Making supporter experience work for better fundraising
The multi-billion pound fundraising crisis sweeping the nation’s charity sector has been widely reported. A major shortfall in donations, as a result of the near overnight loss of critical revenue streams such as cancelled events and closed shops, when paired with donors’ greater reluctance to part with their hard earned money in such uncertain times, has forced the sector to re-think its approaches.
Such has been the impact, that the UK’s best known cancer charity Cancer Research UK reported in March 2020 that the cancellation of a range of its events and the closure of all its charity shops meant it expected to lose up to a quarter of its donated income over 12 months – a figured anticipated to be around £120m.
Ultimately, the traditional rule book for raising the profile of a charity, and acquiring and retaining donors, has been called into question. Like a number of industries, the charity sector continues to face rapidly evolving donor behaviour.
Donations permanently changed
Take, for instance, the way in which supporters make charitable donations, which appears to have permanently changed. A substantial 40% of the public have not made any form of cash donation to charity since before the pandemic started. And the past year of not using cash has had a fundamental impact on how people want to give, with only a quarter (26%) of the public wanting to use cash for donations in future, and the majority (51%) now choosing online giving as their preferred route.
The move online has also seen more people donating directly on charity websites, rather than through giving platforms. Direct donations have risen from 40% of the total during the initial lockdown to 48% during the last few months.
To stay relevant and competitive, therefore, charities have had to adapt quickly to new attitudes in order to deliver the agility needed to grasp opportunities and recognise the progressive changes in donor behaviour.
Charities embracing donor experience
The last 12 months have given charities the opportunity to step back, take stock and reframe their approach, and for many it has presented one inevitable conclusion: taking a long term view of supporter engagement and a robust supporter experience strategy in place has the potential to transform the charity sector. As a result, charities are diligently pursuing the quest for donor loyalty and the experiences that drive it.
But while many charities are now exploring new realms of CX (customer/donor/supporter experience), it has not come without its challenges. In fact, a recent report revealed while a minority of leading charities are effectively pushing ahead with their CX transformation, others are still struggling to create and execute a coherent strategy.
Previously, and particularly prevalent within larger global and national charities – known for their traditionalism, cautious nature with organisational complexities and siloes that can hinder decision making – the lack of maturity and joined up internal approaches to CX remained a barrier. Indeed, only 24% of these larger charities are developing an approach that is joined up, while one in five (17%) which do have a developed approach to CX work in siloes.
However, lockdown and new ways of working have led to numerous charities now seeking to untangle their decision making processes to become more streamlined and agile and taking greater risk, while at the same time creating greater collaboration and unity between different teams and departments. In turn, this is generating a single coherent CX strategy that promotes really effective fundraising.
But what makes CX more successful and how do charities begin to counteract the effects of siloes and reset for success?
Painting a picture of donors
As a first step, having a single coherent view of the donor or supporter is considered essential to any successful CX strategy, and plays an integral role in all facets of fundraising operations ¬– be that brand strategy, communications, effective internal collaboration, donor retention, profitability, marketing campaigns or donor acquisition.
Faced with a requirement to deliver winning campaigns that reach more people and deliver under challenging circumstances, data will likely be the true enabler. This is especially true as charities seek to deliver engaging and empathetic communications that are best suited to the continuously shifting preferences, circumstances and needs of donors.
Despite this, data is routinely the number one problem that almost every charity faces. While many charities have a wealth of it, the inability to unify data siloes, interpret key data and turn it into actionable insights remains a barrier to the success of CX strategies.
The foundational element of any effective strategy should be building a cohesive system of agile technologies, underpinned by a wealth of critical data. Whether that is donor information, donation statistics or behavioural insights, it all needs to be harnessed to deliver a more relevant and tailored service.
Aligning such critical insights with the requirements of your charity – be that raising general awareness, increasing donations from existing supporters or re-engaging with lapsed donors – means charities can produce campaigns which deliver real effectiveness and improve the supporter experience, while at the same time achieving defined goals.
