Ben Kay, Product Owner (Fundraising and Marketing), RNLI

RNLI has just gone live with its first Funraisin campaign – it is rolling out a series of targeted campaigns and always on DIY fundraising products that supporters can use. As well as the centrally planned and managed fundraising products, RNLI is also looking to use it for broader event management – it has thousands of supporter and volunteer led activities every year that help raise essential funds so the charity can save lives at sea.

What was behind your decision to go all in one?

By consolidating to a single event fundraising platform primarily we were looking to improve the supporter experience. Before we had one platform to sell/manage ticketing, then signposting to another platform for creation of donation and sponsorship pages, and finally we would build a resources section on rnli.org with all the associated fundraising materials.

While we are very fortunate to have passionate supporters who love fundraising for us, this was not a great supporter experience and led to issues around drop off in the handoff from one platform to the other and reduction in campaign engagement. Therefore we believed this negatively impacted fundraising activities and campaign performance.

Secondly, we have a big focus on data quality. Funraisin has really strong controls at the point of data capture in the registration forms, and a good reporting and API for us to use in order to import participants and donors into our CRM. Before we had significant issues with different levels of data quality across the separate platforms. Finally, a single supporter experience gives us a unified view of the performance analytics for a given campaign. We can see where we have engagement or conversion issues and are able to optimise the registration, content and ongoing email comms.

What benefits/advantages are you seeing – or do you expect to see?

The marketing, fundraising and data teams are all really happy with the first campaign that we have rolled out. We are looking forward to building out more fundraising campaigns and product on the platform and ultimately creating a fundraising hub – where supporters can find all sorts of different ways that can fundraise for us.  There are many features on the platform that we have not touched yet, but are looking forward to testing

Any learnings you can share for other charities?

As a charity we have a lot of process and complexity behind the scenes but we should not allow that to impact the fundraiser or supporter experience. We know that each supporter has their own relationship with us. There is obviously a balance between overwhelming them with all the different ways that they could potentially support us, while also giving people the tools to fundraise for us no matter what they want to do. This includes optimising the registration process, the ongoing engagement and nudges to enhance their donations and chances of success for a given challenge or event. By being supporter centric and keeping a keen eye on the performance and optimising a campaign or type of fundraising, we believe everybody wins.