Best donor development campaign

Howard Lake | 24 May 2013 | Blogs

For the best campaign to persuade current supporters to renew and upgrade their giving, using any or several fundraising techniques

The shortlisted entries are:

• Royal British Legion, Fields of Remembrance 2012
• RNIB, Active Raffle Conversion programme
• University of Leeds, May Appeal, reminder

Royal British Legion

This is a warm, highly effective donor development and retention DM campaign that has been running for 14 years. The core objective of the Field of Remembrance campaign is non-financial and is to honour and remember all fallen servicemen and women, but there are key secondary financial objectives that drive significant revenue. The packs are highly personalised and where possible contain information that supporters have previously provided.

In 2012 the mailing went to 435,000 warm supporters split across six different creatives and 57 different versions. Response rate was 20.3% with an RoI of £8.28 against a target of £7.26, raising a total of £1,555,165.

The letter does not contain an overt ask, but there is a donation form enclosed in the packs, which delivery high volumes of cash gifts and regular gifts.

RNIB

RNIB had a database of 1.7 million raffle players who had never been offered an alternative product, so it set about offering donors the opportunity to donate by regular donation in addition to raffle giving.

As these donors were used to playing a telephony based raffle external telephone agencies and the RNIB’s in-house telephony team were used to make calls. The conversation thanked donors for their support, talked to them about a range of RNIB services and asked if donors would consider making a regular donation. As the campaign progressed selections and scripts were refined.

A target of 2.5% response rate was set with an average gift of £60 pa and attrition of 15% per year to achieve breakeven. To date, 500,000 donors have been contacted, with a response rate of just over 5% with an average gift of £65 pa. Attrition varies between 10–12%.

The campaign saw the DM team, raffle fundraising team and campaigns teams working together and has given the RNIB confidence to progress on a comprehensive cross-sales strategy.

University of Leeds

Leeds has a successful regular giving telephone programme, but mail-based appeals have historically underperformed. The key objective of this campaign was to improve first-time cash donor retention as well as strengthening donor acquisition from alumni and using the most cost effective DM channels to support the core telephone conversion programme.

The new pack focused on donor needs by tapping into the nostalgia alumni have towards their time at University, and using existing data to create a highly personalised pack, tailored to the era in which alumni studied at Leeds. The pack’s central enclosure was an entertaining scrapbook, personalised by decade with photos of people and places to help alumni reconnect. This was supported by a lift letter from a recent scholar to show the difference alumni could make by funding a scholarship.

Target income was £108,900 (the previous years’ DM appeals had achieved gross income of £30,000 at best). Income achieved was £216,164 and an additional 573 new donors came on board.

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.