Episode Notes
Clearly digital approaches can help your fundraising success, but digital also feels daunting to many charities. So how do make it work in practice?
In this episode, the brilliant Emily Casson, Digital Marketing and Fundraising Manager at the Salvation Army, shares her powerful, succinct recipe for digital fundraising success, as well as four powerful principles. At the time of recording, she was one week into a record-breaking (over £1m) appeal in aid of the people of Ukraine, for her charity. She shows these techniques work for small charities as well as large, and shares plenty of examples to help you believe!
If you want to share this episode – thank you!! – or get in touch, Emily and I would love to hear from you – we’re both on Linked In, and on twitter Emily is @EmilyCasson and I’m @woods_rob.
Quotes
‘So many people are looking at websites on a mobile or tablet, you need to test it works on mobile first, and then make sure it works on a desktop.’
Emily Casson
‘Treat your plan as a living document, rather than something you update every few months.’
Emily Casson
Further Resources
Breakfast Club for Fundraising Leaders (runs every three months.)
Episode 15 Strategies to grow your digital fundraising income, with Emily Casson
Episode 16 MORE strategies to grow digital fundraising income, with Emily Casson
Episode 25 Effective digital fundraising during the pandemic, with Emily Casson
Would you like training, inspiration and support to increase Corporate or Major Donor fundraising income?
You can find out more about our flagship 6 month programmes: the Corporate Partnerships Mastery Programme or the Major Gifts Mastery Programme by following these links.
Want to go deeper and get 24/7 access to LOTS more inspiring and live training content?
Our training and inspiration club for fundraisers, the Bright Spot Members Club, has an extensive library of Rob’s best training films, (including one on Digital Fundraising Success, with Emily Casson) a supportive community, and access to live masterclasses and problem-solving sessions with Rob and other experienced fundraising / leadership trainers EVERY WEEK. To find out more about how to get access to all these resources, go to www.brightspotmembersclub.co.uk/join/
Full Transcript for Episode 94
Rob:
Hello, this is Rob Woods. Welcome to Episode number 94 of the Fundraising Bright Spots podcast. This is the show for anyone who works in fundraising and who wants some ideas and maybe a little dose of inspiration to help you raise more money and really enjoy your job.
If you’ve got a sense that you could be doing more to use digital techniques to help you with your fundraising, irrespective of what kind of donors or supporters or partners you work with, I think you’re going to love this episode, because today I’m sharing the keynote presentation from our recent breakfast club for fundraising leaders. It was delivered by the brilliant Emily Casson, who is the Digital Marketing and Fundraising Manager at the Salvation Army in the UK. Longstanding listeners to the show may remember listening to some great episodes Emily recorded for us in the early days, that’s episode 15 and 16 and 25 and those episodes are still available.
But if you don’t know about Emily’s work, she’s a very experienced digital fundraiser who used to work at Cats Protection. Just to give you a sense of what can sometimes be possible, during the four-year period when Emily created and led that team, digital income grew from £250,000 per year to over six million per year. If that sounds daunting, please be aware that Emily spends some of her time helping out small charities on a voluntary basis, particularly where she’s based in the North East of England. As you’ll hear in her presentation, she is emphatic that having a big budget or a famous brand is not necessary for you to apply and raise money using the ideas that she shares.
In terms of context, this presentation was recorded on the 8th of March 2022 and I was especially grateful to Emily for making time to prepare and share these ideas, because as she mentions near the start, she just completed the busiest week of her entire career. She and her colleagues at the Salvation Army conceived and launched a digital appeal for the people of Ukraine in a staggeringly quick time. So here is Emily Casson sharing her overarching philosophy and mantra plus four key ideas with examples for how charities can make digital fundraising work in practice.
Emily:
Thanks Rob, for having me on. So going to talk a bit today about how to really grow digital fundraising results and some of the amazing charities that really inspire me and how they’ve achieved. So as Rob mentioned, this is my philosophy that cuts through everything. So whether you work for a small charity or a large charity, this will apply to you. So think big, how can digital absolutely transform everything you do in fundraising, but across your organization? But often that’s a really scary concept for people, because there’s so much that you could be doing. So how do you actually start small? So how do you think in really small steps, little pilots, little thinkings, little tweaks, little changes to practice.
