Waysact
Howard Lake | 31 May 2012 | News
Regular Giving is one of the most important sources of income for many large charities and global NGOs. The majority have invested heavily in and benefit from mature retention programs.
With improvements in technology making this valuable channel accessible to charities big and
small, it now has the potential to become a part of every individual’s social identity.
Any marketing graduate will tell you that, “Retention starts with acquisition”. We know that up
to 90% of people who sign up to support charities via an automated regular monthly debit are
signed up by face to face fundraisers. The reason is simple – a lifelong commitment of many
thousands of dollars, pounds or euros requires a conversation. The problem is the way in which
the majority of these prized regular givers are acquired is outdated. It’s not secure and it does
nothing for the lifetime potential of the donor. The current process is so complicated, hard to
report on and long winded that a first supporter communication may not be received for up to
6 weeks! Why? All these valuable new donors are signed up on paper. It is hard to secure a
paper form and the postage and keying and verification add unnecessary time and errors to the
process. As many as 40% never make it past the third month. This also means that managing
face to face fundraisers can take a small army; the quality of individual fundraisers is hard to
determine; and productivity analysis is a retrospective activity. The skills required, cost involved
and risk can be simply too high a barrier.
There is now finally a solution that overcomes these issues, meaning that face to face can
continue to thrive. Thanks to the dedication of the team at Waysact there is a cost effective,
global solution that eradicates paper, allows real time reporting on quality and quantity and
communicates with new donors in rich, real time multimedia..
This software as a service solution has been 3 years in development and is set to revolutionise
face to face globally. The cutting edge web app is built on HTML 5 and Ruby on Rails and has
the look and feel of a professional application. It’s clear from the first look that the application
has been developed by professional fundraisers and people who have a deep understanding of
regular giving.
How does it work? The SaaS solution at the front end looks relatively simple; a pledge form,
traditionally a paper based pad is digitised onto a mobile device. It is a browser based solution
but looks native on any device and can work compliantly on and off line. Drilling down, every
field has algorithms and fuzzy logic behind them to maximise the cleanliness of the data.
Address check, instant payments, bank verification, email ping, capitalisation the list goes on.
What does this mean, it means data clean enough to be imported directly into your database
without manual intervention. The paper pitch card is a thing of the past too, with all pitch,
training and motivational information accessed via the device, up to date and with the ability to
play video. And this is just the start, as soon as a mobile number is captured at the touch of a
button an SMS is sent to the supporter, thanking them, linking them to a video and welcoming
them. The fundraiser can take a picture of the supporter with a banner wedding them to your
cause, this can be sent via MMS to the supporter and immediately added as their facebook
picture or tweeted to their followers.
Once the pledge is complete – which means complete, all information accurate, bank details
checked, contact information verified and even a payment already taken if required – a thank
you email is sent to the supporter from your cause. It’ll be waiting for them next time they log
into their email. The donor experience is completely transformed, they have full visibility and
validation of the amazing action they have just taken instantly and they have been thanked and
thanked again.
Waysact have gone a lot further than just replacing the form though, as soon as a pledge is
confirmed it comes into the back end, it is geo-demographically mapped, time and date stamped
and attributed to the fundraiser, team and campaign instantly. Even before we move onto the
reporting Waysact allows us to complete, let’s consider where this data can go, it can go straight
into a call queue to be welcome called or straight into your database that day, that hour, that
minute.
So now let’s look at the reporting capabilities, every piece of information about that pledge
is captured, GPS of where it was obtained, gender, amount, payment method, by whom it
was obtained, age of supporter and any number of customisable attributes. Who can see this
information, well the fundraiser to start with, on their private dashboard which shows them
how they are doing for the day, week, month or year and how much money they have raised.
The team leader who can also see the rest of the teams details too, managers who can see
trends and provide real time feedback about quality of a team or an individual fundraiser.
Administration staff can see the pledges coming in too. If one cancels or is invalid this is reimported
back into Waysact so that everyone can see why and when to measure quality.
The impact moving forward equates to millions of Pounds, Euros or Dollars in revenue which
would have otherwise been lost. Think also of the man hour savings every organisation can
benefit from, allowing increased spending on the core function of what is trying to be achieved.
This is the clean, transparent and accountable future of face to face fundraising and an exciting
beginning to a digital regular giving revolution.
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.