memberships, for example, are linked to their underlying financial transactions, while activities can capture other interactions with the organisation.

The result can be a much richer picture of engagement.

Turning Data Into Better Supporter Experiences

Collecting data isn’t the goal, it’s part of the process.

The goal, is to use data to build better relationships.

If someone has been donating every month for five years, perhaps they deserve more than an automated receipt.

If someone attends every event your organisation runs, perhaps they would appreciate being recognised as a particularly engaged supporter.

If someone has been a member for decades, that history is worth understanding deeply.

And if someone tells you that they have included your charity in their Will, that information needs to be recorded carefully and handled sensitively.

This is where a well-designed CRM implementation can help, and the technology is only part of the answer. It’s also incredibly important to decide how to structure your data, and how to use it to build relationships with your supporters.

The Long View

It’s hopefully stating the obvious, but Pooka don’t recommend using Remember A Charity Week to start making social media requests for legacy pledges. Instead, use it as an important reminder to develop legacy giving as part of your wider fundraising strategy.

As a supporter, making a legacy pledge should feel like a natural step after years of feeling engaged and valued.

As a charity, receiving that pledge or gift should feel like an incredibly important achievement, but not a total surprise. It should be recorded alongside years of data, clearly demonstrating the effort made to pull your supporter deeply behind your charity’s mission.

Remember A Charity Week runs from 7–13 September 2026.

Pooka are available year round to discuss your CRM needs.