Linking charities with legacy income
The background
Legacy Link is the UK’s largest legacy administration team with over 40 legacy consultants, providing outsourced legacy administration services. Its consultants help the charities they work with ensure their supporters’ final wishes are realised by managing the legacy administration process on their behalf - from notification to receipt of the gift.
Specialising in supporting charities of all sizes, from those typically too small to have their own legacy administration teams to some of the largest in the UK, Legacy Link currently works with over 100 charities at any given time. It has also played a role in reshaping legacy administration into the fully professional and critical aspect of charity management it is today.
Legacy Link’s philosophy is built around ensuring the legacy administration process is carried out correctly, and being able to offer big charity best practice to all charities, in a package which meets their individual budget. Legacy Link will work with their charity clients to discover whether the implementation of a robust legacy management system is right for them.
That system is FirstClass.
“With FirstClass, charities can gain access to insights and data that simply isn’t available to those who don’t use the system. I work with charities that don’t use FirstClass and charities that do and can say with 100 per cent certainty that those who do, deliver. There is nothing like it on the market. Nothing else comes close.”
Paul Browne, Head of Legacy Management at Legacy Link
The approach
On joining the business in 2016, having come from a commercial background where process underpins organisational success, Paul immediately set about recommending a legacy management system to its growing portfolio of clients.
Importantly, as a Director of the Institute for Legacy Management, Paul’s recommendations are impartial. However, as FirstClass has been designed to specifically manage legacy income – unlike general charity CRM and platforms such as Salesforce - there is no challenger to offer the same level of functionality.
These days, Paul and his team use FirstClass to help Legacy Link’s charity clients:
- Understand the bigger picture and timings associated with generating legacy income, such as how long it will take to secure the income and how much time a team will need to invest in order to receive it
- Access soft data that allows them to better understand what is really going on from a legacy income perspective and provide a true picture of each individual case file
- Plug directly into HMRC in order to quickly and easily reclaim tax
- Deliver estate valuations and record all legators’ assets so that they can be continually tracked – considering fluctuations in valuation in line with market peaks and troughs – throughout the entire process
- Provide immediate reporting on any aspect of data made available through the system
- Evaluate team value; in some instances, where charities felt that they didn’t have the budget to recruit an additional legacy team member, FirstClass was used to record all the value add within the legacy team and use the findings to illustrate that a new member was not only required, but financially viable
- Get much more from their legacy management function.
“If someone at a charity is looking for the best way to manage their legacy income, then FirstClass is always the recommendation. It’s a tool that can be used to deliver best practice – as simple as that. On a personal level, I know that I’m the most effective and efficient when using a properly configured FirstClass system, and if you asked any member of the team, they’d say the same thing, too.”
Paul Browne, Head of Legacy Management at Legacy Link
