Over the next few weeks i'm going to be writing about what many people call stewardship or donor care, but which I prefer to call 'donor magic'. I'll be talking through the concept, the critical success factors, the barriers you need to overcome and my personal thoughts on the concept.
However, I thought i'd start with a story illustrating what I mean.
The story comes from a presentation I attended by the NSPCC's stewardship team.
The had quite a high profile committee who organised an annual fundraising event. They wanted to do something extra to thank them for all their hard work that went beyond the normal flowers or wine.
What they came up with was simple and low cost, but also individual and unique and strengthened the relationship with the charity. They gave each member of the committee a special gift box that contained photos from past events, along with hand written thank you cards from some of the children who would benefit from the project the event was raising money for.
The committee members were delighted with this thoughtful and relevant gift and no doubt they told all their friends and family about it, creating some great word of mouth for the NSPCC.
Bmycharity
After reviewing the Justgiving site yesterday, I thought it only fair that I give a mention to Bmycharity, who are one of Justgiving’s main rivals and compare the two.
In the interests of transparency, I want to make clear I have no personal connection with either site and these reviews are just based on my impressions of using them.
The Bmycharity front page is quite busy with boxes promoting their own challenges, individuals sponsor pages and how to set up a page. There is also quite a lot of info on how Bmycharity is ‘more than just giving’ which I thought was quite a clever strap line and clearly demonstrates Bmycharity’s main two advantages: it’s cheaper than Justgiving and there is more opportunity for charities to brand their own pages.
One let down is that nowhere on the front page promotes people who are already raising money. There is no inspiration and examples to other people raising money. This is definitely one area where Justgiving does better.
Moving on to the sponsor pages themselves then it was noticeable that Bmycharity’s pages were much more about the charity, whereas Justgiving is much more about the individual fundraiser.
The ‘Moonwalk’ pages were a great example of this. There is only limited info about the person raising the money, although you can easily share via social media (though again there are a huge number of options) and frustratingly you have to click through to see a list of donations.
However, where Bmycharity is clearly ahead of Justgiving is the information on the charity. There is some fantastic information about “Walk the Walk”, including video, good branding at the top of the page, buttons to find out more about volunteering, joining in, following on Twitter and being added to the mailing list. I thought this was really impressive, thought it is reliant on the individual charity making the most of this opportunity.
In conclusion, Bmycharity is another good fundraising site and I’d have no problem using it.
Overall, I’d say that if I was a charity I’d prefer Bmycharity as it’s cheaper, has more prominent branding for the charity and allows the charity to promote itself in more ways. As an individual I’d go for Justgiving as it’s more about ‘me’ and allows me to tell my own individual story in a clear way and shows how other people have raised money.
Do you agree or do you know another online donation site you’d recommend? Please let me know…
Posted at 10:43 AM in Fundraising Comment | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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