And how do you scale quickly? And as Rob mentioned, come on to some of the numbers later, but we’re talking about how we can do a 100% growth, 1000% growth. We’re not talking about those 1, 2% growth. We’re talking about how we can really transform things.
Emily:
And also fail fast, which is a concept that is scary to a lot of people, but my little sister’s a monkey keeper and they spend their lives fiddling about, trying to work something out and then they fail, but they learn and they do it a bit better the next time. So how can we take that approach and say, “Actually, failing’s a good thing, because if we’re not failing, we’re not innovating and we’re standing still and actually falling behind.”
Though as Rob mentioned that the backdrop to this presentation was I have had the busiest week of my life in terms of digital fundraising. So I work for a very traditional organization that I’m in a brand new role, been there a few months now. And we went from last Monday talking about, maybe we should potentially do an appeal, putting feelers out to some my freelancers and then launching in less than 24 hours. My colleague did an amazing job of everybody coming together and working as a team to send out some communications.
How did it do? It’s actually raised, well as of this morning, £1.2 million pounds in the last week, which is absolutely phenomenal and by far and away the biggest appeal we’ve ever done in the shortest amount of time in terms of the kind of growth of it, that we’ve spent less than 20K so the ROI on that is amazing. And yes, we’ve had amazingly generous supporters, but we’ve also had a lot of new supporters.
So why did that work? I think there were a number of reasons that, yes, the numbers are big because we’ve got a big brand and a big profile and get a lot of support, particularly around Christmas, but it worked because people have that trust that supporters were already asking us, “What are you doing? We know you’ll be doing something on the ground already to support vulnerable people. How can we help support that?” So it was driven by supporters and it was about that trust and showing that we were doing something and being very human to say, “It’s an evolving situation, but this is how we’re helping.”
And also making it really easy for people to donate that we’ve got a new fundraiser platform as our new donation platform and our conversion rate was 49.8% when the average is 15%. So that really, really helped.
So in terms of the ideas I want to share with you today that the first one is, I hate the phrase digital transformation, because it implies that you’re going from A to B and you’re going to get to a destination. It’s much more thinking about the digital journey and how crucially to bring people along that journey. So yes, you need your aims and you need a plan and you need to think about how you can do that, but it’s much more about the approach you take rather than the actual digital platforms and tools and techniques.
So it’s about changing mindsets and I love the idea of growth mindset versus fixed mindset. You might have come across as concept before, but basically it’s a different way of thinking and we can change our mindsets that digital fundraisers or people doing digital are often native growth mindsets that they’re constantly learning, constantly evolving. They’re not afraid of failure because they see it as a learning opportunity. They’re constantly evolving and they love change and they support that.
But the fixed mindset, which a lot of our traditional charities are, is actually the status quo has worked for many years, this digital thing’s a bit scary. So it’s how we can change that and bring people along with us that accepting for some people change is scary, so how can we actually appeal to them? Is that a case of doing business cases and getting the numbers or doing case studies from other charities or is it selling them the dream and showing this could happen? That philosophy I mentioned at the start, that starting small is really crucial in this to bring people along.
So some things that I would suggest you all do in your organizations is think, “Well, what are your digital principles going to be?” So dynamic is the one that I’ve come up with and that’s working across all of your staff, your leadership, your volunteers, your trustees, to think about what are the key words that we want to do to drive our digital forward? They’ll be different for every charity depending on your risk appetite, depending on your size, but I think that’s something really practical you can take away and do.
So who’s doing this really well? I was lucky enough to do a workshop recently with an amazing charity called Frank Water, which is a relatively small charity based down in the Southwest. And they were actually investing time in digital planning and upskilling staff and actually involving everybody and thinking how could digital fundraising flow through everything?
