I have been working in fundraising long enough to have watched the same mistakes get made, fixed, and made again. That is not a criticism. Legacy fundraising is genuinely difficult to read. The decisions your supporters make are private, the timelines are long, and most organisations are operating with very little signal about what is actually working. In that environment, it is rational to copy what the big charities do and hope the logic transfers.
The problem is that it usually doesn't. Not because the big charity programmes are wrong, but because they were built for a different supporter base, a different organisational context, and a different set of resources. Transplanting them without understanding your own audience first is where most legacy programmes quietly go wrong.
That observation is what shapes how I work. Everything starts with the supporters: who they are, what they need, and where the journey breaks down. The programme gets built around those answers, not the other way around.
I spent the first part of my career inside charities, including senior roles at Cancer Research UK, Comic Relief, Cancer Council Victoria and Sacred Heart Mission in Australia. At CRUK I led the legacy programme through a period of sustained income growth, driving a 40% increase over six years, and developed the mass fundraising strategy to drive growth across the portfolio. That breadth matters. Understanding how legacy sits within the wider fundraising portfolio, and how to make the case for it internally, is as important as the legacy strategy itself.
I have been working independently since 2025, which has given me the opportunity to work with organisations I genuinely wanted to work with: smaller charities where the work lands directly, where decisions get made quickly, and where good strategy actually changes things. Current and recent clients include Guildcare, MSA Trust, Forever Hounds Trust, The British Deer Society, Somerset Community Foundation, and Essex and Herts Air Ambulance.
In 2026 I launched the Planned Giving Platform in Australia, a solicitor-led bequest referral service built to address a specific gap: the supporters most likely to leave a significant legacy gift are often the ones least well served by online will-writing tools. Five founding charity partners helped shaped the service.
I also hold postgraduate qualifications in behavioural psychology, which shapes directly how I think about supporter decision-making: what moves people to act, what holds them back, and what happens in the long stretch between someone first considering a legacy gift and actually making one. That stretch is what I call the messy middle. The Gifts in Wills Decision Map is built around it.
If you are a legacy fundraiser, a Head or Director of Fundraising or a charity leader trying to work out why the programme is not growing the way it should, Iād happily have a chat.