Leaving a lasting gift in your will, Include A Charity

Leaving a lasting gift in your will

Eleanor Cater, Fundraising Institute of New Zealand

1 September 2016

This month you may be noticing quite a buzz around will-making and leaving a gift in your will to charity. Gifts in wills (or bequests) are a way of giving that often falls under the radar, however many of New Zealand’s charities depend upon this type of support to continue with their good work.

Many of us are regular givers to causes via regular donations or crowdfunding. Bequests are quite a different way to support a cause you might feel passionate about. Sometimes they can be, in a sense, more affordable as the end of life many of us end up more ‘asset rich and cash poor’ and are more able to leave a gift of lasting value in this way, even after considering family and friends first.

We all hear about the big bequests! Most famously in 2015 Mark Zuckerberg announced that he would be giving away 99% of his Facebook shares to charity. Here in New Zealand the Green Party have just received a massive bequest of over $280k, and how about the man who left $1 million dollars to benefit lizards at Zealandia? It’s no wonder that there are many preconceived ideas that gifts in wills are for the rich, the quirky and the famous!

However, interestingly, out of the $150 million in bequests gifted to charities in New Zealand in 2015, half were for under $20,000. So we are seeing a real trend emerging of every day New Zealanders including gifts to charities into their estate planning and supporting the causes that they care about in this lasting way.

There are some further interesting facts about gifts in wills to charities! Most people who leave a bequest do so to more than one charity (usually 2 or 3), the average bequest to a New Zealand charity is around $40k and bequests to charities are growing (by an impressive 28% between 2011-2014*).

There’s a growing trend too for Community Foundations to set up endowment funds, encouraging people to ‘give where they live’ and build endowment funds to benefit the local community, forever. Internationally there is much research that suggests that local causes are big receivers of bequests, quite simply people like to support local and to think that their money is best used in the community they know and have grown close to.

It’s a fact that New Zealanders are some of the most generous givers in the world and support the causes that they care about in a wide variety of ways, including cash donations, regular giving (think child sponsorship), crowdfunding and major one-off gifts. Bequests are that ultimate gift, enabling givers to leave a lasting footprint on the world.

As the author Menchin wrote, “Perhaps, more than any other human document, a will reflects the character of the writer and reveals his relationship with family, friends, and the world at large. His nature, his prejudice, his interests, his eccentricities, and the full range of man's virtues and vices can be found on the pages of wills." A will is a personal and a revealing document, of great significance to the author, and a document which can truly make its mark on changing our world.

As Mark Zuckerberg might well say, we ‘like’ that.

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Eleanor Cater is Communications and Campaign Manager at the Fundraising Institute of New Zealand (FINZ), which works with the charity and community sector offering education, training and professional fundraising practices (see more at www.finz.org.nz).

Include A Charity Week is managed by FINZ and is on from 5-11 September, encouraging Kiwis to consider leaving a gift in their will to charity. For further details, and for a free Will Information Pack, go to www.includeacharity.org.nz

*stats according to a recent report by Philanthropy New Zealand