BBC Radio 4 Christmas Appeal chooses Donorfy for CRM
Howard Lake | 8 December 2016 | News
St Martin-in- the-Fields, the church on London’s Trafalgar Square, has selected Donorfy as their new CRM solution and for handling donations during their current annual Christmas appeal, which is supported by BBC Radio 4.
With the appeal in its 90th year, BBC Radio 4 listeners have given almost £4,500,000 in the last two years to the church’s Christmas appeals. The money helps homeless people who receive shelter, food, aid and advice at The Connection at St Martin’s. It also maintains a special Vicar’s Relief Fund which makes thousands of one-off grants to vulnerable people across the UK.
Donorfy was chosen by the St Martin-in-the-Fields appeal team to handle the high volume of donations that arrive online, by phone and in the post, with the aim of achieving cost and time savings compared to their previous CRM solution.
Advertisement
Since it is cloud-based, it gives charities instant access to their donor database from any device.
Tim Bissett, Director of the Christmas Appeal at St Martin-in- the-Fields, explains:
“Donorfy have helped the St Martin-in- the-Fields Charity transform its fundraising from cottage industry to exemplary organisation. Their knowledge and experience has enabled us to not just migrate to a modern donor management system, but to a cost effective, integrated system that is right for the demands of the Christmas Appeal. There is no doubt that without Donorfy we would have taken far longer to achieve this”.
CEO Robin Fisk explains how Donorfy is equipped to handle the demands of large scale events like the BBC Radio 4 Christmas Appeal:
“Donorfy was built to scale according to demand, and this appeal shows how effective that is. The built-in integration with the Stripe payment gateway, coupled with the sheer power that’s available from the Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure meant that Donorfy was able to process thousands of donations with ease as the appeal was broadcast on radio and on TV.
“The Gift Aid is also collected automatically, which is a huge time saver. And as the data goes directly into the CRM it means the team at St Martins are able to get timely analysis and insights into the giving as the appeal happens.”
Launched in 2015 by charity technology experts Robin Fisk and Ben Brett, Donorfy is available to all UK charities.
- £500,000 donation made to BBC Radio 4 Christmas Appeal (19 December 2022)
- MAG BBC Radio 4 appeal is the highest performing this year (17 November 2017)
- How to make the most out of a BBC Radio 4 charity appeal (27 September 2012)
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.