Ontario Nature
AOG CASE STUDYLegacy gifts: Nurturing generosity over decades
Client
Ontario Nature
Toronto, ON
Project
Legacy Giving Lead Generation & Stewardship
Services
Legacy Strategy, Strategic Fundraising, Copywriting, Direct Mail, Donor Segmentation
Project highlights
→ Built on 20+ years of a close collaborative relationship between AOG and ON
→ Values-driven storytelling used to make legacy giving feel joyful
→ Decades of refinement based on data analysis and behavioural science
Ontario Nature has been protecting wild species and wild spaces across the province for nearly 100 years.
Through conservation, education, and public engagement, they have helped create Algonquin Park, established the gold standard for endangered species recovery, and built a network of 26 Nature Reserves across Ontario.
They are, in every sense, playing the long game, which is what legacy giving is all about.
The challenge
Legacy gifts are among the most powerful and meaningful donations a charity can receive. They are also among the hardest to cultivate.
A donor who leaves a gift in their will today may have first connected with an organization decades ago. The relationship has to be nurtured carefully, authentically, and over a long period of time.
Last year alone, Ontario Nature received $1.5 million in realized bequests. But gifts like those were not the result of a single ask. They were the result of years of relationship-building, careful stewardship, and knowing exactly when and how to start the conversation.
The challenge was identifying the next generation of legacy donors: people who had not yet thought about a gift in their will, or who were thinking about it but had never been asked.
The work
Agents of Good has been working with Ontario Nature since before Agents of Good officially existed. Cheque number one came from Ontario Nature, and the relationship has only deepened in the two decades since.
That history matters because great legacy fundraising is not something you can shortcut. It is built on trust, on data, on understanding a donor base deeply enough to know what they need to hear and when.
The centrepiece of this work is a legacy lead generation survey, designed to identify new legacy prospects and cultivate existing ones. Written in first person and grounded in behavioural science, the survey meets donors wherever they are in their legacy journey, whether they are just beginning to consider a gift or ready to commit. The questions are warm, values-driven, and deliberately free of the clinical language that makes most legacy conversations feel transactional.
Over years of working together, the Agents have continuously evolved the survey, testing new formats, refining segments, and developing both survey-style and narrative-style packs to reach donors in different ways.
The program runs on a rolling basis with careful attention paid to response capacity (because there is no point identifying 100 new legacy leads if the team cannot respond to each one thoughtfully and personally).
The survey
Legacy giving ads
This is legacy fundraising done the way it should be done.
Not as a campaign but as a meaningful and intentional relationship.
The result
The 2026 Legacy Survey delivered on every level:
Identified a significant number of newly confirmed legacy intentions
Received response rates above and beyond the standard for legacy giving
Meaningfully expanded Ontario Nature's qualified legacy pipeline for future cultivation
But the hard data only tells part of the story.
What this program has really built over time is a culture of legacy giving at Ontario Nature, where donors are no longer just giving to the cause, but actively planning their impact. Fundraisers feel proud of the conversations they are having and the trust they’re building with people who care deeply about their cause.
Donors feel seen, valued, and connected to something that will outlast them.
What matters most: the human connection
Legacy fundraising (done right) does more than identify prospects. It opens doors to meaningful personal stories like this one, from a real Ontario Nature donor:
“As a child, I grew up on a family farm in central Ontario. We had a small woodlot at the edge of which there was a sparkling flow of water bubbling up from a spring. I used to walk back to that spot from time to time and kneel down to drink some of that delicious water. Now, I am a senior living in a retirement home. We have a large and beautiful courtyard where I have been allowed to look after the gardens. My balance is not great, so for the most part, I work at the gardens on my hands and knees.
This reminds me of my childhood and helps me to feel that my life is still worthwhile, in spite of my physical limitations.”
Your donors are thinking about their legacy. Are you?
Legacy giving is one of the most powerful things a donor can do, and one of the best ways to ensure the sustainability of your work. If you are ready to build a program that finds the right donors and starts the right conversations, we would love to talk.
