The Children's Society is taking a new approach to whole supporter relationship management, which has seen it overhaul the way it manages data and delivers insight. Raj Rajukumar explains.

At the Children’s Society we strive to put our supporters first - enabling them to have meaningful control of their relationship with us. To do this, we are advocating a whole supporter approach throughout the organisation that will make it easy for our supporters to engage with us in many different ways.

Our whole supporter approach means that we recognise all the different ways each individual helps the Children’s Society – whether it is through donating, volunteering, fundraising or campaigning.

We want to give supporters a choice in their interactions with us – not just take them on a predefined journey. At the Children’s Society, we think of donating, volunteering, campaigning and fundraising as equally important ways of supporting us. Analysis has shown that people who support us in multiple ways will, unsurprisingly, go on to display better loyalty.  

Our whole supporter approach means we are moving away from the notion that each team has their own group of supporters to cultivate. Instead, all supporters will have the opportunity to engage with us in as many - or as few ways that meet their needs. Fundraisers, campaigners and volunteering teams are now responsible for developing compelling “products” to attract supporters.

This is meant to unlock innovation as each team is energised to come up with new and exciting ways our supporters can continue to build their relationship with us.

The link between insight and innovation is essential to our vision of the whole supporter approach and so we have overhauled the way we manage data and deliver insight within the organisation.

When I took my role at the Children’s Society, I noticed that we collected a lot of supporter data that is then stored in disparate systems that do not 'speak' to each other. The supporter was then receiving multiple communications and asks that did not give them a coherent story of how they might best engage with us.

I also noticed that it was challenging to extract meaningful reporting and information from our supporter database in a timely and efficient way. To address these issues, we are implementing the FastStats analysis tool. This tool will allow the data team much more flexibility in running selections, analysis and reports and, crucially, will allow us to view the disparate data streams in one place.

With our data better connected and more accessible, we will be able to deliver much clearer insights about our supporters. To meet our aim of “placing supporters at the heart of everything we do”, we are building a supporter insight team to pull together these insights and inform all of our policies and strategies.  

Our supporter services team have been looking to streamline processes to free themselves up to deliver real added-value to our supporters when they contact us by phone, email, through social media or letter. Barriers around inefficient data processing are being removed and with clear insights we can now look for innovative ways that will delight our supporters and also members of the general public when they contact us.

We are still in the implementation phase of this programme of work. Our data services team is being built and we have initiated projects to simplify and streamline the way we process data which includes introduction of the FastStats tool. We are also building the supporter insight team to help drive innovation within the Children’s Society in a way that will improve supporter engagement. These two teams will work closely with our supporter services team to establish an organisation-wide approach to supporter relationship management that really does put supporters in control.

Raj Rajukumar is director of supporter relationship management at the Children's Society