How to make the most out of a BBC Radio 4 charity appeal
Guest Blogger | 27 September 2012 | Blogs
Cord is an international peace building charity working in Africa and south East Asia for over 45 years. Despite this we have a low brand awareness and profile in the UK and were thrilled to have the opportunity to broadcast a charity appeal in July 2012 focusing on our solar cooker project in refugee camps in Chad on BBC Radio 4.
The appeal reaches a cumulative weekly audience of 1.3 million with a demographic who are receptive to supporting charities financially.
Our principal aims were to raise money and to use the appeal to increase our profile in the UK with the BBC endorsement.
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Preparing for the appeal
Despite the appeal being a mere three-minute broadcast and repeated twice during the week it did involve a huge amount of work and organisation to maximise the benefits to the charity.
Cord decided to embrace the appeal and with the support of the producer Sally Flatman and staff set about sourcing content to complement the spoken word of the appeal and provide pictures, stories and video content to prolong and maximise the interest in the campaign and enhance the supporter journey through multi channels.
Our presenter the food writer Stefan Gates has travelled extensively and was able to speak passionately with first-hand experience cooking in conflict zones on solar cookers. In addition we were able to promote the appeal in the BBC Good Food magazine the month before the appeal.
Focusing on our website
Even a small charity can put together footage at minimal cost and source photographs and case studies to enhance the appeal. We were allowed to use the Radio 4 logo for the period of the appeal and we wanted to maximise its use!
SEE ALSO: BBC Radio 4 to broadcast new programme on charity fundraising practices (6 October 2017)
We started with our website, a headline banner showing the presenter and including the logo made it clear to anyone that we were the charity endorsed by the BBC. We also included click through to pages with photos, video footage and case studies which all gave more information about the appeal, and of course the essential ‘donate now’ button. We were rewarded with website hits over 11 times in excess of our average day. When we analysed the figures over 90% of these referrals came from the BBC website so were all new visitors to our website.
Using social media
We were keen to promote the Radio 4 appeal amongst our own supporters using our newsletter and e-news and encouraged them to share the broadcast details with friends and family. This has been the hardest aspect of the appeal to measure.
We experimented with both Facebook and Twitter with the full support of the BBC, our presenter Stefan Gates and a number of other supportive charities. We were able to use social media to promote the appeal and to retain interest in the appeal during the week’s broadcasts.
The appeal
The appeal is available as an audio file, which we embedded on our site.
[The audio file is no longer available on Audioboo.fm – 19 December 2022]
Two key lessons
It was interesting to note that the Facebook posts which were most successful were:
• ‘fun’ posts of Cord opening the donation envelopes
• and our thank you post from our colleagues in Chad was one of the highest of the year – a salutary lesson for all fundraisers!
Results
The result of all our hard work was 648 donations raising £32,566, acquiring 200 new potential donors and increasing our networks on Facebook and Twitter.
The donations came in as follows:
• Online 15%
• Telephone 24%
• Credit card 3%
• Cheques 39%
• CAF 7%
• Gift Aid 12%
Susan Barlow is Fundraising & Marketing Manager at Cord UK.
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