Your legacy audience isn’t an age band

Because "55+" is not a personality type

Somewhere in your database there is a segment called 55+.

In it there’s someone who has never written a will and keeps meaning to; someone who has just sold a business; someone who rewrote everything last spring after their mother died; someone supporting two adult children and a parent with dementia; someone who put you in their will in 2011 and has not heard from you in a way they remember since.

They all get the same Gift in Wills Guide.

Here is the argument to challenge that segment. CharityTracker data published in the 2026 Legacy Giving Report found that two thirds of Baby Boomers have a will, against one third of Generation X. One segment, holding a group for whom this is largely settled and a group where most people have not started. Those are not two ends of a spectrum. They are two different jobs.

Why age is the wrong way to segment a legacy audience

Age is a targeting variable being asked to do a relationship management job.

Targeting sorts people into groups so you can send them something relevant. That works for a campaign with a start date and an end date. Legacy fundraising is neither. It is a relationship you are managing across twenty five years or more, and the question is not who gets the brochure. It is what’s happened in the supporter’s life to have triggered them into thinking about writing their will now.

Age cannot tell you that. It is the only field in your database that updates itself without telling you anything, ticking over at the same rate for everyone regardless of what is actually going on in their life. Nobody rewrites their will because they turned 57. They rewrite it because their mother died, or the house sold, or a grandchild arrived, or the diagnosis came back. Those are the moments worth understanding and none of them are age-related CRM triggers.

That gives you three common journey entry points rather than one.

The First Will: the supporter who hasn't written one

Fewer people are writing wills at this stage of life than used to, and those who do are writing them earlier. Legacy Foresight found that 30% of 45 to 54 year olds had a will in 2023, down from 42% twenty years earlier, as marriage, children and property have all shifted later and the will has been postponed alongside them. Remember A Charity's consumer tracking puts the average age of will-making at around fifty.

This person is not spending Sunday afternoon contemplating their philanthropic legacy. They are trying to establish where the pension paperwork went and whether the friend they named as guardian eleven years ago is still a sensible choice. The task in front of them is the will, not your gift, and it has been on the list for four years because it feels complicated and faintly morbid.

Anything that treats the charitable gift as the headline is answering a question they have not reached yet. What moves this person, is making the whole business feel manageable, and establishing early that the people closest to them come first, because until that is settled nothing else gets any airtime at all.

The Rewrite: the supporter whose circumstances have just changed

This is the richest of the three journeys and the most important. Pensions crystallise, property decisions arrive, sometimes a business is sold or an inheritance lands. It is the point at which people start having structured conversations with solicitors and financial advisers, which means it is also the point at which your charity makes the will or is deprioritised. Does your charity (still) align with their values and identity?

The supporter here is actively reconsidering what their money is for. Lifetime giving and legacy giving stop being separate propositions, and the question shifts from whether they would leave you a gift to what they want this cause to do with the rest of their life and beyond it.

The Last Will: the supporter who may already have included you

It’s an obvious statement but the will that is realised, is the last one. Smee & Ford data has charitable legators signing their final will at 77 and dying at 84, and James and Baker's analysis of Australian probate records found more than three quarters of bequest income came from wills signed at 80 or older.

This journey is driven by events rather than birthdays: a bereavement, a diagnosis, a grandchild, a move into social care, a decision to make things simpler for whoever has to sort it all out. What this person needs is not more persuasion. It is confidence that the organisation they chose fifteen years ago is still the organisation they thought it was. You can win someone at 50 and lose them at 76 without ever knowing it happened.

So what should you segment on instead?

Three starting points, one programme. The temptation is to build lots of separate journeys but you do not need to. Each of these is a trigger. All three feed the same long middle stretch where somebody moves from thinking about it to actually doing something.

Legacy Foresight’s research on will-making has a line that resonates for me: early wills are holding documents, later wills are statements of intent. That middle stretch - what I call the messy middle - is where most legacy income is won and lost and it is the part which is hardest to describe to senior leadership. You can tell them how many people asked for a leaflet and how many gifts have been realised this quarter. The distance between those two numbers is measured in decades and it’s the quality of the relationship with the organisation (because people will come and go!) that needs to endure.

So the useful question is not understanding how old your supporters are, it’s understanding where they are with their relationship with your charity. Have they considered a gift in their will? That is what the Gifts in Wills Decision Map helps with. It sets out the decision from the supporter’s viewpoint to help you locate where someone actually is and work out how and if you can help them make that next step.

Age definitely won’t tell you that.