It’s easy to put your charity’s supporters into boxes and label some people as donors or volunteers and others as activists, when in fact most people just want to support a cause they believe in. They sign petitions, join protests and donate funds.
Charities can be guilty of categorising supporters and, in my mind, this can only make them less effective. At Greenpeace, we’ve found that we can further our aims by combining all elements and thinking of supporters as people, instead of volunteers, donors or campaigners.
We started by getting to know our supporters. Charities have deep insights into their audience and with market research and structured direct marketing testing they can find out what works for supporters. We asked questions such as why they support us, how they want to support us and what they want from us.
We learned that the first action for most of our supporters is signing a petition, but all of our campaigns link to a bigger, long-term project. So, after a supporter has signed a petition, we thank them, tell them what they have helped us achieve, outline the next stages of the campaign and ask them if they would give money to support our long term goals. Thousands go on to donate.
It therefore makes sense for our fundraising team to use its advertising budget and messaging to push Greenpeace’s campaigns. Campaigners gain signatures, we gain donations and overall the charity increases its ability to deliver.
For example, when we were finalising our plans for the climate change talks at the end of 2015, parts of the UK were hit by severe flooding. We knew this was a chance to collaborate and increase support for our calls to reduce CO2 emissions and for the government to reduce the risk of flooding. We reached out to people on social media, on our email list and through our local groups. We were able to reach hundreds of people affected by the flooding.
Within a few days, staff from our fundraising, volunteering and campaigns departments pooled their resources to launch a campaign. It included messages from those affected by the floods, online adverts asking people to sign our petition and a demonstration at Westminster where we placed 500 pairs of used wellies with people’s messages attached. The campaign gained widespread media coverage, massively boosted the number of petition signatories to more than 100,000 and extended our reach with more than 113,000 video views.
For our next major campaign, we brought supporters into the office to work with staff from different departments, and to find out how they respond to our ideas before we finalise our plans. We found that the messaging that worked for us “insiders” wasn’t always the best messaging for those who care as much about the cause, but are not immersed in it on a daily basis.
By having staff from campaigns, fundraising and volunteering using this insight and thinking about how the supporter journey unfolds over time - with opportunities for different kinds of engagement at different points – the campaign will allow supporters to connect in the way that makes most sense for them, whether that be writing to a minister, donating, sharing a video on social media or signing a petition.
We could not further our charity’s aims as successfully if we categorised our supporters into different domains. By asking all of our supporters to engage with all aspects of our work, we know we can achieve much more.
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