Get all your news in one place.
100’s of premium titles.
One app.
Start reading
The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Paul Allen

How five charities are realising the potential of digital fundraising

Clare Balding and Frankie Dettori do the ice bucket challenge
The surge of social media campaigns, such as the ice bucket challenge have shown the incredible power of online campaigns. Photograph: Anna Gowthorpe/PA

After a few false starts, digital fundraising is finally starting to realise its potential for UK charities. The surge of social media campaigns, such as the ice bucket challenge, Giving Tuesday and no make-up selfie, have shown the incredible power of online campaigns to reach and engage potential donors – and the increasing extent to which social media is just an ordinary part of their interaction with charities.

In 2014, research by Blackbaud reported (pdf) that approximately 15% of all private giving to charities now comes via online donations – with more than half of charities reporting a proportional increase on the previous year.

A 2014 study for Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) and IPPR reports that a quarter of the public (pdf) have participated in a charity fundraising campaign driven by social media. In November 2014, separate Mintel research on charitable giving reported that two-fifths of interviewees had either contributed towards, or had an interaction with a charity on the web within the previous year.

Here, we talk to five very different UK charitable organisations about their individual approaches to driving online donations.

Porchlight

Jo Dawes, director of fundraising & communications, Porchlight

As a homelessness charity, our main focus for digital appeals is Christmas and over winter, as we get most support when it’s cold outside.

What we’ve learned for this peak period is the value of an integrated digital campaign – and we’re increasingly linking our PR, blogs and social media content to specific fundraising appeals. For example, we now embed fundraising asks into our news stories.

I think this more strategic approach has been the biggest change to our digital output. We know we need supporters to have an immediate response – and we’re increasingly driving that by showcasing homeless people and their stories, outlining the impact of donations, and trialling different kinds of content, such as infographics and videos.

We re-launched our website last year, and it is now more accessible for potential fundraisers and people who are homeless. We’ve integrated CAF Donate as our digital fundraising platform, as we don’t have the resources in-house to process donations and they are very aligned with the charity world.

Our new site has also enabled Porchlight to gain far more insight into consumer behaviour. As well as Google Analytics, we’re using Facebook Insights to monitor not just user numbers but the percentage taking action – such as engaging, sharing, liking and conversions (including signing up to events or donating online).

This has, in turn, helped shape our content and decisions about when to use Facebook adverts, as we now know which content resonates most with our supporters. They want real stories – with photos and videos – and that means us spending more time at the coalface. As well as building more user engagement, it’s also been good for the team to remind us what we’re in the job for, and to see the work in action.

To make sure we’re always learning from the experts, we also draw on a number of fundraising resources, such as SOFII, the Media Trust’s digital fundraising courses, UK Fundraising, and Institute of Fundraising conferences, which we love. That kind of outsider knowledge is exceptionally helpful, especially for a small team like ours.

Macmillan Cancer Support

Amanda Neylon, head of digital, Macmillan Cancer Support

Our first focus for digital fundraising is about being audience-led. That’s not just about responding to how people want to give online, it’s also about how they want to be communicated with more generally, and the products and services they want to use on the web. That insight has driven a lot of segmentation of our audiences – so we now know much better who to talk to, and which marketing channels to use.

Our second focus is innovation. Our innovation programme for fundraising is deliberately lean – we rely on testing and learning. We build lots of prototypes, see how they work for audiences, and then we add more features and functionality if needed. For example, our Brave the Shave campaign came out of our innovation team: it was a low level micro-site for the first year; and, when we saw it was working, we added more time and effort. Last year, it raised £3.4m for Macmillan. Part of the success in innovation is about how we’ve integrated digital into the marketing mix – for example, using social media for acquisition, and experimenting in paid-for social. It’s not just about [building the] fundraising product, it’s also about driving people to it.

Finally, we’ve spent a lot of time up-skilling people in digital. Rather than having separate fundraising and digital marketing teams, it’s all integrated now – with each person in fundraising running their own search and digital marketing activities. It has empowered our fundraisers to deliver their own campaigns – and really made a difference. After all, digital has to be everyone’s job.

