What we learned when we stopped guessing how supporters felt at Battersea

At Battersea, we care for dogs and cats who need us by rescuing, rehabilitating and rehoming animals at our centres in the UK - and by sharing our knowledge and resources with rescue organisations around the world.

We took part in The Chase Index for the first time in 2022 – before then, we didn’t have a measure of our supporter experience. At first, the results looked great – our Loyalty Score ranked highly, with an average of 6.07 out of 7. But we didn’t understand why that was!

Very importantly, we also noticed that a number of other animal welfare charities in The Chase Index had an even higher Loyalty Score than us. Our results highlighted where we were ‘leaking’ loyalty, which gave us specific areas of focus to target our plans for improvement:

1. Our supporters were showing a lot of goodwill that wasn’t converting into long-term commitment, which is vital for securing lifelong support.

   
   

2. Supporters were also telling us that their trust was low: they didn’t see us delivering the outcomes we promised and spending their money appropriately.

   
   

3. Lastly, only 3.3% of our audience felt appropriately thanked.

   
   

These insights targeted our approach to improving the experience.

We chose to focus on fewer moments, but to make them better:

A focus on thanking

Our results showed that thanking was a major growth opportunity, so we chose to focus here. There were some ‘quick wins’, such as a review of all our thanking letters, and some more long-term projects, such as a commitment to celebrate milestone moments more meaningfully.

We’re now in the process of moving from transactional thanking – a person makes a donation, we say ‘thank you’, the cycle repeats itself - to seeing thanking as a moment to build stronger relationships with supporters.

Supporter experience principles

Using the results from The Chase Index, we’ve also built a set of six supporter experience principles that are based on what drives supporter commitment according to our supporters - not just what we believed internally.

They reflect what supporters need from us, both emotionally and practically: from showing the need and making it relevant, to making sure we show our gratitude and give people reason to trust us enough to stay. Our fundraising teams now use these principles as guidelines when developing a campaign: it has been useful to use a ‘traffic light’ system to spot which principles are coming across quite strongly - and others not so much.

We’re already seeing higher supporter engagement to our communications, with one supporter sharing that “I enjoyed the last edition so much that I increased my direct debit!”.

Review of supporter journeys

The data told us what was wrong – but the journeys told us why. For every product we mapped exactly what it looked like from the supporter’s perspective. 

It was the first time we had a shared understanding of what it looks and feels like to be a Battersea supporter. In some ways, the biggest value wasn’t the map — it was just getting teams to see supporters’ reality together. This enabled us to work collaboratively across our fundraising teams and identify where things could be improved.

The results

“I enjoyed the last edition so much that I increased my direct debit!"

By choosing to focus on improving how we thank supporters, we’ve seen an increase in the number of supporters who agree that they are "always thanked appropriately for any gift to Battersea". Growing this from 3.3% to 9.3% reflects the positive impact of our focused work on thanking over the year.

And we’ve seen this pay off in our fundraising appeals, too: we added a thank you card into a cash appeal pack, which was a direct application of our ‘Show Gratitude’ principle, and tested this across all new audiences.

Of the 50% who received the card, we saw:

• A 30% increase in response rate

• A 1.2% increase in average gift

• A better ROI despite an £0.11 increase in pack cost

If all new audiences had received the card, this would have resulted in 167 additional responders to our cash appeal campaign!

This wasn’t a big, complex change: it was a small shift grounded in supporter need, which shows how powerful these principles can be when put into action.

What we’ve learned

• Listen to your supporters. The data from The Chase Index helped us to find our loyalty leaks, and it helped us to build the business case for investing in better experiences for our supporters.

• ·Make time for supporter experience. Loyalty doesn’t just happen by accident. It’s shaped in the small moments – in the silence, or lack of it! – and in the long-term, intentional building of stronger relationships across your organisation.

• Find your allies! Supporter experience fails when everyone agrees it’s important, but there’s no one there to see it through. We started working with one team at first, highlighting the small changes and financial impact as evidence of what was possible. It was a slow process, but worth it.

If you’re looking to start reviewing your supporter experience, I would start with the following questions:

• How well do you thank - really?

• If loyalty slipped tomorrow, would you know why?

• Do you know how supporters feel, or are you guessing based on their behaviour?

  
  

What’s next for supporter experience at Battersea?

Going back to our Loyalty Action Plan, we now want to start improving our welcome experience for supporters and create deeper connections and commitment early on. 

We will be revisiting our journey maps and designing improved experiences for multi-product supporters, including making better use of our behavioural data alongside our supporter experience principles to ensure we’re building loyalty.

We’re off to a good start at Battersea, but there is still a lot of work to do!