Where to Start with Legacy Giving: a Small-Charity Playbook for Canadian Fundraisers

You have a donor who gave $50 a year for fifteen years. She passes away. Her estate executor calls a few months later to tell you she has left your charity $40,000. 

You did not ask. You did not have a legacy program. You probably did not even know her well. And yet, it happened. 

This is more common than most small charities realize. The Will Power campaign, run by the Canadian Association of Gift Planners, estimates that 1.3 million Canadians have already left more than $180 billion in bequests to charities in their wills, with another 1.1 million Canadians actively planning to do the same. 

Many of those bequests are going to small organizations whose first hint of the gift is a phone call from a lawyer. 

If you are running fundraising for a small Canadian charity, you have two choices. You can keep receiving these gifts by accident – at whatever frequency the universe decides to send them. Or you can do a small amount of intentional work and, over the next decade, multiply the number of times this happens. 

This article is the second path. No planned giving officer. No legal counsel on retainer. Just a real desire to set this up properly. 

The Numbers, Briefly

Three data points, then we move to the work. 

• The share of Canadians who say they have left a gift to charity in their will has gone from 5% in 2020 to 10% in 2026 (CAGP / Will Power 2026 research).
• 44% of Canadians say they are likely to leave a charitable gift in their will, up from 31% in 2020.
• The most-interested group is not seniors. It is Canadians under 50, with household incomes between $60,000 and $200,000, and includes Black, South Asian, Asian, and immigrant communities at rates higher than the national average.

Read those again. The ‘typical’ legacy donor your training materials describe – older, wealthy, white, mailed-list – is no longer the only or even the most representative prospect. If your donor base looks anything like modern urban or suburban Canada, you have prospects you are not talking to. 

What ‘Legacy Giving’ Actually Means in Practice

For the purposes of getting started, you do not need the full taxonomy. You need to know three things. 

Gift type	How it works	Why it matters for a starter program
Bequest (gift in a will)	Donor names your charity in their will. Can be a specific dollar amount, a specific asset, or a percentage of the residue.	About 80% of the volume. Easiest entry point for the donor. Focus here first.
Beneficiary designation (RRSP / RRIF / TFSA / life insurance)	Donor names your charity directly on the plan or policy. Often does not go through probate.	Common in parallel to a will. Advisors often suggest this route once a donor is engaged.
Gifts of securities (life or death)	Donating appreciated publicly traded securities eliminates capital gains tax on the gain.	Powerful incentive but requires brokerage steps. Worth knowing exists; not the first priority.

For your first 90 days, focus only on bequests. They are the majority of the volume and the easiest entry point for donors. 

The Mindset Shift You Have to Make First

Most small-charity fundraisers approach legacy giving the way they would approach a major gifts ask: identify a wealthy donor, build a relationship, make a private ask, sign paperwork. That mental model is wrong, and it is the main reason small charities never start. 

Legacy giving works the opposite way. You raise the topic publicly, to your whole list, in low-pressure ways. Most of the people who will leave you a gift will never tell you they did. You will never have a ‘close.’ You are not asking for money today; you are making sure that when a supporter sits down with a lawyer to update their will, your charity comes to mind. 

The implication: this is a marketing-and-stewardship problem more than a sales problem. That is good news for small charities, because marketing-and-stewardship is what you already do every week.

The 90-Day Starter Playbook

The goal of these 90 days is not ‘raise legacy revenue.’ The goal is to build a small, durable system you can keep running for the next ten years. Everything in this playbook is achievable by one person, part-time. 

Days 1 to 30: Foundation

• Get permission from your board.

Bring one short item to your next board meeting: ‘We are starting to talk publicly about gifts in wills. We are not changing our fundraising priorities. We are adding one channel that pays off slowly.’ Get it in the minutes. This protects you for the next decade when someone asks ‘who authorized this?’ 

• Pick the words you will use.

Decide whether you will say ‘leave a gift in your will,’ ‘a legacy gift,’ ‘a bequest,’ or ‘planned giving.’ Use the same language everywhere. The Will Power campaign uses ‘gift in your will,’ and the research suggests donor-facing language tests better than industry jargon. Pick one and stick with it. 

• Write your three foundation documents. 

You only need these three; do not over-engineer. 

Document	Length	Purpose
One-page ‘Leaving a Gift in Your Will to [Charity]’ PDF	1 page	Lives on your website, attaches to emails, hands out at events
Suggested bequest wording for the donor’s lawyer	One paragraph	Lives on the back of the one-pager and on your website
Internal ‘If a bequest call comes in’ document	1 page	Lives in your shared drive; tells whoever picks up the phone what to do

For the suggested bequest wording, adapt the standard Canadian template – the CAGP Foundation publishes a model that any registered charity can modify, including your business registration number, the dollar amount or percentage, and a clause for what happens if your charity ceases to exist before the gift is realized. Have your lawyer review it once, then reuse it forever. 

• Decide your ‘bequest indicators’ tag list. 

Before you start surfacing prospects from your file, define what you are looking for. The standard small-charity list: 

• Tenure: gave in 5 or more of the last 10 years 
• Consistency: monthly donor for 3+ years 
• Engagement: opens emails, attends events, or replies to surveys 
• Past hints: any note in their record mentioning ‘estate,’ ‘will,’ ‘trust,’ ‘bequest,’ ‘my lawyer,’ or ‘planning’ 
• Demographics: anyone who has self-identified as 50+ in surveys (do not assume from name) This becomes the segmentation you build in your CRM in days 30 to 60.

Days 31 to 60: Make It Visible

• Add one line everywhere. 