MuchLoved

Jonathan Davies, founder, MuchLoved

We are a tribute charity that helps people create online tribute pages for loved ones who’ve died. When we started a decade ago, there was no fundraising function. But users told us it’d be nice to add messages on about how much money they’ve raised for different charities, so we listened to that. Today, fundraising is the main focus for many people.

There are lots of fantastic digital fundraising platforms out there – and there’s no point us trying to compete against the big ones. But I think we offer something unique. Our service is free for donors, and we offer a subscription-based bespoke platform for charities, which includes British Lung Foundation’s Breath of Life and Prostate Cancer’s You’re the Man online tribute funds.

All of our fundraising runs through CAF Donate, which takes away the administration side. We wanted to use an established, charity-focused organisation, and they also charged less than JustGiving.

Most charities use fundraising tools to raise money for themselves – we work much more like a social enterprise, raising funds for any UK charity. So far our tribute funds have raised over £20m for around 900 charities. And though tribute fundraising has traditionally been offline, over 50p in the pound is now given online.

The evenings are our busiest time of the day, as people have a bit of downtime, they’re back from work and may not want to bother a friend with a phone call. Instead, they will sit down in their living room and have a look at a tribute page. Most of our web traffic now comes via mobile and tablets – and we’ve worked very hard to optimise our site for them.

Team Margot

Yaser Martini, Margot’s father, Team Margot

Our charity is only one year old, and we primarily focus on campaigning and encouraging people to register as potential stem cell donors, rather than asking them for money. That said, we now accept donations – both directly on our site via CAF Donate and using Virgin Money Giving, where charity supporters can set up fundraising pages.

I think good digital platforms like these help to level the ‘playing field’ for small charities like us, who are essentially run by a handful of unpaid, part-time volunteers.

I’m a believer that people will come around and find a way to help us. We have 40,000 fans on Facebook and 7,000 Twitter followers. Sometimes people just want to give money, and that’s great when it happens online. The key for me is that digital platforms enable awareness on a wider scale. If it resonates, then people will take action – and digital fundraising is one of the options.

Digital platforms have made donating money to a charity like us far easier than ever before, both in terms of single and also regular donations like Direct Debit. What my sister Nadia and I really like is that digital giving also allows the donor to learn more about the charity they are considering giving to, in their own time and with no pressure from a charity’s employees or volunteers.

Movember

Paul Mitcheson, marketing and communications director, Movember Foundation

Well over half our digital interactions now come in through mobile and handheld devices, so we decided to design our key digital channels – the website and our emails – for mobile screens first rather than for desktop.

When it comes to converting traffic into actual fundraising potential, the prevailing opinion is that people find it a bit of a pain entering their payment details into a phone. Happily, we’ve most recently found the opposite is true – as long as the offering and messaging is presented appropriately.

For example, our recent campaign running up to World Cancer Day on 4 February asked the public to make a minimum £2 donation for a Unity Band. We’d expected lower rates of conversions through mobile than desktop – but handheld channels performed even better for us.

While we, and the industry at large, are still working out exactly how contactless technology will play out at scale, it is refreshing to see that the public seem to be increasingly prepared to make transactions through their mobile devices.

Another innovation we’ve tried is beacon technology, which I think will undeniably be a big growth area for digital marketing in general. This offers messaging targeted at specific demographics and geographic locations. Our [pilot] activity wasn’t fundraising-led but it showed strong response rates and will be an interesting one to explore.

Lastly, we can’t ignore the basics. Email remains a really powerful tool for us – although we’ve still got some way to go yet before we realise the full potential of segmentation and targeting. And then there’s social media, and we found once again with World Cancer Day that frequent and creative posting, especially when co-ordinating with partners and ambassadors, was a key driver to our donation platforms.

Find out how the digital fundraising platform, CAF Donate, can help your charity boost online donations, here.

Content on this page is paid for and provided by the Charities Aid Foundation sponsor of the Guardian Voluntary Sector Network’s Charity Money hub.

Sign up to read this article
Read news from 100’s of titles, curated specifically for you.
Already a member? Sign in here
Related Stories
Top stories on inkl right now
One subscription that gives you access to news from hundreds of sites
Already a member? Sign in here
Our Picks
Fourteen days free
Download the app
One app. One membership.
100+ trusted global sources.