The virtual fundraising feast
Howard Lake | 18 January 2013 | Blogs
I first met Kids Company's founder Camila Batmanghelidjh when I was wearing a Santa's hat in Oxford Circus tube station shaking a fundraising bucket. From that first meeting grew a digital daydream which became the charity's virtual 'Plate Pledge Appeal'.
My background is advertising and tech start-ups, and I've launched five companies around the world. At my next meeting with Camila she explained that she needed to raise over a £1 million each year just to feed the children the organisation provides love and care for. As she began to reel off her list of ideas which included a gala dinner, a big picnic and a picnic blanket made of paper plates, each of which fed a child for a day, the idea of the virtual Plate Pledge Appeal developed.
The beginnings of the campaign
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The idea was simple – I would create a site that would ultimately become a wall of plates, people would be able to create a virtual plate by uploading a photo or logo and then sharing it on their social channels. Their peers would be able to either contribute to the plate shared or create their own.
The campaign would have its own supporters, create its own PR and we could offer advertising space on the site to key partners and influencers. We would add the ability to dedicate your plate to someone, or add a personal message to encourage people to share and more, would add an element of competition, ensuring the plates with the most donations would raise to the top of the plate wall.
Kids Company's position
The concept was supported by some strong strategic thinking. Kids Company had a strong following on social media, they had lots of people engaging in their conversations but were struggling to convert these conversations into cash. Kids Company were a well known charity but few people realise the huge amount of work they do, and there was a need to raise awareness and understanding of the hunger and malnutrition children were facing on the streets of London. Kids Company had some long term corporate partners, trustees and high net worth donors but were yet to explore the mass market or digitalise ‘micro donations’.
Early challenges
Although from an external perspective this seemed like it would be clean and simple to execute, internally things were much more complicated than I had realised. Unlike the agile, pioneering, dynamic and digitally savvy entrepreneurs I was used to working with, the team at Kids Company was large, complex and had varying levels of knowledge, understanding and appetite for risk. The brand, unlike the commercial entities I was used to working with, was sophisticated and sensitive and the vast majority of staff, management and otherwise were focused on doing and delivering rather than developing strategic, planning, knowledge and insight.
There was a fundamental shift in thinking that had to occur to ensure the campaign could work. I needed to change ‘how do our target audience behave?’ to ‘who else could be in our target audience if we behaved differently?’. I needed to shift ‘word of mouth marketing is risky’ to ‘word
of mouth marketing is powerful’ and worked hard to help the team understand that high profile, expensive events was not the only way to build strong and long lasting relationships.
Not only did I have to work on a revenue share rather than having any of the upfront costs covered, I also had to spend a significant amount of time understanding the organisation, their objectives and the skills and personalities that existed in the teams.
I had to learn how campaigns were scheduled, how trustees and key donors were managed and why and when journalists and celebrities would offer their support to a campaign. I had to understand their brand guidelines, their payment systems, their database structure, their technical competencies and the way in which they currently engaged online. I needed to understand their decision making processes, the responsibilities of key personnel and their existing relationship with their donors, supporters and influencers within the industry.
Campaign results
Months down the line, I would like to think I have learnt a bit about online fundraising and the potential it holds for charities in the future. Kids Company, as I suspected, have done very well with The Plate Pledge appeal. The campaign launched with a piece of research into hunger and
malnutrition and a double page spread in the Evening Standard. Three months later, without any more significant media coverage to mention, the campaign value sits at just over £400,000.
Thoughts on the platform
As I analysed why this campaign worked I realised the platform provided people with a reason to give. Charities tend to be very good at sharing their need for funds but in my experience, poorer at giving people a reason to give. The platform also allows people to show that they have done good and identify themselves as part of a crowd, united in their giving.
This is well demonstrated by the British Legion Poppy Day Appeal and was leveraged by Kids Company during the Plate Pledge Appeal using the virtual plate of pride which allowed people to show their social contacts that they had provided a meal for a child. We spent a lot of time considering the user experience of the platform both online and mobile ensuring that donors could support the campaign easy and effectively on the go and with just a few clicks from seeing a plate on a friends wall through to sharing a plate of your own.
Beginnings of The Rainmaker Foundation
The success of this campaign and the vast amounts I learnt in the process of creating it led me to doing two more things in the space. Initially I developed a framework to help charities understand the most effective route to digital success and the activities, behaviours and changes that need to take place in order for them to do this. I combined the insight I had gained from Kids Company with my commercial, strategic thinking and digital knowledge to create this guide for charities which I hope will provide a blueprint for others to make a transition into the digital space.
As this guide was adopted and well received I also decided to create ‘The Rainmaker Foundation’. I have developed a team which provide the infrastructure and ecosystem I have used with Kids Company along with a bespoke design, marketing strategy and campaign manager to charities of various shapes and sizes. We work collaboratively, on the same results driven basis as Kids Company and hope to provide organisations with both the message and the method for embracing and enhancing both digital and mobile giving.
Charlotte Hogg
www.TheRainmakerFoundation.com
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.