Manchester Dogs Home appeal raises £1m in 22 hours
Howard Lake | 14 September 2014 | News
In under a day the public has donated £1 million online and via text to the emergency appeal for the Manchester Dogs Home following the fire the killed dogs and damaged the buildings.
The appeal page was set up on JustGiving on behalf of the home by the Manchester Evening News at 9.20pm on Thursday 11 September, just two hours after fire broke out. The appeal jumped overnight to £240,000, but by 7.15pm on Friday 12 September, just 22 hours after its launch, the donations passed the £1 million mark.
Total donations will be higher, as many people have pledged or delivered gifts in kind to the Dogs Home or at the Cheshire Dogs Home which has taken in many of the dogs that survived. Others have donated via other platforms. The Sun newspaper has also set up its own fundraising appeal for readers to support.
From the moment the fire was first reported, many people have attempted to reach the Manchester Dogs Home to provide donations of good, blankets and other items. Builders have also pledged time and equipment to help in the repair and rebuilding work.
Indeed, the throng of people wanting to help on site caused so much traffic that the charity, on police advice, had to encourage people to avoid doing so as the numbers were causing traffic delays on the M6:
We've gridlocked the M6 & Warrington can donations now be done next w/end police concerned with H&S wow, we've stopped the M6
— Manchester & Cheshire Dogs Home (@manchdogs) September 13, 2014
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By Sunday mid-morning the appeal total was rising, but more slowly:
Reasons for success
Why might this appeal have achieved such success when similar appeals have not done so? It is possible to highlight qualities which have helped other fundraising appeals achieve success.
1. Speed
The online appeal was set up within two hours of the fire. Leaving it to the next day, a weekend, could well have reduced the likelihood of people choosing to give.
2. National news story
The fire and the scale of the number of deaths amongst the dogs meant that it was a major news item, both on Friday evening, and on Saturday morning. Indeed, the story was covered internationally. JustGiving reports that it received donations to the appeal from over 40 countries.
3. Not driven by the charity
The charity’s staff and volunteers were too busy dealing with the disaster, so were unlikely to be in a position to decide to set up an appeal and launch it effectively on the night. Instead, the appeal was set up on their behalf by the regional newspaper the Manchester Evening News, bringing instant publicity and a trusted, independent voice.
4. Popularity of the charity
The outpouring of practical support and giving indicates that this charity has been engaging with its community and its supporters very well over a long time. This kind of trust and affection is not developed overnight.
Many people who have rehomed one of the dogs will have developed a positive memory of their encounter with the dogs home, and will daily enjoy the animal which they took into their home from that charity.
5. It’s an animal charity
Of course, Britons support animal charities to a greater degree than do people in many other countries. The horrific deaths of so many dogs is guaranteed to affect many people learning of the event through the news media. But other animal charities have suffered tragedies and setbacks and not received this rapid influx of donations.
Again, the real reason is likely to be the quality of this particular animal charity, and its communications with the public over many years.
6. Frictionless giving platform
Would the amount raised have been as high if the Manchester Evening News had chosen a different online giving platform? That’s one for the different providers to debate. Whatever the answer, JustGiving provided a well-known name, with plenty of already registered users/donors, and a facility for charity corporate supporters to set up an appeal very quickly.
It could handle several spikes in giving activity. According to Fundraising magazine:
“Between 8am and 9pm on Friday, JustGiving processed 8,600 donations to the animal charity, over twice the volume of its previous hourly record.”
At its peak it was handing four donations a second.
JustGiving also offered a mobile giving option. Frequent visits to the donation page suggested that text donations usually outnumbered those given online.
We shall have to see from JustGiving data whether this was the case in practice, but typical lower text donations could explain how the average gift hovered around the £10 mark for much of the appeal, and then dropped below this level. Average online gifts are often higher than this.
Do you have any other likely reasons for this appeal’s success? Share them in a comment below.
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.