Guest blog: what do holiday memories tell legacy fundraisers?
This guest blog is by Dr Claire Routley has worked in fundraising for 14 years, specialising in legacy fundraising for the last 10:
I bet, like me, you’re counting the days until your summer holiday. As a child, we invariably used to go to a caravan in West Wales and some of my most vivid childhood memories are of digging sandcastles, playing board games with my sister whilst the rain beat down on the caravan roof, and eating ice-cream sundaes – ice cream always tasted better at the seaside.
We know from Professor Russell James and Michael O’Boyle’s research that vivid autobiographical memories have a role to play in legacy decision making. Using fMRI technology to scan the brains of people thinking about legacy gifts, they find that two areas of the brain – the precuneus and the lingual gyrus – are activated when thinking about a charitable bequest. The two areas of the brain are also activated when older adults are shown photographs from throughout their lives: they are associated with vivid autobiographical memories.
After working in legacy fundraising for a while, you hear many donor stories that bring James and O’Boyle’s research to life. Interestingly, some of these are also related to holiday experiences, from the gift left to RNLI after the donor was welcomed into a lifeboat station as a boy by a kindly volunteer, to the legacy to a museum after a visitor was allowed in to see a favourite object after closing-time on a rare trip to London