Once the preserve of female churchgoers in their 80s, the Children's Society has broadened the appeal of its community fundraising. Gillian Claugher, the charity's director of regional fundraising and development explains how.

A few years ago all of the Children’s Society's appeals were targeted at the charity’s loyal, existing supporter base, made up of elderly female churchgoers in their 80s.

Our objectives and performance measures were formulated on recruiting a given number of new churches to hold fundraising services, but these objectives were set without the corresponding data as to where existing support was and no insight into which churches to approach.

One of my senior managers, previously a community fundraising manager, told me: “I would wake up in cold sweats thinking about where we were headed”.   

The Children’s Society, no doubt like other charities at some point, was guilty of continuing to work in ways that it always had and, as a result, was missing a trick. It was doing this by:

Not keeping a close eye on the figures

Profitability, ROI and growth were not “charity-friendly” terms.  As a result, we had a number of loss-making events and failed to make informed business decisions. One staff-led community fundraising event, “Walk & Explore” (a Thames walk), had been loss-making for three years without any review or change being made for fear of upsetting the participants.  

Going for likeability not profitability

Our community fundraising managers were travelling to all corners of their geographic patches for cups of tea and a nice chat, but sadly this wasn’t resulting in any income growth.  We realised that happy supporters and profitable supporters did not need to be mutually exclusive.

‘Group think’

The practice of thinking or making decisions as a group, resulting typically in unchallenged, poor-quality decision-making.

The charity convinced itself that promoting our community fundraising products to our traditional, existing supporter base reduced the risk of upsetting them or losing their support. Risk-aversion and only consulting within our teams meant there was little to appeal to new audiences and little income growth from existing ones.

Not working together. Focusing on the short term

The structure of the community fundraising team made it hard to work with other teams and our fundraising appeals, legacies and events departments were all working in isolation. In addition, the focus for each team was on results for the current financial year with little consideration to long term planning for sustainability and growth.

Us not them

Like many organisations, not just charities, we were guilty of the “we need… you must” approach to community fundraising marketing. There was very little decision making based on supporter research or insight.

There was so much to do in local communities to raise money and change the lives of thousands of children living in poverty and suffering neglect in the UK. We needed to think about how this translated to our supporters with the most impact.  

This is what we changed:

Understanding product performance

An audit of our fundraising product portfolio enabled us to consider whether to retain, divest or invest. We looked into the events and activities on offer and we decided to stop our Walk & Explore staff-controlled fundraising event, which was loss-making.

This was re-positioned as a supporter-led event with downloadable resources available to walk organisers.  We moved into profitability and despite concerns, we retained supporters who wished to continue and lead the event. We used ongoing review processes and in turn developed the team into strategic product and audience managers.   

Understanding our audiences

You know when you join a gym in January then work out in April that because you’re only attending once or twice, your occasional swim session is costing you £35 a month? Well, similar analysis revealed that stewarding all of our supporters, irrespective of income potential, was costing us dearly. We segmented, analysed and researched our supporter base and piloted a new account management approach last April. This means our community fundraising managers now carry out ‘key supporter plans’ to truly understand the motivations, expectations and fundraising potential of our existing supporters and we ensure that the stewardship they receive can be both exceptional and appropriate.  

Test everything

We now view every new venture as a test. After all, if you view everything as a test it helps you to overcome the fear of failure: a test cannot fail!

Unsurprisingly, this has been uncomfortable at times. We’ve challenged our director of fundraising who was reluctant to invest in student fundraising. But with a robust business proposal, backed up with sufficient audience research to warrant a test, we won him over and the fundraising programme is looking promising in this first year. To do something new will always involve risk but continuing on the same path with no innovation, in my view, presents an even greater risk.

Working together

Legacies and events are now part of community fundraising and boy does it make a difference. Taking an integrated approach is not only common sense, but lucrative too.  For example, our analysis shows us that 40 per cent of our legacy income comes from our church supporters who hold our money collecting boxes so we can tailor our communications accordingly. Our money collecting box income is on the increase, legacy notifications have increased and we’re recruiting new supporters that we’d previously only dreamt of.

Them, not us

We now have a supporter engagement strategy: using insights, research, feedback and data to enable better decision making and innovation. Our aim is to better understand our supporters and initiate meaningful conversations with them and engage them in other ways, virtual or actual. For example, we’re marketing our traditional church fundraising initiatives to wider audiences, including evangelical churches and children’s church activities, offering the flexibility to tailor it to different types of service.  This will ensure that we don’t make inappropriate asks that are at best a waste of effort or at worst crude.

Heading in the same direction

I’m very proud to be part of a dynamic, results-focused team who are at the very heart of what makes fundraising special and effective. As a team, we’ve had our work cut out in the last couple of years to turn the tanker around, or rather turn a fleet of several tankers around to face the same direction.

We were not working as a team, we didn’t really know the activities that were engaging supporters, bringing in most income, and we didn't know what people wanted.  We’re still in the process of turning the tankers around – we haven’t completely got there yet but with focus, resilience and the rest of the organisation behind us, we won’t give up until we’re all heading in the same direction.    

Gillian Claugher is director of regional fundraising and development at the Children's Society