The crucial piece a lot of charities struggle with is, making the case for investment for something completely unknown. It’s how you can look at what other charities are doing and how you can do that small pilot and then scale it so working with them on a plan to really build on their strengths. They are amazing at digital corporate partnerships. They send up some amazing social media packs to allow corporates to really get on board and they’ve got some amazing corporates that really fit with their brand. So it’s how you can get that synergy and share online and moving very much to a test-and-learn approach that not everything is going to work and that is a bit scary, but actually you are spreading the risk by trying a lot of different things. So do check out this amazing charity that I love.
So the second point that I would come to is around attracting the butterflies. So what do I mean by that? The butterfly donors are these donors that flit about different charities. So they’re not as loyal as maybe previous generations were, but they’re attracted by the cause rather than the charity and they’re attracted by the messaging.
So how can we attract these butterflies? Part of it is actually our message needs to be really strong. We need to be really clear online, what is our aim? What is our goals? What do we want to achieve by using digital? But we also need to think about how we can get in the practice of social sharing, whether that’s actually things like online streaming and building up online communities or some of the great virtual events that are happening lately with the Facebook groups and challenges and using that data to really understand that.
So one of the key things I would say to you all is about knowing your audience or your target audience, that when I was at Cat Protection, one of my aims was to bring in a new demographic, a new generation of people. We had a very elderly donor database, which I think is common to many charities. So it was actually saying, how can we attract young people? What is going to attract them?
For some people that’s going to be a homeschooling ask. For other people that’s going to be, they want tips about their cat. For other people, it’s going to be the petitioning side in terms of they’re interested in campaigning and lobbying. So it’s really understanding your audience. It got to the point that I knew exactly what my profile was, that I knew a 42-year old woman on the way to work on a Tuesday morning on a mobile device, and a ginger cat that had little ear injury rather than an eye injury with a cause-led messaging, that was going to be my best performing. So it’s knowing your support as to that level of detail, to know what really works.
You don’t need a lot of fancy tools for this. You don’t need a lot of money to do this. Anybody can do this at any scale, looking at the date with insights. Also a lot of charities think very much in income products or different income streams. So how can you think actually, [inaudible 00:10:57] by the message, by all coming together, to build some amazing journeys and look at your data capture, that how you can really streamline and make that process work better for you, whether that’s tweaking your pages or whether that’s asking for different fields, whatever it is. So it’s all about finding that sweet spot. So the right message at the right medium at the right time.
For some charities, that’s going to mean, right, get on the TikTok bandwagon and start using TikTok and that’s where your supporters are and that’s how you can engage them. For other charities, that completely won’t be right. So it’s you thinking for your charity what will work.
This approach really works, that my target initially at Cats Protection was to recruit two and a half thousand new leads that we could maybe steward in long term supporters. We actually achieved over a 100,000, which is phenomenal and these people are long term supporters. So these people aren’t just one-off donors we’re talking about. These people that are stewarded in a regular giving, in a volunteering, campaigning legacy pledging.
And it raised a lot of money and yes, that is a big charity with a big profile, but all of these techniques I’m talking about will work for a charity of any size, but you don’t need to have a big charity. You can all do this in just spending half an hour this week thinking, “Right, what is my audience or what is my target audience and how I can reach them,” whether that’s starting with maybe a 50 quid Facebook outfit, a really, really small scale, or whether actually just doing a campaign with friends and family, with supporters, asking them to spread the word for you. There’s a lot of different things you can do on a really small or no budget, because as Rob mentioned, I’ve done a lot of stuff with North East charities that don’t have any budget to do this, but it’s how you can do it on a small scale and make that case or investment.
