The problem
Brightsource’s longstanding relationship with the British Heart Foundation has helped make prize-led campaigns a crucial pillar of the charity’s overall fundraising strategy. With a highly successful programme delivering healthy income and thousands of new supporters year-on-year, the team could have rested on their laurels. But how should their fundraising programmes evolve and adapt to a rapidly changing world, where supporters can engage with the charity over multiple channels? How could they learn more about their donors and give them more choice in terms of how they engage with the organisation?
Technology tools
Using a combination of clever tools, including Pageflex, our technology team built a system whereby a series of personalised pages could be accessed via a pURL (personalised URL). Donors received a paper-pack, but were invited to go online to either buy raffle tickets, and donate via the web. Once online, they arrived at a page addressed personally to them. The content of the pages they then clicked thorough were driven by data held about them by the charity, such as previous ticket purchase and gift aid flags. The financial transaction screen linked up directly with BHF’s payment partner creating a seamless donor experience, which allowed for consolidated reporting of both paper and online responses. Once the transaction was complete, we invited them to forward the link to a friend or to share the campaign on social media.
Cross-media design skills
By carefully adapting the response triggers that work in traditional offline prize-led communications for the online version, we made sure that none of the motivating techniques were lost between media.
We worked with online style sheets and brand guidelines to create a consistent look and feel for the whole campaign.
Return on investment
The initial investment in creating the new system was paid for immediately – a rare outcome for a charity developing a new online response channel. 3% of donors chose to go online with a higher average gift than offline responders. The campaign also enabled other audiences to be contacted by email, generating incremental income that otherwise it would not have been cost-effective to contact.
Supporter engagement
More importantly for BHF though, they can now give supporters a choice of response channel. BHF now have a highly personalised response portal that has been adapted at low cost for a subsequent multi-media awareness campaign, and cause-led campaigns sent via either direct mail or email – a system that can be re-worked and re-used for any campaign. It’s early days, but first indications are that supporters are pleased to be able to choose to interact with the charity in the way that is most convenient for them.