Battersea has developed and delivered a unique and successful programme of Legacy supporter events, inviting Legacy Pledgers and Enquirers into the very heart of the charity. The programme is a truly supporter-centric experience and the development of the programme has been supporter-led, with the interests and passions at the heart of our planning and delivery resulting in ‘the best day of my life’ for at least one satisfied supporter.

Breast Cancer Now’s wear it pink campaign has gone from strength to strength from 2017-2019, growing from £1.2m to 2m in just 4 years. This growth has principally been driven by our renewed commitment to supporter experience. We have grown repeat participation rates, increasing average gifts and remittance rates YOY and changed the focus for the team, working on added value stewardship and relationship building first and foremost.

From ensuring accuracy and simplicity of our processes to guaranteeing that no supporter falls through the cracks, our work to create a personal supporter experience at scale has given one of the sectors most established mass participation fundraising events a new lease of life and has transformed our organisational approach to mass participation.

Consistently over the course of 3 years we’ve shown that it’s possible to build something that makes 24,000 people feel valued, known, appreciated and inspired and that by, among other things, refocusing staff time to added value you really can bring a relationship fundraising approach to a mass participation event and create a fantastic supporter experience.

The Lowry is the North West’s most visited cultural venue, offering an extensive range of performing arts across our three theatres, contemporary visual arts and the world’s largest collection of works and archival material of LS Lowry, and an award-winning learning and engagement programme which focuses on young people in Salford experiencing deprivation and/or disadvantage.

The Lowry’s Development Team operates a range of regular giving programmes for individuals and corporates, and prides itself on our personal relationship with our regular supporters, ensuring our offer is relevant, attractive and rewarding for all our donors, no matter what aspects of our work and charitable mission they are most interested in.

At the Vision Foundation, we are determined to overcome the barriers that so frequently make blind and partially sighted people feel excluded from mainstream activities. We always approach every fundraising activity with the attitude that it must be accessible for everyone involved. For the London Marathon we have taken a tailored approach to each runner, finding dedicated guide runners and researching accessible training sessions. Our friendly events team have helped our visually impaired runners every step of the way and are dedicated to ensuring all our marathon runners reach the finishing line and have an exceptional London Marathon experience.

The RNLI’s bravest and biggest campaign, the Perfect Storm Appeal, was a powerful cry for help – with spectacular results. 

In 2019, we faced a ‘perfect storm’. More people were in danger at sea. Lifesavers were busier than ever. And income had fallen. In a brave, honest campaign, the RNLI launched the Perfect Storm Appeal, asking new and existing donors to come to the rescue. And thanks to our innovative and wide-ranging campaign, they did – donating over £2M. How did it happen? It happened thanks to a cultural shift in the charity. It happened thanks to a new donor centric approach. And it happened with a carefully planned and optimised campaign that included warm and cold mailings, DRTV, radio, social ads, and organic content across all channels. It happened because nobody wanted to see the RNLI drown. We’re proud - and incredibly grateful - that our call for help was answered.

The Forget Me Not appeal enabled members of the public to make a donation of their choice in return for a locally made, hand-crafted, iron forget me not for their garden. The forget me nots were all purchased in memory of a loved one. The campaign was delivered mainly digitally. Initially given a fundraising target of £30,000, the campaign received an overwhelmingly positive response and ended up raising £104,241.16. The campaign launched on 15th February 2019 with posts across the Hospice’s social media channels. The launch Facebook post reached an outstanding 96,919 people, had 4,862 engagements, 271 likes, 136 comments and 191 shares. This is particularly impressive as the standard Facebook audience the Hospice has is around 15,000 people. For six months, the Hospice continued to promote their Forget Me Not appeal digitally through social media, their website, online local press and email marketing. It was particularly important for St Barnabas to use digital marketing as their main method of promotion for this campaign as it meant reaching a wide audience at little cost. The total digital marketing spend for the duration of the campaign was only £200 and no money was spent on print advertising. As well as the incredible amount of money raised by this campaign, the Hospice discovered that a large proportion of people ordering forget me nots were people who hadn’t supported the Hospice previously. This is because the campaign was for everyone, not just those whose loved ones had died in the Hospice. It has meant that the Hospice now has a whole new pool of supporters to communicate with about other relevant campaigns, including future spring appeals. In total, 1,057 people bought a forget me not who had never donated to the Hospice before.