Rob:
Hi, it’s Rob and I wanted to jump in very quickly to let you know about our two flagship courses designed to help you grow high value fundraising results. That’s the Major Gifts Mastery Program and the Corporate Mastery Program. We are now taking bookings for both as they start again in April, 2022, but rather than have me tell you all about it, I thought it’d be most interesting if you could hear from someone who’s done one of these courses recently. So here is Rihanna Jarvis from [Sustrans 00:13:20] who did the Corporate Mastery Program last year,
Rihanna Jarvis:
I did the Corporate Mastery Program in April till September last year and it was great. It taught me some awesome techniques about how to negotiate existing partnerships and win new ones. Specifically, it really helped me bring onboard a brand new partner from cold to sponsor a project that we’ve been doing for years for the first time, which is fantastic. They have been really supportive and they’ve given us £30,000 to deliver that work, which is really exciting. I definitely wouldn’t have gone about it the way I did if I wasn’t following the techniques that were on the mastery program. So if you’ve got the time and you can find the budget, I highly recommend you doing it.
Rob:
If you’d like to find out more about either the Major Gifts Mastery Program or the Corporate Mastery Program go to brightspotfundraising.co.uk/services.
For now, let’s get back to Emily’s presentation, as she shares her third idea, which is about finding ways to appreciate and nurture relationships with people who support your charity.
Emily:
So the third thing I want to talk about is how do you nurture these online relationships? So you’ve attracted the butterflies, you’ve put out that great content, you’ve been on the right timings, you’ve been on the right platforms, but how do you then nurture them? How do you really show that love? How do you show that you really want to value these people?
Often in fundraising, we get bogged down with the numbers. I’m a complete geek. I love the data, I love the insights, but it’s actually real people that we’re talking about. And that’s really important to remember that we’re talking about real people and how we can build a relationship.
So my top tip for this one is be more Geordie. For our international viewers today, that’s basically’d be more like the North East people. There’s lots of amazing case studies of big London charities, but I want to show the spotlight on an amazing charity I love here in the North East. It’s called feeding families. I’m a supporter of this charity because I was so inspired by their message and they really talk on a human level. They don’t have fundraising staff, nothing like that. They are a tiny little charity that started with one woman called Juliet Mission to give Christmas hampers to people that need them in the North East, so that peer-to-peer kind of support. That has massively bloomed into this massive need in the North East, sadly around food banks and an all-year-round need.
So what they do really well is, they show the impact. You can see where my money is going and build up that relationships and think beyond the shopping list in terms of X equates to Y, that, yes, you are actually donating a box of food, but it’s more than a box of food. It’s a lifeline for somebody and it’s showing somebody that somebody cares. So it’s that really human approach that inspired me and others to donate. That’s something you can all do in your charities.
They’re currently running an appeal to get 100 new regular givers, which is massive numbers for them, but relatively small scale and achievable. This approach really works that everybody loves a Geordie, but it’s finding those individuals, but also the corporate and major donors, which are a good fit for your cause.
So some of the examples here are the Newcastle [inaudible 00:16:48] Chronicle Sunshine Fund, which is a lovely local charity that supports disabled kids in the North East. Every year, the bus drivers dress up in ridiculous outfits and collect money. So it’s a fairly traditional kind of fundraising, but they do some amazing stuff online as well around sharing that and doing nice thank-you videos. And it’s raised over 40K, which is massive numbers for a small local charity.
It’s also about having fun and fundraising. Sam Fender, who’s the patron of the charity that’s about 100 yards from me, North East Homelessness, and he actually comes along and plays piano with homeless people. He does auctions. He gets a shout out when he wins Brits awards. So it is about building up those relationships and that very human nature that comes automatically to the generous Geordie public, how can you have that across your organization?
Rob:
Hi, it’s Rob. And one thing that I’m really pleased Emily decided to touch on in her presentation is just how overwhelming and distracting it can be if you feel a pressure to keep up with all of the fast paced innovation and change in technology and so on. So she’s going to give her reassurance on her view on that.
And just to add my two pennyworth to that same thing, what I’ve been encouraging fundraisers to do for years is, absolutely find ways to ongoingly innovate in the sense of find ways to make even just small changes in the way that you do things, in the way that you build relationships with your supporters or in the way that you design your website page to make it easier for people to give generously or get a sense of the difference their gift was making. Lots of small shifts are there to be made and I think smart fundraisers are continually looking for those shifts we can make, those innovations, those bits of progress that we can make to how we build relationships and raise money. So that’s one thing.
