Over the past 15 years Legacy Foresight has carried out extensive research in a mission to help charities get a deeper understanding of the baby boomer generation, assessing the opportunities and challenges they represent for legacies.
Boomers are long established as the key audience for legacy giving and are a cohort that Legacy Foresight have been studying for the past 15 years. We have run 5 consortium research projects at regular intervals (the last being in 2019) charting their changing attitudes and behaviours to life in general, their finances and their future plans in order to understand the potential impact these have on legacy giving.
In 2023, post Covid and in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis, it was time to relook at boomers, to see what has changed for them over the past four years. It was also time to start looking further into the future by considering Generation X, who are now at a similar age and stage to boomers when we first looked at them.
The focus of the research programme was to understand where boomers are at now and identify similarities and differences between them and Generation X, along with the opportunities and challenges that they represent for charities and legacy fundraising in the future. We also carried out market sizing and updated our legacy forecasts to 2060.
…baby boomers are far cannier about the money they leave behind. To them their gifts are investments – they want to see the way that money will be spent and the impact it will have.
Giving Tomorrow
The programme had 3 key elements: Desk research, consumer research and analysis and modelling.
Our research considered how different boomers and Generation X are as cohorts – both in terms of numbers and in value terms, we looked at what unites them and what pulls them apart and in an age of ever increasing, multi-dimensional uncertainty, we looked at how uncertainty was affecting their attitudes and behaviours.
Our analysis and modelling used the latest demographic and economic data along with additional insights gained from the consumer research to update our market forecasts to 2060.
This briefing report outlines key topline findings from all our research and analysis and we are grateful to our 34 learning circle members for agreeing to share this information more widely with the sector.
Contact Caroline Waters for more information
