News

Stay informed with our latest news and insights.

Talk To Us

Anything here sparked your interest? We would love to chat to you!

Challenge

Legacy giving is vital for the UK’s largest woodland conservation charity, The Woodland Trust, funding a third of everything it does. The charity wanted to capitalise on a key period for legacy giving to increase brand awareness and consideration for leaving a gift to the charity in your will. For the first time, it was offering free will writing services via Farewills throughout Free Wills Month. We needed to support the charity in promoting its new free will writing service to reach its target volume of conversions. We were targeted with driving 145 conversions throughout October’s Free Wills Month. 

Marketing Insight

The legacy market has seen considerable growth, with charity media spend doubling since 2022. In 2024, conservation charities accounted for 8% of legacy income. This is predicted to grow by 5.5% per annum over the next five years.  

Direct competitors of the Woodland Trust spend most of their budget in press titles and on digital channels. The Woodland Trust had seen consistently strong legacy performance on PPC, however Demand Gen had seen a drop in performance during the last Free Wills Month.  

We know that legacy fundraising benefits from the halo effect of bigger brand activity. The Woodland Trust’s cross conversion report indicated that legacy receives conversions from other product’s activity, such as membership. We therefore wanted to ensure that we took an integrated approach when planning media to capitalise on this as much as possible. We used historical results to inform our strategy to ensure we were upweighting best performing channels.   

Media Innovation

Our approach combined awareness and conversion driving activity. For awareness, we ran both Google Display and print advertorials. To drive conversions, we ran a combination of activity across Meta, Google PPC and Bing PPC. 

On Google Display, budgets were split evenly across audience targeting and topic targeting. For audience, we focused on the charity’s Green Living Enthusiast audience, with a 55+ age overlay to target legacy givers. Topic targeting included content around green living, environmental issues, agriculture and forestry. Creative encouraged people to go to The Woodland Trust’s website to find out more about leaving a legacy gift. Activity ran with different conversion points for people to do this: brochure download, form submission or via Farewills. 

Our strategy for third party activity was to align this with our Woodland Trust Membership online and offline press activity. We ran full page advertorials in the Guardian and Telegraph right after Membership, so we were speaking to a primed, aware audience. 

Media Innovation

Accelerating Growth

We beat our conversion target by a whopping 120% at a 63% lower CPA than target. 21 new wills were written leaving a gift to The Woodland Trust using the Farewills offer, with 76% of these coming from new supporters.