Legacy Navigator | Smee & Ford

Clarity, focus and strategic direction - a new standard of benchmarking.

Built on decades of experience. Reimagined for the future.

For decades, Smee & Ford and Legacy Futures have been at the heart of the UK’s legacy giving sector. Together, we’ve helped hundreds of charities understand and grow their legacy income. Legacy Navigator is a transformative resource where market-leading legacy data meets expert insight and peer support to help your charity grow gifts in wills income with clarity and confidence.

Turn knowledge into action with tools that enable you to evaluate your position in the market, identify what works, and drive evidence-based decisions that secure your charity’s long-term growth and more.

Who is Legacy Navigator for?

Designed to support teams involved in legacies across your charity, Legacy Navigator turns knowledge into action by giving a unified, evidence-based view of your legacy performance and growth potential.

Legacy Administration

Move beyond case-by-case legacy management with a full understanding of your charity’s legacy performance in the context of the wider market. Identify whether the trends you’re seeing are unique to your charity or part of broader market patterns.

Marketing & Supporter Engagement

Discover who is leaving gifts to your charity so you can target, segment, and communicate more effectively with supporters most likely to leave a legacy.

Finance & Budget Holders

Forecast and budget with confidence using clear, accurate insight that combines market data with your own, removing the guesswork and enabling long-term strategic planning.

Senior Leadership & Strategy

Access the insight needed to build stronger business cases to secure investment in legacies, and make evidence-based strategic decisions across the charity.

Helping your legacy journey with guidance and support.

What makes Legacy Navigator distinctive is not just the data it draws on, but the way it turns that into practical value:

Trusted evidence – built on the UK’s most complete legacy dataset, including current and historic Smee & Ford notifications, covering every charitable gift in England & Wales back to 2012.   
Confidence in decisions – no more wrangling spreadsheets. Navigator benchmarks your charity’s performance automatically, with minimal data submission.
Smarter strategies – gift-level detail that reveals drivers of growth, detailed insight into legator profiles, bequest types, and co-beneficiaries. (advanced tier only)
Lasting support – training, consultancy, and a community of peers.

Speak to an expert >>

What does the Legacy Navigator include?

Legacy Navigator has been created in partnership with charities to bring something new to the sector; a product that seamlessly combines exclusive market-wide data, expert analysis, and peer learning on one platform.

Webinars and presentations

When you join Legacy Navigator, your whole charity gets access to a supportive learning community, including 4 market updates and 5 tactical training sessions throughout the year via webinars.

The webinars are open to everyone from your charity and are a great source of learning for those in and outside of your charity’s legacy team. Every webinar is recorded and stored in the secure client portal, so even if you miss a live update, you can access the recording at your leisure.

Reports

Offer you a clear view of the legacy giving market, with annual sector insights on trends, forecasts, and hot topics, plus quarterly updates on income, bequests, values, and key events. Alongside this, you’ll receive personalised quarterly and annual reports benchmarking your charity’s performance across all core metrics.

Data visualisation

Provide your charity with a complete, actionable view of legacy income and the wider market with all your legacy insights, growth, trends, and benchmarks in one view.

Chat to the team to find out more >>

Pricing

To ensure we can best support charities of all sizes wherever they are in their legacy income journey, we have devised tiered pricing based on legacy income size.