“As far as we’re aware, the charity had never spoken to him, all we could find is that he lived near one of our shops.”

If you see a yellow and grey air ambulance helicopter in the skies above the Midlands, it very possibly bears the name Denny Kerrell, in honour of a Northamptonshire man who left £2.6m to The Air Ambulance Service in his will when he died in 2022.

Kerrell’s gift represents just under 10 per cent of the charity’s total legacy income across the past five years, and close to 2 per cent of its entire income across that period. It was, not surprisingly, the biggest legacy it has ever received, says Chloe Bass, the charity’s head of legacy and major gifts.

“As a team, we had no knowledge of him before it came in,” she adds. “The executors of his will did come to our airbase, and we spoke at some length, but even they weren’t really sure why he chose to be so generous to us specifically.”

Legacy income – from long-anticipated or totally unexpected gifts in the millions, through to more modest but still very generous bequests – can make a huge difference to a charity’s finances, and to what it can achieve.

While the legacy giving market is growing, it remains in many ways a frustrating fundraising channel. As Bass and others acknowledge, it is both hard to know what has worked and what hasn’t, and to have any idea of what’s going to come in the next year.

So Third Sector went behind the headlines to analyse half a decade’s worth of legacy figures across 100 major charities: exploring which organisations saw the greatest jumps in income, how legacy income compared to overall fundraising spend and how organisations managed the volatility of this frustrating but lucrative channel. 

Take a detailed look at the full set of findings with our legacy data tracker, which allows users to directly compare the financial performance of up to five different charities. Or keep reading for the top-line trends.