Sometimes the way that you might do that might involve some technology. It might involve any of the digital ideas that Emily has talked about today, but it doesn’t necessarily need to. To innovate is to make progress rather than to necessarily need to use technology for how you make progress. So that’s my take on it.
Now, here’s Emily’s advice on how you should not get overwhelmed, but you should potentially find your strengths and go with things that might suit your charity.
Emily:
So the last point I want to talk about is innovation. I absolutely love innovation, but I would say don’t get distracted by shiny new toys, that you don’t always have to be at the forefront leading digital innovation. Actually, sometimes it’s better to be a follower, that in the past I’ve done some pilots of contact inspection boxes, years back when the battery life was hopeless and they were really buggy and that actually put a lot of people off. So sometimes you’re better waiting, seeing other people making those mistakes and then launching in.
So who’s doing innovation really well? So I want to give a shout out to the Cats and Dogs Home in Edinburgh and the lovely Nicola and her team there. So they’ve really embraced cryptocurrency. They’re one of the few charities to do so and they got a massive donation last year of £87,000. They’ve had more donations this year and it’s not just donations. They’re really building relationships and partnerships with people using cryptocurrency, different community groups on that and different partners. That’s not going to work for everybody in terms of cryptocurrency, but they really embraced it.
So what did they do differently as a relatively small Scottish charity? That it came about actually somebody wanted to donate and they didn’t have the ability to take that donation. So they went and really researched this and really looked at it and invested in digital. I don’t mean investing digital just in terms of money. I also mean in terms of time and in terms of learning and having that growth mindset I was talking about earlier and really thinking big.
They’ve also recruited a digital trustee, which I would urge all of you to do, that we’re not all going to get innovation-mad with this innovation cap that some of you know, but it’s, that is something practical that all of the charities can take away and really say, “Actually, digital is really important to us. We want a voice at senior leadership level on that, and we want to really embrace it.”
But digital innovation doesn’t have to be scary that I’ve mentioned charities large and small today, some with big fundraising teams, some with no fundraising teams. And a lot of people think, “Oh, well, that’s not for me. I need a budget for that.” A lot of these things you don’t need budgets. And it’s thinking about what are those small steps you can make to really make that transformational change like some of the chars I’ve mentioned today are making. Some of them are kind of further on that journey than others, but here’s some start of a turn suggestions that meet somebody in the chat and just mystery shop each other’s donation pages and give feedback. That could be the single biggest thing you do this week in terms of tweaking your donation page and improving your conversion rate.
Or try signing up to your own email comms or testing your social. It doesn’t have to be some big innovation team. It can be as simple as setting up, right, we’re going to have an innovation / ideas discussion every month, invite staff, invite volunteers, invite supporters, invite audience along to share ideas, what they’ve seen in the outside world, what other charities are doing and what you could do.
So kind of come to the end now, so I want to leave you with this. So in terms of next steps that, think big, where could you go with digital? How could do you reach those transformational results other charities are making through changing your mindset and changing your approach? How can you start small? How can you do those constant tests and learns and pilots and how can you scale quickly or fail fast? Be ambitious and support each other.
So what I would say is, all charities are somewhere on this journey. So find a one that’s in a similar place to buddy up with and find a one a bit further along that you can talk to and get advice from. But I basically want to leave you this message, that go forth and do digital. It’s not scary and it can absolutely conform your fundraiser.
Rob:
Hi, it’s Rob. And when we do these breakfast club for fundraising leaders events, we tend to have a little bit of time at the end of the talk to get some questions from the audience, which I then pose to Emily by finding those questions in the chat box and posing them to Emily. In this episode, I thought I’d include just two or three while we’ve got time.
So firstly, someone referred back to the results Emily mentioned near the beginning of the talk in terms of conversion rates she’s achieved in her current appeal. I think she said a staggering 49% they’ve been able to achieve. So I asked Emily for a little bit more insight about how she felt those had been achieved.
