Making shift happen: how donor retention and loyalty became everyone’s business at Sydney Children’s Hospitals Foundation

Sydney Children’s Hospitals Foundation (SCHF) exists to help provide access to the best possible healthcare for children, whenever and wherever they need it.

Since 2018, we have supported five separate entities across the Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network. As a united team with one mission, we must deeply connect our donors with SCHF, whilst honouring their commitment to each of our individual hospital entities. 

These people often believed in our mission enough to give once, but something was missing that kept them from staying. 

When we looked closer, the reason was clear: our supporter experience was transactional. It lacked warmth, personalisation and meaningful engagement – and when we measured the supporter experience with About Loyalty in 2023, our ranking was almost at the bottom of The Chase Index.

For many people, their journey with us was a one-and-done experience, with nothing but silence after the receipt of their gift. So, if we wanted to turn donors into lifelong supporters, we knew that we needed to shift from transactions to relationships – from passive communication to genuine engagement.

Once we had identified the problem and mapped out our strategy, it was time to get to work.

These are three of the key changes we’ve made to our supporter experience since beginning this project:

1) We designed an automated welcome journey that introduced donors to our mission, showed them their impact, and kept them engaged. To encourage that all-important second gift from new cash donors, we introduced a quiz at the start of the journey which helped us to understand what motivated our supporters. The answers split our audience into three groups meaning that we can now send impactful communications to these groups that are crafted to align with their underlying motivations.

2) For donors who made a second gift during the Welcome period, we flagged them for a personal call or email just to say ‘thank you’. Those calls revealed that most people were giving because they had a personal connection or were supporting a friend’s fundraiser, which provided valuable insight for our peer-to-peer fundraising team to personalise their experience even further.

3) Lastly, we introduced an optional ‘thank you’ gift at the third donation mark. Our research showed that this moment in the supporter journey was a critical indicator for future retention. We provided an optional choice between a magnet, a notepad, or a pen, all branded with a message of gratitude.

The results

From starting this project in 2021, by 2024 our personalised, donor-centric approach was already showing results across Individual Giving:

• The median gift has grown by AUD $17.80 (approximately £8.60). Average gift size has increased by nearly AUD $20 (approximately £9.70)

• More people are reaching the third gift milestone — up from 9.0% to 9.7%.

• In particular, the first phase of the thank you calling initiative has had a huge impact, bringing in 185 donations worth AUD $115,000 (around £56,000) and reactivating 37 Regular Givers.

Lastly, and most importantly for us, supporter retention for Individual Giving has climbed from 39.7% in 2021 to 54.0% in 2025.

What we’ve learned

We started this journey trying to solve our Individual Giving team’s biggest pain point. What we ended up with was a blueprint for how to build better relationships, a stronger organisational culture and more long-term impact by focusing on supporter commitment, satisfaction and trust.

1) Personalisation isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s transformational. When donors felt seen, heard, and valued, their satisfaction skyrocketed — and so did their giving. Simple acts, like a thank-you call or a personalised third-gift journey, had outsized impact. But remember - the donor experience isn’t just what you send, it’s how it makes them feel.

2) Establish engagement, retention or loyalty as key organisational metrics. You can’t fix what you can’t see. Tracking metrics like supporter loyalty, with scores in satisfaction, trust, and commitment, gave us a new lens and a new level of accountability. And partnering with About Loyalty helped us go beyond anecdotal feedback and gut feelings. From this, we gained quantifiable insights that shaped our strategy and validated our decisions when making this shift happen.

3) Adopt a test-and-learn mindset. We didn’t wait for perfection. We launched, learned, adjusted — and got better with every iteration. If you don’t have organisational buy-in to radically change your whole way of working, we found it valuable to use early or case-based wins to build your case before gaining wider support from other teams.