Charity Fundraising after the Ice Bucket Challenge

With the Ice Bucket Challenge taking social media by storm, we have seen a great way for Charities to raise awareness and obtain one-off donations from people participating in the challenge, as well as from nominating others to do the same.

The exact origins of this charitable initiative are somewhat unclear, although here in the UK we first saw celebrities taking part, then it spread to involve the general public, too. There have been some arguments about which charity ‘owns’ the concept, but overall, with various charities benefiting, the general feeling around the current phenomenon is positive.

Life after the Ice Buckets

However, following its initial great success, the #IceBucketChallenge is now starting to wind down, having enjoyed its ‘5 minutes (or few weeks) of fame’.

So Charities are again looking for ways to increase their donor numbers and revenues through more traditional marketing, which is where targeted and relevant campaigns using effective data are key to success.

We work with many Charities and, depending on their needs, generally work with them on one or both of these areas:

• Identifying the type of consumers (or businesses) who already donate, to inform the segments the Charity should focus on in campaigns, to attract new donors.
• Selecting the most appropriate data to identify those with the highest propensity to convert into donors.

Understand your donors better to find more like them

The effective analysis of a Charity’s existing data is vital to help identify the kind of individuals (or businesses) currently providing the majority of its donations. Customer Profiling helps identify the best prospects – by analysing the existing donors, and matching them to a data universe to find out more about them. This method facilitates identifying the types of people most likely to become new donors.

From that point it’s possible to inform, plan, segment and automate marketing campaigns more strategically – knowing that the targeting is effective and that therefore costs are being driven down and ROI up.

A challenge many of our Charity clients also highlight is not being able to identify all the ways people support them (i.e. one person may donate to their charity shops, participate in the ice bucket challenge and fundraise through a bake sale.) An option to improve insight here is to explore a Single Customer View to bring all this information on a client or donor together and be able to better target communications with them – both to promote to them or just to thank them for their support.

Data Selection for Charities

We help Charities select the most appropriate data for their needs so they can get the best possible return from their campaigns.

We can identify and filter individuals by our standard criteria such as Age, Gender, Occupation, Income, Post Code and many others, where a particular group has been identified as most likely to donate to their cause.
- For example: Females with their own kids, over the age of 30, with a household income above £35k being more likely to donate to Children’s Charities.

Additionally, we can identify those who have Charitable Concerns along with the particular area of interest, i.e. deafness, cancer, children, wildlife, etc.

The money that is spent on marketing within Charities is of course drawn from previous donations, so obviously any money invested in finding new donors must show a good ROI. The most effective way to do this is to utilise effective targeting from strategic data use.

• Are you a Charity looking to improve your campaign results?
• What challenges do you normally face in attracting new donors?
• What successes have you experienced from Direct Mail, Social Media or other channels?