This is the single highest-leverage move in legacy fundraising for a small charity. Add one sentence to: 

• Your donation thank-you receipts: ‘Have you ever thought about leaving a gift to [Charity] in your will?’ 
• The footer of your monthly e-newsletter (whichever email tool you use) 
• The donation page of your website, near the bottom 
  • Your email signature, for the next quarter
  • Your annual report, if you have one

Each of these is a five-minute change. Together, they create the impression – accurate – that legacy giving is just part of how your charity operates. 

• Build the prospect segment in your CRM. 

Apply the bequest indicators list above. Tag every contact who meets two or more criteria. Do not ‘score’ them yet; just tag. You want to be able to filter to this group quickly and confidently. 

A practical caution: if your data is scattered across a spreadsheet, an email tool, an events platform, and an old donor management system, you will spend most of these 30 days reconciling rather than tagging. This is the actual bottleneck for most Canadian charities. 

• Write one stewardship email for this segment. 

Just one. Make it about mission, not the ask. Something like: ‘We were thinking about you because you have supported us for a long time. Here is what your support has built. PS – a few people have asked us recently about leaving a gift in their will, and we put together a short guide. Reply if you would like a copy.’ That postscript is the entire ask. Do not write a campaign. Do not run a series. One email, sent once.

Days 61 to 90: Make It Conversational

• Train your front line. 

This is one 30-minute conversation with anyone who answers your phone or general email.  Here is the script: 

When a supporter says…	Your team should respond…
‘I’ve included you in my will.’	‘Thank you so much. May I have your name and contact information so we can keep you informed about what your gift will support? You are not committing to anything, and you can change your mind at any time.’ Then write it down somewhere durable.
‘I’m thinking about leaving you a gift in my will.’	‘I would love to send you a short guide we have put together. Where should I send it?’ Then send the one-pager.
Tax or legal questions	‘I want to make sure you get the right advice. Please talk to your lawyer, notary, or financial advisor. Our charitable BN is [number] – they will ask for that.’

Never, ever pretend to give tax or legal advice. You will hurt the donor and you will hurt your charity. 9. Set up the ‘if a bequest call comes in’ checklist.

When the executor or lawyer calls – and they will – your team needs a simple checklist: 

• Confirm the deceased donor’s name and the charity name on file (sometimes wills name an old version of your charity) 
• Ask whether the gift is specific, a percentage, or residual 
• Ask for an estimated timeline (most estates take 12 to 24 months to settle) 
• Ask for the executor’s contact information and update your records 
• Forward to the ED for an acknowledgement letter to the family 
• Start tracking three numbers. 

That is all. Anything more is overkill at this stage: 

• Number of people who have told you they have left your charity in their will (your ‘legacy society,’ whether or not you call it that) 
• Number of inquiries you have received this quarter 
• Estate gifts realized in dollars and count, year-to-date 

These three numbers go to your board annually. Over five to ten years they compound into a real program. 

What This Playbook Will and Will Not Do

Be honest with yourself about what 90 days produces. 

It will:

• Make legacy giving a normal, visible part of your communications 
• Surface a small number of donors who quietly already have you in their will (this happens almost every time) 
• Build the data foundation that makes everything else possible later 

It will not:

• Generate measurable bequest revenue in year one. Bequests realize on a 7- to 15-year horizon. • Replace major gifts work, monthly giving acquisition, or your current campaigns. It is additive. 
• Solve underlying data problems. If your donor file is in bad shape, legacy giving will surface that – not fix it. 

That last point is the one most small charities miss. The playbook depends on being able to find your loyal donors, see their giving history, see their engagement, and tag them reliably. If those things live in five different places, the playbook stalls at step 6.

Where Ensemble Fits

Ensemble is a charity management platform built for Canadian charities by CanadaHelps. It is not a planned giving platform. It does not draft wills or run estate calculations.

What it does is provide the unified contact record that the playbook above requires:

• One contact record per supporter, with online gifts from CanadaHelps automatically attached, offline gifts entered alongside, and event and activity history in the same place
• Activity tags so you can mark someone as ‘legacy intender,’ ‘bequest inquired,’ ‘stewardship audience,’ or any other label you need 
• Segmentation that filters on lifetime giving, recency, and tags – so the ‘5+ years of giving and engaged’ segment is one query, not a spreadsheet exercise 
• Contact Merge for when the same person exists twice in your file under maiden and married name, or with two email addresses 
• CRA-compliant automated receipting for the cash gifts and gifts of securities that come in around an estate – so when a $40,000 bequest cheque arrives, the receipt math and the donor record handle themselves 

What Ensemble does not do, and we will say this plainly so you do not get sold something that does not exist: it does not yet include traditional reporting dashboards or a built-in email/communications module. You will export your legacy prospect segment and send the email from Mailchimp, Constant Contact, ActiveCampaign, or whichever tool you already use. The exports work; the dashboards are not yet there. 

For a small Canadian charity starting a legacy program, that combination is usually enough. You are not trying to run a planned giving operation; you are trying to make sure your data does not fall apart when an estate gift arrives or when a donor finally tells you they have included you in their will. 

What to Do This Week

If you read this far and want to start tomorrow: 

• Block 90 minutes next week to draft your one-pager and the suggested bequest wording. 
• Add the single line ‘Have you ever thought about leaving a gift in your will?’ to your next donation receipt and your next email newsletter footer. 
• Search your donor notes for the words ‘will,’ ‘estate,’ ‘bequest,’ and ‘trust.’ Flag every record that contains them. 
• Put one item on your next board agenda authorizing public communication about gifts in wills. That is the entire first week. None of it is hard. All of it compounds. 

Try Ensemble

If your current donor data lives in three or four places and you are dreading the segmentation step in this playbook, that is exactly the problem Ensemble solves first.

Start a free trial and bring one of your loyal-donor lists with you. We will help you import it, tag it, and see your real legacy prospect pool by the end of the day.