Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust chooses thankQ
Howard Lake | 22 May 2013 | Newswire
The Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT) is a leading UK conservation organisation that works to save wetlands for wildlife and people worldwide. Across the UK, WWT’s nine specialist wetland visitor centres give one million visitors each year opportunities to get close to wetland wildlife and become actively involved in conservation.
Ongoing year on year growth has meant that their existing database had become less well suited to the organisation’s more demanding requirements. So a fresh approach was needed to enable WWT to support a broader range of initiatives and to implement more efficient processes. Following a robust tender process, thankQ CRM software was selected to help WWT achieve its objectives.
In the main, the WWT Supporter Relationship Management system is used for supporter income generation through its management of membership and other committed giving schemes, in addition to fundraising in the form of donations and grants from individuals, trusts and organisations and legacy income. Supporter recruitment is another key objective for the Marketing & Supporter Development Directorate and WWT is using a wide range of marketing channels to achieve this objective.
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WWT currently engages with over 15 different supporter groups, including visitors, members, VIPs, corporate patrons, bird adopters, volunteers and grant making bodies and trusts, to name a few. thankQ’s ability to easily manage these diverse relationships and the differing requirements of each, all within a single database, was a key factor in WWT’s decision making processes.
Another attractive feature for WWT was thankQ’s ability to integrate and interface easily with the majority of commonly used systems, and in particular thankQ’s digital integration capability. This will allow WWT to continue to use third party bulk emailing tool, MailChimp, and online donation site JustGiving, with key campaign and donation data from each being automatically pulled back into thankQ.
Similarly, web integration will allow members and supporters a self service experience, whilst at the same time giving WWT a real time view of supporter and member online activity. Linking with WWT’s EPOS system will enable integration of visitor, member and supporter data within thankQ.
WWT was keen to improve visibility of financial data between the finance and fundraising functions and reduce unnecessary re-keying of financial data. To this end, WWT was particularly reassured by thankQ’s robust data validation processes, which allow automatic sharing of relevant financial data between functions, with checks in place to eliminate processing errors.
Ray Clark, WWT Head of Regular Giving, said of the appointment, ‘in implementing thankQ, we will be able to collate a vast amount of data from a really diverse range of channels and sources, to give us a genuine 360o view of supporter activity. Our intention is to translate this wealth of knowledge into actionable insights to drive an ever better experience for our supporters, members and visitors and an assured future for our wetlands and the wildlife they support’.
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.