Legacy Planning is HERE!

We are so excited to share our newest feature, Legacy Planning, with you!

What is Legacy Planning?

Legacy planning ensures that your personal values, beliefs, and preferences are respected and upheld even after your death. It gives you the opportunity to express your wishes regarding the management, deletion, or preservation of your collections on Permanent. It can include instructions on the continuation of your archives, copyright and publishing preferences for the future.

Digital Legacy matters now, more than ever.

Before the digital age, a family member could simply walk through the home of a recently deceased relative and find all of their photos or paper records, but now our lives extend to digital spaces. This means that we need affordable and accessible ways to plan for what happens to our digital materials too. Your digital legacy represents a part of your life’s story. It encompasses your thoughts, experiences, achievements, and relationships. By planning your digital legacy, you have the opportunity to curate and preserve your online presence in a way that reflects your values and desires. It allows future generations to understand and appreciate your digital footprint and its significance. Permanent is here to help you create, preserve, and pass on your own digital legacy.

How does Legacy Planning work on Permanent?

Last August, we asked you all for help with designing our new Legacy Planning Feature. Now, this summer, it’s ready for you to try out. This new feature allows you to plan for what should happen to your materials after you can no longer manage them. 

The current process allows you to assign a Legacy Contact to notify Permanent in the event of your passing and assign a unique Archive Steward to each of your archives, depending on who would be the best for each one. In the future, we plan to release more options such as deleting or publishing your archive after a period of time. You will also be able to designate what should happen to any leftover storage you have in your account–for a peek at the future plans, see our full prototype.

To help you with your legacy plan, we’ve created and provided some educational resources. View our instructional video series here or check out our in-depth legacy planning guides for more information. 

It is our hope that our members take advantage of this new feature and create legacy plans that will ensure that their legacy lives on. Don’t leave your legacy up to hearsay, start your legacy plan today.