By forming an accurate picture of their supporter base and building pen portraits of donors, charities can understand which messaging will best resonate with individuals, recognise which media channels are best to engage them with, as well as what response vehicles they are likely to use, and ways of making their end to end journeys more relevant and motivating based on individual donor profiles.
Only once this level of understanding is achieved can charities begin to think about the most suitable form of communication, and invest in the appropriate channels and technology to provide the delivery infrastructure to support future-proofed communications, and drive positive results.
Adopting new technologies
For charity leaders to push their charities towards a unified mindset, it’s vital to have collaborative technology in place. With the appropriate solutions charities can build cross-functional teams who are empowered to monitor, analyse and improve the donor experience.
The accelerated drive towards digital transformation has led to a raft of new technologies that are having a disruptive influence on the charity sector. While the cloud has become the infrastructure of choice and big data, email marketing, smartphone apps and intuitive social media campaigns have become the true drivers of transformation, and there are many notable examples of how technology can be embraced for good.
Charities are increasingly making use of innovations to find new ways to embrace contactless giving, for instance. This can involve charities placing “contactless giving” windows in their shops which allow passers-by to donate a defined amount of money with one tap, or contactless charity donation boxes (the Natural History Museum uses tap-to-donate podiums which have helped it to raise an extra £1 million in donations).
Contactless giving can also involve using QR codes that let users access more information and guide them to online donation web pages. Indeed the need to make sure that the destination website and your donation journey mechanisms are as simple and frictionless as possible has never been more important, particularly as the user experience (UX) becomes a key differentiator.
Similarly, the British Red Cross “gaming for good” campaign combined Tiltify (the fundraising platform of choice for streamers) and Discord (a community platform for gamers, with a dedicated server for people taking part in the charity’s events) to encourage people to live stream games such as FIFA and Fortnite and raise valuable funds through viewer donations.
Digital innovation in practice
For St Mungo’s – a charity which has been at the forefront of efforts to tackle homelessness for over 50 years – the pandemic offered an opportunity to review and optimise its outbound and inbound campaigns, and launch an array of multi-channel digital campaigns.
St Mungo’s utilised audience profiling and segmentation for the different types of supporters to help with targeting and ensure creatives hit the right note.
Through six integrated digital campaigns, a continuously learning approach was adopted. Within each campaign St Mungo’s tested various factors to optimise donations numbers and value. The charity used a diverse mix of channels from social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube, to Spotify, Gmail, PPC (Google and Bing), retargeting banners and native adverts to effectively engage a diverse audience of largely older donors and new younger supporters.
In this way various creative concepts – including “Dog’s Life”, “It Started With”, “Cold Facts” and “Angels”, each built around different homeless case studies – were delivered to the public. This resulted in tailored campaigns that appealed to varied audiences in different media channels with differing attitudes and values.
In addition to the homeless charity’s outbound social media campaigns, it underwent a full user experience (UX) process, including reviewing the donation journey, looking at industry best practices and redesigning donation forms to improve conversions.
After noticing that conversion levels were low and a high volume of traffic generated from social campaigns wasn’t converting, user personas and profiling of donors were reviewed and the donation process redesigned accordingly to accommodate their unique behaviours and needs.
The charity’s social media campaign testing regime, together with UX improvements, delivered excellent results.
Positive supporter experience essential
Of course, establishing the adequate delivery infrastructure to accommodate advanced technologies and new communication approaches is just one stage of any effective strategy.
In this modern landscape, not only do effective donor experience strategies have to harness the latest technological developments to unlock income opportunities, but also deliver a positive supporter experience. It has become increasingly important that interactions with donors look beyond being solely transactional, and focus on surprising and delighting them.
Regardless of how they interact with a charity, supporters want to feel valued and see how their donations are being used to help others. Charities are progressively using technology to deliver more personalised communications across a multitude of channels, looking beyond simply using them as a fundraising tool and instead embracing them to connect their supporters to the outcomes of the services they deliver.