So we introduced a new fundraising platform called Fundraiser, and part of that is using AI to do different price prompts. So it’s really using that learning and really understanding the audience to give them a prompt that works for them. But part of it was just the basics. We stripped it down. What is the easiest flow for supporters? We did a lot of testing with supporters to make that flow look really, really easy for them and really intuitive and user-friendly.
So our previous forms were, if you think of a direct mail pack, kind of on a webscreen, so it was very busy. It was very confusing, whereas the new process is much more, right, step one, step two to step three. And we did a lot of testing in terms of actually did that approach work and having a checkout.
Rob:
Then there was another question in the chat box to do with data capture and how hard it can be to encourage people who support your cause to leave their data with you so that you can stay in touch with them, including, and especially younger people being really reluctant to do that. So one person was posing the question, Emily, what do you think about that issue? How might we solve it? In particular, he had heard of this newish platform called Toucan and he wanted Emily’s view on that platform.
Emily:
So Toucan was on Dragon’s Den recently. It’s very much around the support they’re giving to different charities without that data capture. But I think what I would say around data capture is, basically, give people a reason to sign up to your emails, to follow you on social media. That people are passionate about charities and yes, a lot of people are very much seen as “Ooh, younger generations don’t want to give us their details,” but it’s like, “Well actually, are we giving them a reason to?” If you are really interested in the cause, you’re going to want to get updates about it. So it’s really being clear on that.
Toucan might take off, but I would say actually, it’s more about the cause rather than charity. So it’s how you can really get across the impact people are making and say, “Right, if you sign up to our emails, this is the amazing content and the added extras we are going to give you,” or on social media rather than being afraid to ask peoples data.
Rob:
Then finally, this was probably the most common question that came up in that chat box. People in the event were asking, “Emily, what if you’re only a very small charity, or if you are really brand new to applying digital techniques to your fundraising, how do we get started?
Emily:
I would say, starting by why do you want to use digital? So it’s very basics that digital would be a great tool, but you still need the message and you still need to think why you’re using it rather than just saying, oh, everybody else is on digital, we need to be. So it’s actually thinking, “Right, is it recruiting new supporters?” in which I would say take a storytelling approach.
That start small, often small charities start with friends and family and spread out from there. So it’s very local rooted and that’s when you can really build strong relationships with people. So you don’t need to necessarily start with a budget. It can start with that initial network online. And it’s basically asking your existing support. It’s asking those 100 people you do have, “Right, can you all tell a friend about us?” That’s something really practical you can do, and overnight you’ve then doubled your database. So it’s that sort of really practical thing that you could do.
Or you could invest in Facebook Ads from kind of 50 quid, but I would say actually building up that profile and really thinking about who you want to attract and why you want to attract them is really important.
Rob:
So I hope you enjoyed hearing Emily’s ideas and advice. If you did, and you’ve not yet subscribed, please do that today so that you don’t miss out on all the episodes we’ve got coming up as well as access to all the previous ones, including Episodes 15 and 16, also with Emily, which are well worth a listen.
If you’d like a full transcript and a brief summary of the episode, go to the podcast section of our website, which is brightspotfundraising.co.uk. Now, if you’re the manager or the leader of a fundraising team, and you’d like to get access to lots of training resources and support for your team, do check out The Bright Spot Members Club, which is our training and inspiration site for fundraisers. As well as access to live workshops every week, there are more than 50 video learning bundles covering a broad range of fundraising topics, including one on digital fundraising that we made with Emily. Although we’re not currently taking on individual memberships, we are accepting team memberships at the moment, which actually work out better than half price per person compared to the individual ones.
To find out more, go to brightspotmembersclub.co.uk/join, or send me a message through my website. And if you enjoyed today’s episode, then I’d be incredibly grateful if you take a moment to tell someone you know, who you think might find it helpful so that we can get these ideas out to as many charities and fundraisers as possible. Thank you for your help.
Emily and I would love to hear what you think about today’s episode. We’re both on LinkedIn and on Twitter Emily is @emilycasson and I am @woods_rob. Thank you so much for listening today. Best of luck with your digital fundraising and I look forward to sharing more ideas and examples with you very soon.
