Targeting an audience to grow income at NHS Charities Together

Introduction

Every charity audience is made up of supporters who give for different reasons. And many charities have at least some supporters who may be giving primarily because of an external prompt – be that a high-profile international crisis, a celebrity-led appeal or, in this case, a high-profile fundraiser that was front-page news through the peak of Covid-19.

These supporters feel ‘different’ to a charity’s core audience – they may be less engaged, and less likely to give again going forwards, so it can be a delicate balance when estimating a return on investment for their future fundraising.

This case study shows the impact of understanding supporter motivations to target investment in the supporter experience at NHS Charities Together, and the potential for using audience segmentation to improve the experience, grow supporter loyalty and improve an audience’s lifetime value.

Identifying the problem

In March 2020, NHS Charities Together received an influx of new donations in response to fundraising efforts during the Covid-19 pandemic. Over £15 million was raised in the first five days, and their Covid-19 Urgent Appeal went on to raise over £150 million from a vast audience of hundreds of thousands of new supporters.

The majority of these supporters weren’t closely connected to NHS Charities Together. Many were simply responding to Capt. Sir Tom Moore’s inspirational fundraising efforts, while others were simply looking for an opportunity to feel less helpless in the face of the frightening pandemic.

In 2022, NHS Charities Together wanted to learn more about these people, in order to create impactful, targeted supporter journeys for their “best” supporters. We started by asking: how can NHS Charities Together discover who is a loyal supporter, who might become more loyal and increase their support, and who is unlikely to support again?

Insight into action

• We ran a full data audit which identified five key audience segments for NHS Charities Together, using giving behaviours to provide clues towards supporters’ attitudes towards NHS Charities Together.

  
  

• And we ran a full supporter survey, to identify how these five audiences differed in Loyalty.

  
  

• From this research, we could understand more about each supporter’s motivations for supporting NHS Charities Together.

  
  

• Particularly importantly, we could test how these motivations differed across their five key audience segments, which allowed the team to build targeted supporter experiences for specific parts of their audience.

Instead of targeting all 500,000 people who had ever given, many of whom had extremely low loyalty and were unlikely to give again, the survey identified the two “best” supporter segments to focus on - a huge cost-saving for the organisation.

The results

Fast forward a few years and the team have been focusing on building long-term relationships with the more engaged segments. This audience now makes up the core of their programme, and we’ve seen their Loyalty score increase significantly – rising by 10.4% in 2024 when compared to 2022.

As a result of this increase in Loyalty over the last two years, we are forecasting an increase of 10.8% growth in the value of donations from these supporters over the next three years – equivalent to an increase of £160,550.

Not only this, we also forecast an increase of 4.9% in gift in wills, equivalent to an increase of £105,270 over three years.