Don't park BMWs and Mercedes when you're holding a legacy event.

When you need some light hearted but valuable stories about legacy fundraising, there's no better person than Ken Burnett.

In his brilliant book 'Relationship Fundraising', he tells of a woman who had pledged a bequest to a charity and was later invited by charity to an open day at their offices. To get to this meeting she had to cross the charity's car park where she was struck by the number of BMWs and Mercedes parked in the car spaces. 

This pledger never got to the meeting. Instead, she turned around, went home and wrote the charity out of her Will because she didn't want her precious bequest to go to an organisation of fat cats. 

It didn't matter that the parked cars might not have belonged to charity employees. It's perceptions that count.