Brief
Charities have been aggressively competing for a share of the public's attention. The country's largest cancer charity, Cancer Research UK, was looking for innovative new ways to encourage funding. They asked us to look at methods of attracting first time donors. They also wanted us to give existing donors an incentive to donate more money, more often. The final part of the brief was to create advocates for donorship, pulling in their friends and family.
Insight
People are happy to give. But what they really love is to get involved. To be 'doing' something. And simply giving money can only be a part of that. The audience we were tasked to reach (AB, 25 to 55 year olds) would have been touched by cancer in a variety of ways. Through people they know. Through their relatives. Maybe even through first hand experience. And as well as being a personal illness, it's also a varied one, affecting clearly defined areas of the body. So we had to give them more of a say as to where their donation went.
Solutions
The fight against cancer is happening on many fronts. We realised one of the ways we could help was by ring fencing people's donations to help fight a specific type of cancer. MyProjects was a unique website we created for Cancer Research UK. It gave donors a choice of research projects to support, broken down by both disease type and geographic location. We knew that if we created the site using agile methodologies, it could evolve and be shaped by the people who worked with it and used it. So we built MyProjects using FIG™, our proprietary content management system, on a highly secure Zend framework. As well as making it easy for donors to choose and follow projects, FIG™ makes administrating the MyProjects site easy. As an interactive site, with donors receiving regular feedback about their chosen project, this level of control was vital for Cancer Research UK staff to manage content effectively. Finally, another feature was the ability of users to access the tools to build their own online community. It was a fantastically empowering way for them to amplify the fight against cancer across a network of their friends and family. That's how important MyProjects was for them.
Results
And so for the statistics. The results from this campaign have been extremely positive. We have allowed Cancer Research UK to reach out to a largely new audience who have previously been untouched by past fundraising campaigns. The largest group of MyProjects supporters are now the 30-39 years old, far younger than the average supporters of Cancer Research UK projects. What is even more exciting is that 65% of these MyProjects supporters are new to Cancer Research UK, with a higher proportion of men becoming involved in the cause. The site now has almost 3000 supporters from its BETA year, donating a staggering sum of £300,000, and this figure is only set to increase.
To all you superheroes out there who have raised so much money – from everyone at Essence – we salute you.
