Speakers
Victoria Read
Customer Success Manager at Funraisin
Paul Parker
Digital Partnership Manager at Funraisin
Watch a live discussion on creating the ultimate VIP supporter experience, with your hosts Paul and Victoria.
In the session we covered how to:
- Make all your supporters feel like a VIP with our VIP Toolkit
- Invest into a targeted VIP program for high value fundraisers
Don’t have time to watch the full webinar? Check out our takeaways below or download the presentation.
Summary
Whilst giving hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels, now is the time to really appreciate all the supporters you have with VIP experiences. Whether it’s quick wins or a fully implemented VIP club, start building your VIP toolkit today to create an extraordinary supporter experience.
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Takeaways
Personalised URLs 🤗
- Gather together what you already know about your supporters to start adding a personal touch to their experience
- Make supporters feel special by recognising who they are and their journey with you, such as whether they’re a first-timer or a repeat fundraiser
- Consider your supporter’s past behaviour to nudge them to take part again, complete their registration or increase their donation.
Check out the example from MS Society’s May50K and how they recognised their fundraiser, celebrated how much they raised, and invited them to do it all again.
Impact 🚀
- Go back to your finance team and find out your latest shopping lists - we know it’s not always an easy ask!
- Show the direct impact your supporters have made with individual, tangible stats
- Nudge donors to donate at a higher value that makes a difference for your cause
Check out the example from Hunger Drive with how they demonstrate the value of $1 for four meals.
Check out the example from Pieta’s Darkness into Light with how they added individual impact stats on their fundraisers’ pages
Check out the example from MS Society’s May50K with how they created fundraising tiers to celebrate hitting target milestones.
Emails ✉️
- Celebrate your fundraisers’ milestones in the moment they happen with automated triggers
- Personalise with live data such as name, fundraising target and amount raised, and how this translates to the direct impact they’re making
- Review your email journeys to check for any missed opportunities
Gamification 🕹️
- Review what you know about your audience, and choose relevant milestones to reward them at every level
- Create digital badges to reward fundraisers for hitting milestones, such as first donations or hitting targets
- Set up automated triggers to celebrate the moment fundraisers unlock a new badge on their page
Check out the example from Winter Run and how they created new badges throughout the campaign to keep supporters coming back and checking in. This increased their activation by 30%.
Check out the example from GOSH’s JanuRun and how they set fitness and fundraising badges to unlock throughout January.
Invite a Friend 💬
- Enable fundraisers to team up with their friends and family by adding the option to invite a friend in your registration flow
- Take advantage of 16-28% more fundraisers joining in with a free cost per acquisition
- Make the instructions clear and easy to follow to invite even more higher value fundraisers
Check out the example from MS Society’s May50K with their Challenge A Friend customisation that added 10% to their overall income, raising £100 more on average.
Wall of Fame Leaderboards 🏆
- Set the achievement level based around what you already know about your audience, from average raised to ability, to encourage friendly competition
- Frame your leaderboard’s collective identity to celebrate your fundraisers, such as a Wall of Fame
- Link your leaderboard achievement level to your impact statements to make it more meaningful and nudge fundraisers to increase their fundraising total
Check out the example from Walk For Autism who created a Wall of Fame to recognise fundraising legends, finished off with classic confetti.
Check out the example from the Great Kiwi Bookathon who celebrated the Best Bookworms Club in their Hall of Fame.
Red Carpet Page Tour 🎥
- Give supporters a warm welcome with a tour of their fundraising hub
- Make their journey easy, stressless and set them up for success by showing them the key parts of their hub
- Nudge them to take action straight away and start updating their personal story and sharing it with friends and family
Check out the example from Focus Ireland who showed new fundraisers around with a fundraising page tour.
Awesome Exclusive Content 🎁
- Collaborate with corporate partners, influencers and charity ambassadors to create unique perks for your audience
- Consider perks like unlockable downloads, discounts and rewards, or assets you already have available
- Make it exclusive for your logged in fundraisers, only available from their fundraising dashboard
Check out the example from Coastrek and how they recognised supporters with exclusive content and discounts.
Check out the example from JanuRun and how they created downloadable resources.
Rewards, Recognition and Prizes 🎉
- Add surprise and delight elements to recognise fundraisers, such as confetti, crowns or touches of gold
- Create teasers of rewards yet to come to incentivise supporters to sign up, get fundraising and keep going
- Tailor rewards to fundraising behaviours and milestones you want to nudge, from higher targets to getting started straight away
Check out the example from Paul’s Demo Site with surprise and delight confetti and the crown on his profile.
Check out the example from ABF The Soldiers’ Charity with a program of unlockable rewards.
Check out the example from Asthma+Lung UK with tailored incentives and badges.
Targeted VIP Program 🤩
- Advertise your VIP Club before fundraisers sign up to start building anticipation and excitement.
- Nudge fundraisers to choose a higher fundraising target straight away with an incentivised VIP club within your registration journey.
- Offer a tangible VIP experience with exclusive upgrades such as hoodies, queue jumps and tours of your charity.
- Recognise VIP Club members with customised tiers, badges and visual effects on their fundraising page and leaderboards.
