Best use of face-to-face
Howard Lake | 2 May 2008 | Blogs
For the campaign that demonstrates innovation linked to success with face-to-face fundraising at any level. Applications that show creativity and development of the techniques are sought.
And the shortlisted entries in alphabetical order are:
Cancer Research UK
Street Prospecting Campaign
Cancer Research worked with Bluefrog, Gift and Pell & Bales to complete this campaign that was run across the north west of England by Gift’s Manchester-based campaign teams. Over a 26-day period in March and April 2007 17,913 prospects were recruited with a target of converting 15 per cent of these to donors.
Cancer Research has not used traditional face-to-face in its fundraising mix before and this attracted a younger type of donor to the charity.
The 15 per cent conversion to regular giving was achieved on the telephone with an average gift of £69 – slightly below target. Collection of phone numbers was 81 per cent against a target of 70 per cent. The campaign showed how conversion to regular giving can be three times sector averages for cold calling, just because prospects have been engaged with first.
Delice de France
Delice de France wanted to launch a payroll giving scheme as part of a comprehensive CSR policy. The company wanted to make all 950 employees aware of the scheme and aim for a 10 per cent uptake with an average gift of £5 a month.
A high percentage of Delice de France’s employees are Polish, so all literature was translated into Polish and a Workplace Giving UK advisor spent time finding what causes they were attracted to and a Polish translator gave information about UK charities that fitted the bill.
In two months 102 employees signed up to the scheme with an average gift of £7.40 a month. Employee participation is now 10.7 per cent, qualifying the company to receive the government’s Gold Quality Mark for Payroll Giving in 2008.
Workplace Giving is now looking at translating its materials and certain pages of its website into other languages to ensure that within companies they work with as many employees as possible are included.
VSO
Home Fundraising Campaign 2007
This door-to-door campaign was a test for VSO that would be compared with other forms of F2F. The target audience was middle income, young professional couples and family donors.
Home Fundraising created a flexible two-stage approach with fundraisers able to make a return appointment at the door if the prospect needed more time before committing to a regular gift. This worked well with young professional couples and families. The campaign was tested in the south east and south west of England and saw the development of a donor-profiling tool that will be used further in roll-out activity during 2008.
The target was to recruit 1,150 donors and 1,176 were recruited with an annual average gift of £126.16 (£120 target) and 90 per cent Gift Aid. The campaign also yielded an older donor profile with an average age of 42. Past research on VSO’s F2F donors shows age affects donor retention significantly.
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.