Best integrated fundraising and campaigning organisation
Howard Lake | 16 May 2011 | Blogs
The organisation that demonstrates exemplary integration of its fundraising and campaigning messages to good effect
The shortlisted entries in alphabetical order are:
Beatbullying
Elephant Family
WaterAid
Beatbullying
Beatbullying launched The Big March in November 2010 which was both a uniquely innovative and integrated digital campaign and an integrated sponsorship and merchandising fundraising campaign, which saw hundreds of thousands of supporters ‘march’ over 60 independent websites during a 12 hour period. Fundraising was a key campaign objective, levered principally through the sale of wristbands. Packs were sold to schools and youth communities as well as individually. Over 85 sector, corporate and media partners took part, hosting the Big March, pitching virtual tents and seeding in their own related activities. The entire campaign was run as a cross-departmental collaboration, bringing together colleagues from fundraising and communications, new media, practice, policy and research and the CEO office. Media coverage was good, and there were many learning outcomes to take into account for The Big March 2 for 2011. However, it still beat all its targets by wide margins.
Elephant Family
The Elephant Parade London 2010 aimed to generate awareness for the plight of the endangered Asian elephant with an audience of 25 million people, to raise funds for their conservation and increase the brand visibility. 260 brightly painted elephants in the streets, parks and squares of London made an immediate impact on the capital and created strong media interest in the event. Funds were raised from the sale of the sculptures, commercial sponsorship and public donations. Regular donors were recruited through an SMS campaign. Elephant Family aimed to raise £2m from the sale of the sculptures, but in the end they sold for £4.2m. The regular giving campaign received more than £10,000 in year one. This has made Elephant Charity the UK’s biggest funder for the Asian elephant. The charity used its team of 10 people plus two interns across all departments to execute Elephant Parade. Media coverage was excellent.
WaterAid
‘Dig toilets, not graves’ needed to integrate fundraising and campaigning asks in a single campaign. The objectives were to recruit regular givers from a different audience and to influence the outcomes of the MDG summit by collecting petition submissions. A media stunt – placing 167 spades in Trafalgar Square to represent the number of children who die from diarrhoea every hour – aimed to achieve coverage in a minimum of three national press titles. In the end 23 articles were published. The DRTV recruitment ad was projected to achieve a minimum test channel Year One RoI of 0.4 and beat this by 7.5%. The viral film needed to achieve 35,000 views, but was watched by over 266,000. The campaign targets were exceeded by 67%, garnering 33,042 campaign petitions.
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.