- Integrate your VIP benefits across your fundraisers’ journeys, dashboards and emails.
Check out the example from Up All Night and how they celebrated high value fundraisers with their Shining Nights VIP club, leading 1300 walkers to raise $1.7 million. 32% of participants became Shining Nights, raising 60% of the event total, and increasing the overall total by a staggering 71%.
Q&A
How do I personalise a fundraiser experience on a large scale? An event with loads of participants?
I think there's lots of stuff, really, which we've gone through there. Of course I'll re-mention PURLs. You've got rewards. You got the trigger emails. you've got the prizes and the recognitions. Those ones in particular - trigger emails, and rewards and prizes that you can turn on for everyone. Those are ideal.
For mass participation, one particularly are triggers, because you'll not have to do all that manual work for a ton of people. It's already taken care of for you. So then you can focus on other areas that you need to.
How can we improve our ways of working so we can improve our supporter experience?
I remember some struggles from my days in fundraising, and I know a few of you have struggles with internal teams. It's not always easy. A big thing for me is making sure that everyone has equal access to data. Make sure you have access to data for your campaigns and don't be afraid to push for it, because that's your data that is crucial for you to be able to do your job.
And that's the lovely thing about the Funraisin platform, all the data is held there. It's viewable for everyone with access to the platform, data teams, marketing teams, finance teams and importantly fundraising teams. You can all see it, and you can all use it and work together.
Where should I begin when I've got a limited budget and a tiny team?
It's a common issue and there’s so much you could tackle that it can be really easy to become overwhelmed. Try not to get too stressed!
The important thing is always to identify the behaviour that you most want to influence. So what's important to you, your charity, to this particular campaign? Do you want to look at conversion, improving activation rates, increase average per head etc? Pick your main metric and choose the tools that will be of most help to you. Don't try and do everything at once.
If you could only choose one of the tools covered, which ones would they be? And why?
Paul: Well, I think everyone knows my one! I'm going to say PURLs. I just think it provides a brilliant user journey. It's very unique to that individual. No one else will have that one, and it just looks cool. That's just my opinion, so I would pick PURLs all day long.
Victoria: It's confetti for me! It's fun and immediately makes a fundraiser feel a sense of celebration. My mum did a fundraising challenge on Funraisin last year, she kept refreshing her page so she could see her confetti blasting. People love it!
How do I pitch to my team that doing the dedicated VIP program will work?
We would love to extract the motivations of entrants via data export but now it is difficult due the fact it is csv and thus the sentences get cut off and the export is a bit messy.
Is PURLs completely custom or is it out of the box?
There’s lots of different ways to use PURLs. The May 50K example is custom, and our Professional Services team can provide a quote on a custom solution.
For chasing incompletes however, this can be set up quite quickly and is explained in this article - but you can also pop in a Support ticket and the team can help you get set up to chase incompletes.Is there a potential issue with personalising URL's due to GDPR and some people not feeling comfortable with their information being stored and used this way?
When using PURLs for unique pages, you control the communications and what you present on that personalised page from the data stored. It can be basic or more granular. It would also be based on your privacy policies and would therefore depend on the opt-in to direct marketing, or whether you are using under legitimate interest.
Also, much of what can be presented is in the public domain such as name, amount raised. In summary, you control what your charity wants to present and what you personalise.
Even at a basic level, a nice styled acquisition page to say welcome back Jenna with some charity impact elements would be a nice surprise and delight moment for your supporter.
Do emojis work? We did try but it mostly displays as [?]
From the platform? They should do, but we may need to add using the unicode character. In terms of displaying for supporters, this can depend on the email client they’re using, as older operating systems have limited support. (e.g Windows 7 and older versions of Outlook are not great for this.)
Again, feel free to pop in a Support ticket and the team can help with any emails :)
Can you create a trigger email that lets everyone know when we have reached certain fundraising goals?
Currently, we don’t have the option on the platform to send an email to all event entrants when the event collectively reaches a specific goal. However, we’re looking to evolve our nudges and email capabilities, so this may be available in the near future.
I see one of the examples for emails is a halfway email. Can we set up emails based on dates or days into an event?
Currently, date specific emails from the platform are custom, but can be sent via MailChimp/Campaign monitor for example. However, we’re working on evolving our nudges and email capabilities on the platform, so hope this will be available in the very near future.
Hello, are all the tips also possible on mobile devices? Like the confetti cannon?
Yes, absolutely!
Love the SMS services. Is there anything the platform can do with WhatsApp?
Yes. On the reg form label (within registration) you would need to have it as WhatsApp rather than say mobile and that should then trigger using say twilio/burst
Is this tiering out of the box?
For the Up All Night example, this was built custom for them. And if you’d like to explore options, then let us know, as there’s lots of options we can explore.
You can however use your trigger emails and gamification badges to set up fundraising tiers for your supporters to aim for.
What impact features are standard and which are custom? The examples look great!
Currently, many charities use badges and triggers for their tiers as these are a really easy and quick way to set up ‘levels’ to achieve.
Some of the other examples being shown are custom - but our product team are currently working on the dashboards to allow far more flexibility for Funraisin users to create a more custom experience.
If there is anything specific you’d like to explore, let me know and we can provide a quote/examples.
