*This is a report I prepared for a British firm, which included an unedited transcript of a taped presentation. The casual nature of this report is at the client’s request. * When the – Refuge – contacted us six weeks before they wanted to go live with an ad campaign, we knew we would be challenged. We certainly didn’t know that their database of donors was 50% invalid. Anyone would be surprised and even shocked at the results that were achieved. Before we reveal where we ended up, we should start at the beginning and describe where we started.
Background:
In 1971 Refuge opened the world’s first safe house for women and children escaping domestic violence in Chiswick, West London. They’ve provided a haven for women and children for nearly 50 years and now offer 48 refugees across the country. Their services include a 24-hour domestic abuse helpline as well. They also provide several advocacy and outreach services. It was about a year ago when they hired Jo Felgate – as Head of Supportive Fundraising at Refuge – and that’s where our story began.
Jo Felgate had come from a charity where they had done a lot of face-to-face fundraising. She’d been used to big budgets with a large supporter base. At Refuge, the opposite was confirmed with a small supporter base of approximately 5,000 cash and debit givers. A new Director of Fundraising had been appointed a couple of months prior. His vision included a focus on accumulating data and digitizing the process. At the time, The Refuge had just started building digital movement into its system.
Jo Felgate began looking at what she could do with her budgets. One thing that stood out to her was the value of online donations they were getting through their website. About 200,000 pounds per year was coming through, mainly at Christmas – with a massive spike between November and January. Traffic was primarily driven by media partners and influencers. Refuge had little control over when, who, or what cause was being promoted.
Problems:
The online donations were a mix of unsolicited and one-off donations. Sadly, there was no welcome or stewardship program for any of these donors. The online donation pages themselves looked tired, dated, and uninspiring. Not to mention the fact that they were highly unfriendly to users. By the time frustrated donors were ready to donate, they’d been whittled down to a conversion rate of only 2.78%. Despite the poorly constructed donation page, Jo Felgate realized something essential and expressed it this way.
“So, there are two things there. People really wanted to donate to us; we just had to make it easier. The other thing we needed to look at, was actually taking control of driving the traffic to our pages, so we weren’t as reliant on third parties and media partners…”
Solutions:
Jo Felgate’s first steps were developing a business case for implementing new pages. She looked at a variety of varying systems, platforms, and different types of models. And that’s how we – Engaging Networks – caught her eye. These were her words;
“I think the thing that really swung us to go for Engaging Networks was really the email integration; as well as the fact that we could easily produce our own pages with a bit of support. Also, in terms of the functionality, we could see that whilst we might not use all of it at the start, as we grew and got more sophisticated, the technology would be there to support us.
The platform Refuge chose is created by Engaging Networks in the following manner;
- Our pagebuilder technology allows you to build beautiful page templates and donation forms quickly and easily, either on your own or with our free templates. We specialize in nonprofit software.
- Accept recurring donations and allow supporters to update their payment information or upgrade their monthly gift. Recurring gifts can be managed, updated, and even refunded directly in your Engaging Networks dashboard. Your donations form optimization is flexible and tailored to your supporters’ needs and those of your company.
- Simple, transparent one-click donation forms increase conversion rates.
- We are an eCRM provider working with your database. This means better accounting, offline mailing, and better segmentation.
Refuge had chosen our platform. But they needed a good user experience, user flow, and design. They approached – Forward Action – one of our partners, to work on the page design, emails, and Facebook advertising. The goal was to drive more traffic to their web pages. This is where the real challenge began. There were only six weeks before it was to be running live – in time for the Christmas donation campaign.
The key, as Jo Felgate put it, was…
“… really working closely with our digital manager and also our database and insight manager. I think without the support of them, we wouldn’t have got it live in time for Christmas. So, after a lot of hard work, lots of late nights, we actually produced this really simplified user journey with – Forward Action.”
Testing and learning were the subsequent phases. The pages only went out live on November 25. Refuge had one month to capitalize on those pages during the Christmas rush. To add to the confusion, the ads weren’t getting approved because they were thought too political. The option they chose instead was to focus back on the products that they already had – the gift list and Refuge parcels. This is where it was discovered that their email list had shrunk. They lost about 50% of their emails because once we checked the actual consent audit trail, it wasn’t in place; we had to just cut it by half.
Results:
At the end of it all, Jo Felgate summarized the results of the Christmas donation campaign in the following manner.
“… the overall results were really encouraging. We had an open rate of 34% for our emails. So even though our email list was quite small, it was quite mighty. In terms of income, we increased income by 21% compared to the previousChristmas. The really big increase was in terms of our direct debits. We saw a 71% increase in direct debits coming through the new pages, and also the page conversion rates increased to about 17.5%.
To put things in perspective…
- A 21% increase in donations from the usual 200,000 pounds in donations meant an additional 42,000 pounds during that campaign.
- For every 55 pounds, Refuge could house an additional 763 mothers and their children in an overnight emergency.
Now THAT is a tangible, incredible result with only a six-week window to have implemented the plan. Can you imagine what the results might be next year with a full twelve months of planning in place? But they weren’t done there, nor does this story end just yet.
The Covid-19 Corollary:
Then… Covid-19 happened…and Jo Felgate expressed her thoughts in this way.
“So Forward Action put together a plan to help us do this. We switched over the Facebook adverts to a COVID-19 emergency ask. We also put in place specific donation pages for COVID-19, as well as a banner on our home page. And we also put in place an email to be sent to supporters over two to three weeks. The response we got was just amazing. I think it kind of blew all of us away, really. We didn’t really expect that we would generate the income we did in April. The Facebook adverts were performing extremely well. We were getting an ROI of 71, and I think that, in some ways, we were very lucky in terms of what happened. We had the pages in place. We had all the testing on the Facebook adverts. We had a way of really talking to our supporters by email, which is very personable.
Jo Felgate mentions talking to their supporters through email. Those features they benefited from are part of the main reasons people seek out the email platforms of Engaging Networks. We bundle…
- easy-to-use – intuitive user interface for the non-technical staffer
- completely customizable templates built into the software, or you can easily create your own
- quickly – create an email in a matter of minutes
- customizable – unlimited design templates to match your site or campaigns
- unlimited lists and groups
- built-in email engagement scoring module
- built-in marketing automation using drag-and-drop technology
- the capability to send up to 10,000 emails a minute, with no limit on volume
- create email triggers and automated welcomes series
A Summary… Moving Forward…
Jo Felgate summarised her conclusions and observations about her experience with Forward Action and us… and everything that had transpired in the last six months for Refuge, including the implementation of their new web pages and email platform.
“I think the lockdown resonated with a lot of people. The thought of being stuck indoors with an abuser or perpetrator horrified a lot of people and gave us a lot of traction. We had a huge surge in media awareness. Having those pages in place, meant we could take advantage of that. We saw a surge in donations coming through to us. I suppose looking back and thinking about key learnings over the last six months, it’s about looking at new and existing activity and the online success of digital activity. It’s about identifying where you can really add some value to your supporters and ultimately to the people you’re trying to help.”
Working with Forward Action will be exciting in the next twelve months, and we here at Engaging Networks look forward to creating more success stories with them.