British Red Cross ends online affiliate campaign with UKaffiliates
Howard Lake | 10 March 2004 | News
The British Red Cross has suspended its online affiliate fundraising activity in partnership with UKaffiliates.
The suspension of the scheme precedes the charity’s withdrawal from UKaffiliates on 9 April 2004.
In May 2003 the British Red Cross joined a small number of other charities including Save the Children Fund and the Institute for Cancer Research in trialling affiliate marketing. Working with UKaffiliates, the British Red Cross had promoted online donations. It offered banner adverts to participating partner Web sites who were rewarded with commission for generating donations as a result of displaying these banner ads. The charity offered 5% of one year’s donations generated by participating Web sites.
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Online affiliate marketing offers considerable attractions to charities because the model involves payment only on success. Sites earn commission for actually generating a donation, so it should prove a successful model for the conservative charity not wishing to invest too much money up front on online advertising.
The Red Cross joins Save the Children Fund in closing their online affiliate fundraising with UKaffiliates. World Vision remains the only charity still participating with the model, promoting child sponsorship using the system. However, even they closed their affiliate programme for their Great Gifts catalogue.
UK Fundraising tested the British Red Cross’ affiliate programme and we can report fairly successful clickthrough rates of 3.27%, 4.15% and 5.25% for the three different adverts that we carried.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.