It is with great pleasure that I introduce today's guest poster, none other than Adrian Salmon.
Adrian has been the Footsteps Fund Manager at the University of Leeds since 2008 having previously been Head of Client Services for The Phone Room in Oxford. Recently he headed to the the Institute of Fundraising's National Convention, and agreed to report back for the Fundraising Collective on what's going on charity-wide.
Thanks Adrian, and welcome to the blog.
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Recently I spent 3 days at the Institute of Fundraising’s National
Convention, to find out what’s going on in the big bad world of the wider
charity sector. It’s funny, but when I come back to the office from
conferences, I always feel like Cosmo Kramer in Seinfeld, sliding in with a ‘Hey!’ to tell Jerry, Elaine and George
his latest crackpot scheme. So, is there anything good to tell? Or is it more
the equivalent of Kramer’s most glorious pointless scheme – “The Coffee Table
Book of Coffee Table Books”? (As a reward to you for reading, there’s a link to
Kramer’s best entrances at the end).
A lot’s changed at the IoF since I was
there last – 7 years ago! Back then, digital was just coming into its own, face
to face had just started, and the sexy sessions were all about DRTV (Direct
Response Television – TV ads, to you and me.)
But now – what a change. Digital’s
everywhere. Everyone’s crazy about
it. And three things stood out for me that summed up the whole event.
The first
was the debate – between ‘old-style’ (and hugely successful) direct marketer Stephen Pidgeon, and ‘guerilla
blogger’ A J Leon. The proposition? “This house believes that
online will entirely replace print as the main medium for acquisition and
retention in the next 5 years”. A bold statement indeed, considering that, as
Stephen pointed out, giving via online sources still represents only 8% of the
total donated to charity in the UK. And even if it grows by 20% year on year
for the next 5 years, it will only then be at 13%.
A J had examples of some truly
inspirational online campaigns, such as WaterAid’s The Big Dig, in which he’d been involved
in enabling the people in Malawi to live-blog straight to WaterAid’s site. And
of course everyone knows about Charity:Water
– don’t we? (I’m with Celina
Ribeiro, who’s written this great article about 4
charity campaigns she doesn’t want to hear about again J)
But although AJ won the day – partly
because the motion got changed – my head’s with Stephen. Online’s got a long way to go yet, folks.
Which leads me onto the second thing that’s shaped my view of
the three days – the award for ‘Best Use of E-Media’ at the National Awards on Monday night.
If digital’s where it’s at, this is the best
of the best, right?
Hmm. The winner was UNICEF’s ‘Own a Colour’ campaign. “Own A Colour And Help Save A Child’s Life”.
You may have seen it, there’s been a lot about it on Twitter. And it’s a very
simple proposition – buy one of Dulux’s 1.67 million colours on the website
(which is indeed a fabulous technical feat) for £1 or more, and support UNICEF.
The target was to sell all the colours, and raise £1.67m.
Nice. So – how has it done? There’s a
counter on the website. Since November 2011, this award-winning campaign has
raised….
….£106,000. Oh.
Compare that to one of the other entries,
Care International’s Kiva-inspired Lend With Care, that has just broken the
£1m mark in loans, since launch last March. Or Wateraid’s The Big Dig, that has raised over
£600,000 since June 18th. And, in the way that that campaign has
empowered field workers to blog from the front-line, I think there are lots of
takeaways for all of us who work in higher education fundraising.
Now, I’d really hate you to think I’m dissing
the huge amount of work that the folk at UNICEF have put into Own A Colour. You
can see that they have. And if an online campaign I ran had raised over £100K, I’d
be delighted. But UNICEF? If I were in their shoes I’d be a little
disappointed, and wondering what we could do to turn this round. It perturbs me
that this could now be seen as a model to emulate, and I may write another blog
about it. Let me know if you’d like to hear more.
So, I’m a right grouch and a know-it-all,
aren’t I? Didn’t I like anything, I
hear you ask?
Well yes, I did. The session that made me
go, ‘Wow’ was about mobile. And SMS. And UNICEF, again, but doing
something way, way better.
UNICEF have been using SMS on the street as
an alternative to the monthly direct debit sign-up, as a way to improve their subsequent
donor retention. It’s so much easier to give a gift by text to a street fundraiser,
and, by offering street-recruited donors a choice of amounts - £3, £5 and £10 –
to donate by text, they can see who’s most likely to convert to Direct Debit.
They phone them up afterwards to secure the monthly gift, and get around 1 in 8
people going onto Direct Debit. That’s pretty nice already.
But then here comes the genius bit. Lots of their donors were saying, “Why can’t I
give my monthly gift by text as well?” And of course they can, but every monthly
text would have to come, by law, with the option to ‘STOP’ in the message. Not
so good for retention. So UNICEF went to the regulator and said, “We’re a
charity, not a ring-tone merchant. Can we change this message to ‘SKIP’,
instead?” And the regulator said, OK.
So, a regulatory requirement becomes a
donor-centred benefit. Can’t manage your £5 this
month? Skip until the next. You can’t do this with a Direct Debit. It’s the
Milky Way of charity donations – the gift you can make between jobs, without
hurting your bank balance.
They phoned back all the people who’d
refused a monthly gift by Direct Debit, and got another 1 in 8 people going
onto a gift by monthly SMS. Wow.
I’m wondering if I can adapt and copy this,
off-street. Are you, too?
So, #iofnc 2012. There you have it. The
future’s bright. The future’s digital. The future’s traditional. The future’s
mobile? Thanks for sticking with me, and – here’s Kramer!
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