The National Gallery Legacy Project
The National Gallery Legacy Project
By
Aimee Hooper
The National Gallery houses one of the greatest collections of paintings in the world and admission to see them is free. They have played the long game to nurture and develop their legacy marketing strategy.
Over the past five years we have been working to develop our legacy marketing strategy through audience research and annual campaigns (run through our owned channels and onsite).
Arts supporters are some of the most likely people to leave legacies, on average 38% leave a legacy.
However, arts supporters often do not consider arts organisations as charities. This was confirmed for the Gallery in results from research undertaken in 2015, which revealed that more than half of our visitors did not know the Gallery was a charity.
This discovery, alongside an increasing need for public support, prompted us to seek additional budget to broaden our marketing around donations and legacies.
A major push in this marketing activity was our 2015 Legacy Awareness Month. We found that stories worked well in illustrating the impact of legacies in a tangible way and thus allowed us to successfully engage audiences with our message.
We were really pleased with the project. It worked really well as an extension of our established annual Legacy Awareness Campaign and allowed us to broaden our reach and engage new audiences in the work of the Gallery, its mission and its need for public support.
