Here at Legacy.com – the leader in online memorials – we spend a lot of time thinking about death.
For more than 15 years, Legacy has helped honor the lives of millions of people around the world through the obituaries we host for our newspaper and funeral home partners, as well as the condolence books we maintain as safe places for loved ones to mourn and share memories.
But Legacy is not just about remembering the dead – Legacy is about inspiring the living.
Every day at Legacy we witness the power that a person's life story has to inspire. Even the most humble life story can challenge us to live better, make a difference, and fulfill the promise of our humanity.
At Legacy, we wanted to do more to honor the lives and legacies of the individuals on our website. We wanted to challenge our company, ourselves and others to make a difference. We wanted our partners and the public to get to know Legacy in a different way. Legacy is not just a digital resting place – it is a place for the living to discover and make meaning. We wanted people to see the Legacy we know, the Legacy that is about life and love and kindness. Legacy is not just about death – it is the place where life stories live on.
In December 2015, we launched Legacy's first annual Give to Remember social campaign. The idea was simple but powerful: encourage people to give to charity in memory of someone they love.
Legacy partnered with 13 charities, including StoryCorps and the American Heart Association. We created a special landing page featuring each of our charity partners and describing the event. Any donations made through the Give to Remember landing page during the month of December would be doubled by Legacy up to $50,000 event-wide.
We kicked off the campaign on #GivingTuesday – Dec. 1, 2015. Throughout December, we shared with our users on Facebook and Twitter and encouraging them to #GiveToRemember. Meanwhile our charity partners shared on their websites, social platforms and through email, urging their followers and donors to participate.
When Give to Remember came to a close, Legacy's partner charities had raised $167,000 including $50,000 in matching funds from Legacy.com.
We felt good about what we'd accomplished and so did our charity partners, including The Funeral Service Foundation, an organization that supports' funeral service professionals and their efforts to serve grieving families. Legacy partners with 3500+ funeral homes, yet funeral directors have historically been wary of Legacy. Legacy's partnership with The Funeral Service Foundation for the Give to Remember campaign is helping to change attitudes toward Legacy within the funeral industry.
The top fundraiser during Give to Remember was Final Salute, an organization that seeks to end homelessness with a focus on underserved female veterans and their children. Founder Jas Boothe was delighted with the results: "Because of our partnership with Legacy.com and the donors that supported this giving campaign, our mortgage on our transitional home for women veterans will be entirely covered for the 2016 year!"
Ty Louis Campbell left a huge legacy for a little boy, and his mother Cindy Campbell is growing that mission every day by funding pediatric cancer research through the Ty Louis Campbell Foundation, another top fundraiser during Give to Remember. Cindy said, "It was truly such a pleasure working with Legacy on this campaign. Legacy.com is an admirable brand that manages to find the impossible balance between understanding the grief while celebrating the legacy."