In June 2019, The Myton Hospices embarked on its most ambitious campaign to date – ‘The Butterfly Effect’. As well as raising money so Myton can continue to provide its services, our main objective was to harness the power of the butterfly effect – the belief that even the smallest actions can have a far-reaching impact.

To do this, 1,000 hand-made butterflies formed an installation where they were emerging from the historic walls of Coventry Cathedral to celebrate the lives of those who have experienced the services Myton provides to people with terminal and life limiting illnesses in Coventry and Warwickshire. Each butterfly was available to buy in memory of a loved one and/or to support Myton. The aim was to raise £50,000 and also increase awareness of Myton and our services.

Black Friday is huge in the retail world but many charities switch off their paid advertising over the event, unable to compete for user attention on screen or against rising costs. Through this campaign, we wanted to carve out a space for non-profits in a field dominated by retail, proving that it pays to be present even in competitive markets. Secondly, for WWF it was important to divert user attention and share of wallet away from Black Friday sales and toward meaningful actions – adopting endangered and under threat animals, becoming members and donating to WWF causes.

We promoted a Flash Sale of WWF’s limited stock, but not as traditional retail audiences knew it. Unlike the fabricated urgency of retail sales, we have limited time to prevent the loss of habitat and endangered species across the world, offering the perfect parallel to build our campaign.

On first impression, the ‘stock’ in our social assets appeared as you’d expect – flashy and discounted - but as our video zoomed out revealing WWF’s endangered Giant Panda emblem, we physically turned the notion of limited supply on its head. We also placed display banners amongst Black Friday content on the open exchange. Working with WWFs marketing team we co briefed designers to produce banners that highlighted the contrast between Black Friday’s superficial consumerism, and the reality of species extinction.

Mirroring the typical attributes of sale creative, we brashly highlighted the number of pandas left in the wild highlighting that like sale items these animals are disappearing fast and need adopting before they’re gone forever. Using countdowns and ‘limited stock’ messaging, we were able to achieve a sense of urgency, highlighting key endangered species, and how few of them remained in the wild.

With reduced CPA's and increased number of conversions, the campaign was a huge success. But the biggest success of all, was showing that it’s hard to beat compelling creative, properly executed and running on the right platform.

Our Make Homelessness History campaign was a bold and innovative individual giving campaign in Bristol, that linked all its components to create a uniquely successful result. With a full staff body and volunteer involvement the ROI of 18:1 was a joint effort, that has had a considerable effect on the future of our organisation and the impact we're able to make in Bristol, and beyond. We hope that the marketing values and learnings we made in this campaign are is influential to others as they have been to Bristol.

‘Make Our May’ was a regional campaign, run by the Colchester Mercury Theatre, which aimed to raise £25,000 in a single month to go towards the theatre’s Mercury Rising redevelopment project. This was the first ever campaign of its kind conducted by the theatre, and multiple donation routes included text-to-donate, auditorium seat adoptions, brick sponsorships and fundraising specific events. Newspaper advertorials, uniquely branded social media and special celebrity video messages were among the methods used to encourage theatre audiences to support the project. The campaign surpassed its goal, raising £26,985 to go towards Mercury Rising, with the £9.8 million theatre development now due to be completed in September 2020.

Our Save Your Corn Exchange campaign was launched in October 2018 to fill the gap left by the withdrawal of all local authority funding from April 2019.  Faced with the need to fill the gap left by these cuts we approached our audiences and local community to support us so that we could continue to do all the brilliant work we do, including the work we do in our community with young people, families and our Ageing Creatively programme; our free outdoor shows; and our packed programme of the best theatre, comedy, music, dance and films.

Our Save Your Corn Exchange campaign put fundraising front and centre of our organisation, marking a shift in organisational focus from ticket sales to donations.  For a small fundraising team this was empowering, giving us the opportunity to approach our fundraising in a new and creative way.   

Primarily an individual giving campaign, we asked everyone we knew to help us by committing to a small regular gift of just £2 per month. We illustrated our need with an infographic video and print, which reinforced the message that lots of small gifts can make a big difference.

We were overwhelmed by the generosity of our local community and enormously proud of the support we received which exceeded our ambitious fundraising target of £150,000.

