Best use of face-to-face

Howard Lake | 24 May 2013 | Blogs

For the campaign that demonstrates innovation linked to success with face-to-face fundraising at any level.

The shortlisted entries are:

• Merlin
• Shelter

Merlin – Life or Death, Merlin PSMS Measles Face-to-Face campaign

Merlin used three agencies – Open Fundraising, Tag and Listen – collaboratively for this campaign, developing a two-stage street prospecting and telephone conversation campaign, integrating street theatre and mobile.

Prospects were asked to text a PSMS microdonation on the street as their initial commitment. The act of donating validated the mobile number which, in turn, delivered a significantly higher than normal contact rate on the phone.

Fundraisers were dressed in Merlin branded doctors’ scrubs and equipped with medicine vials as props to give members of the public the opportunity to engage with exactly what their donation would be paying for. Leave-behind leaflets were styled like immunization record cards, and donors were given ‘Hero’ stickers and Merlin lollipops. Prospects were not asked to share any personal data with a fundraiser because the action and transaction took place on the donor’s phone.

Target figures were to recruit 20,000 PSMS donors (23,409 achieved), with an average gift of £2.82 (£3.43 achieved). The campaign has also seen brand awareness for Merlin increase from 7% to 13% in London and 1% to 4% in the north east, areas where the campaign was carried out.

Shelter

Shelter’s Christmas appeal, based around the premise that 75,000 children in Britain would be homeless over Christmas, was used to create an integrated campaign across the whole of Shelter and used F2F, D2D and PSMS. Over 100 F2F staff were branded with the Christmas appeal stats which tied in with all ATL activity to provide a unified Christmas image.

All F2F and D2D fundraisers were retrained at the launch and all PSMS staff were trained by specialist SMS operator TAG.

This was the first time that a Christmas rebrand was applied across all staff. All targets were beaten with PSMS generating 26,332 prospects (20,000 target) and bringing in an average gift of £92.82 against a target of £85pa.

SMS income was almost double the original target of £59,088. On the next PSMS campaign the age demographic will be raised and a higher ask implemented.

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.