STRATEGIC OBJECTIVE 4 - DOUBLE INCOME
ENGAGING WITH OUR SUPPORTERS
“ IN 2021, WE WILL BE ENCOURAGING
MORE POSITIVE, LONGER-LASTING RELATIONSHIPS BY FINDING NEW WAYS TO
Income from our individual donors – cash and regular donors, raffle players, lottery members and legators – is a major part of our plans for future income.
training programme to place more emphasis on how they can reflect our charity values in every fundraising conversation.
Growth continues to be primarily driven by face-to-face fundraising, but the charity also invested in testing new ways of engaging donors in 2019. This included using direct response TV advertising (DRTV) and digital advertising to recruit new regular givers and reduce our reliance on face-to-face fundraising. The DRTV and digital campaigns piloted in 2019/20, focused our messaging on ‘Every Second Counts’ and helped us to gain valuable learnings for testing in future financial years.
Our face-to-face fundraisers, many of whom have been dedicated representatives of the charity for several years, had a total of more than 285,000 conversations with the public in 2019/20 alone. This allowed us to reach new and varied audiences, who may not have otherwise heard about us or had the opportunity to give. We are encouraged by the feedback from our fundraisers, who relay how highly regarded the charity is by the people of London, even those who are not able to give.
Face-to-face fundraising has allowed us to recruit large volumes of long-term supporters, forming a reliable source of income for the charity. In 2019/20 we recruited over 17,000 new regular givers and approximately 18,000 lottery players through face-to-face fundraising – strong results against our ambitious targets.
For supporters to have the best journey with us, we also needed to put a stronger focus on compliance within our face-to-face programme. Tower Lotteries Ltd, Gemini Fundraising Ltd and Wesser Ltd, who are our trusted agency partners, worked collaboratively with us to establish new measures to evidence best practice, such as routine compliance and training audits of their practices, and new policies and procedures. This collaborative work with our face-to-face agency partners on compliance strengthened our working relationships, supporting the reliable nature of this income stream.
The majority of our supporters (65%) first donated to us through our face-to-face channel, according to our first supporter survey in 2019. Therefore, as our face-toface fundraisers are often the first step in a supporter’s journey with the charity, we redeveloped our fundraiser
IMPROVE THE INDIVIDUAL SUPPORTER’S EXPERIENCE ”
The end of the financial year brought with it a new challenge for face-to-face fundraising. The nationwide lockdown meant a complete pause on all face-to-face activity. We took this as an opportunity to refresh our approach and become more strategic, to strengthen our training and monitoring programmes and to increase fundraiser engagement. We supported our agency partners during this difficult time by ensuring they were prepared for the future relaunch of their fundraising activity. Looking forward into the next financial year, in line with our new engagement strategy, we will be encouraging more positive, longer-lasting supporter relationships by finding new ways to improve individual supporters’ experience, further developing our supporter journeys so that the right message gets to the right supporter at the right time.
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