Go Wild Gorillas, in partnership with Wild in Art, created the Channel Islands’ largest public art trail. This large-scale regional campaign and community project combined art and conservation with a specific appeal to raise funds to build a new home state of the art home gorilla at Jersey Zoo.

Grand Gorilla Auction raised an incredible £1,146,500 and one sculpture sold for a record-breaking £72,000, the highest bid for a Wild In Art sculpture.

The Island embraced the trail, with extensive media coverage, new corporate supporters, schools and community groups engaged via the creative learning programme, bolstered zoo visitor numbers and all sectors of the community ‘going wild’ for gorillas.

As well as raising vital funds for the gorillas, this trail also encouraged people of all ages, both visitors and locals, to get outside and explore our beautiful island. As part of Durrell’s ‘Rewild our World’ strategy, we want to reconnect one million people to nature and Go Wild Gorillas was the perfect way to get people outside enjoying nature.

Durrell has always been at the forefront of conservation. Understanding that restoring the health of our planet requires people to positively change how they value the environment. The first step is to build a strong emotional connection between people and the natural world.

Go Wild Gorillas has helped Durrell to celebrate the work of the charity, forged important partnerships, provided pride within our island community and transformed donor prospects to support a £5million Gorilla Capital Appeal. The overall success of the Go Wild Gorillas project would not have been achievable without the hard work and dedication of so many individuals, organisations, schools, and community groups.

‘Raise the Roof’ was the public launch of Thames Hospice’s fundraising appeal to raise vital funds for the completion of the charity’s new £22 million state of the art hospice. The campaign targeted existing and new supporters across Berkshire and Buckinghamshire and aimed to raise £3 million.

Through offline and digital marketing campaigns, PR and several fundraising initiatives, Thames Hospice has now raised £4.9 million of the final £6 million needed. The appeal was launched in September 2019 in partnership with the charity’s retail team, promoting the Raise the Roof campaign in all 22 Thames Hospice stores on the high street to reach even more potential donors.

To date in the last financial year, the charity has raised a total of £5.19 million gross income, a year on year growth of 15.7%, with a 53% growth in community income and a 33% rise in lottery and individual giving.

Thames Hospice are just 5 months away from moving into the best new hospice in the UK, and the final income for the ‘Raise the Roof’ appeal is in sight.

Bringing the Secret Santa campaign to life - A pop-up, virtual gifts, artificial intelligence and facial recognition with a generous dose of Christmas spirit thrown in!

For the 2019 campaign, Action For Children sought to offer the public increased tangibility, choice and impact in return for their support. We brought our successful digital campaign to life with a pop-up in Covent Garden, inviting them to peruse gifts that their donation could provide for a vulnerable child against a Winter Wonderland backdrop. Within the store we offered 'Elf.ai', a digital experience produced in partnership with Capgemini's Applied Innovation Exchange, which utilised artificial intelligence and facial recognition software to recommend gifts to visitors based on their emotional response to a range of festive stimuli (who doesn't love a gif?). Overall, the pop-up and it's virtual counterpart raised over £100k, almost 3 times their respective income target.

The RNLI’s emotive Launch a Memory campaign offered people hope in the face of loss. The chance to share a loved one’s name on the side of a lifeboat, in honour of their memory, inspired thousands to donate. This campaign was new territory for the RNLI. Before 2019, we lacked an accessible and tangible in-memory giving product that met people’s desire to pay tribute to those they have loved and lost.

But Launch a Memory met that need, giving people the unique opportunity to see their loved one’s names form the numbers and letters on a new lifeboat’s hull. The digital campaign was fundamental: social ads, web forms and search functions to submit and see names, plus email, web and social content delivering updates. The £453,011 raised smashed all targets and almost 10,000 names were submitted. From fundraising objectives to the acquisition of new supporters, it’s been a remarkable success.

Ross Wiggan, Sue Ryder’s Lottery Manager introduced Lottery to Sue Ryder’s 450 Retail shops, generating over £640,000 in 2019.  The innovative technical solution allows Retail customers to purchase single or multiple entries to the Sue Ryder lottery and Super Draws in any of the charities shops nationwide. Customers can then also check their ticket in any store and claim cash prizes of £10 and under – increasing footfall, stock donations and secondary sales throughout the Retail network.