FirstClass Codicil Publication 2006

Many charities seem to successfully manage legacies without much more than some index cards and a spreadsheet. The majority of these charities will have “systems” in place to help them with this task, and by “systems”, I don’t necessarily mean computer systems. Manual systems in some circumstances can just be as effective.

The aim of any such system is firstly to be organised so as to:

Get the most from bequests
Protect your Trustees
Satisfy your auditors, and (one often forgotten)
Gather information to help gain more legacies in the future

For a charity with only a handful of new legacies a year, an indexed list of cases, a list of monies received and a (five-year) diary might well suffice.

Correspondence and documents are usually filed and indexed according to case and in alphabetical order. Obviously, there may be an issue if you get several John Smiths, so you may need a unique identifier, say a sequential number, to distinguish them.

Case management

That sort of paper system will satisfy some of the criteria I’ve set out. However, it may not help you manage your cases, especially if you have more than a handful of new legacies a year. You may be tempted to create a spreadsheet or two to help provide some reporting to the Finance Director and to keep track of troublesome files. I have found that this easily leads to a series of spreadsheets disconnected from each other and the index of cases. Keeping these spreadsheets up to date can become a time consuming affair.

The ability to cross-reference information adds power and control, particularly for legacy marketing. For instance, you may need to know if your legators tended to move geographically between when they were donors and when they died. If records cannot be easily cross-referenced, this sort of enquiry can take hours of researching.

I believe that the answer to these dilemmas is a database system. After all, almost all fund-raising charities will have a database of supporters and you would think it natural that support after death might be recorded in the same way.

Stand-alone or integrated?

There will appear to be strong arguments for using the charity’s fundraising database, for instance avoiding a proliferation of databases and linking of the records of live and deceased supporters. Some charities choose to go that route.

However, in my experience, few of the popular charity fundraising database systems really offer legacy administrators what they need. In your role you may be handling hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of legacies and as such you should expect that your database provides you with the right tools for your the job. If you are handling more than this, I would say that you should demand a database built especially for the job.

These days it is relatively simple for database systems to talk to each other so that information can easily be linked, imported and/or exported from one system to another. Your legacy database can be linked to your supporter and accounting systems as required.

Hence it is possible for legacy marketers and administrators to have the best of both worlds.

Benefits of a database system

There are many good reasons why a comprehensive database system can help you with the task of managing your legacies.

Instant access to information - Many legacies are complex and require substantial amounts of chasing before their value is actually realised. When dealing with executors and associated charities it is important that you have all the appropriate information in front of you. If that information is held on pieces of paper and in files, it can take some time to get the information together, whilst a comprehensive database system can retrieve this information instantly.
Complete Contact History - Details of documents, emails and faxes sent and received as well as summaries of telephone conversations are useful information to store as part of a detailed contact history. A computer system not only gives you the space to store all this information but much of this information can be recorded automatically.
Important information can be shared - In my experience, it is not just the Legacy Department that benefits from seeing the legacy data. With a database system it should be possible to assign different users rights to different parts of the system. You could, for example, give a colleague in the finance department permission to run the financial reports or someone in legacy marketing could have access to research data.
You can check on workloads - If you receive a high number of legacies each year and they are split between case handlers, then a computer system would allow you to allocate cases accordingly. Using this information, it would then be possible to review cases by case handler and to see each case handler’s workload at any point in time.
Review dates remembered - A diarised review section within such a system would ensure that review dates are never passed without the user being notified first. It is often possible to get the computer system to generate the review dates automatically when certain events are triggered, such as entering income.
Know where your money is coming from - With a database system, you should be able to keep track of your income, both expected and realised. You should be able to find out valuable, financial information at the click of a button, such as:
- The outstanding value of your legacies
- How much of this money is restricted
- What the expected income is likely to be from these legacies in the coming months
- The breakdown of your income by legacy type
- The average value of your recently closed legacies
Electronic data can be loaded automatically - If you receive electronic notifications of legacies, then the electronic import of this information could save you a large amount of time. This data could be automatically compared with existing data and new details entered directly into the system.
Look after your pledgers - Some database systems enable you to build and maintain a relationship with your pledgers. A system of reviews and a full contact history could be available for pledgers in the same way as it was for legators.

What’s best for you?

I believe that all of the larger legacy earning charities should be using a database system designed specifically with their needs for legacy administration in mind. Such a system should allow tailor-made links to their other database applications (accounts and supporter) together with additional extras.

For smaller charities with reduced legacy income and a smaller budget, the solution may be a legacy administration database accessed via the Internet. Such a system would provide much of the functionality required by the larger charities but without the need for support from the charity’s IT department and at an affordable price.

Gordon Cooke is the FirstClass Product Manager at Clearwater Consultancy Ltd.
FirstClass is the leading legacy management system used by charities in the UK.
Gordon can be contacted on gordon@clearwater-consultancy.co.uk

Clearwater Consultancy Ltd. 18 St. George’s Street, Chorley, Lancashire. PR7 2AA

Tel: +44 (0)1257 272730