Running a Mobile Giving Campaign: Lessons from the Little Heroes Appeal

As I blogged about a few weeks ago, the last couple months at work have been taken up with running the Little Heroes Nursery Appeal to raise £100,000 in 100 days. The great news is we did it and announced a final total of £103,000 on Tuesday.

The appeal was a huge learning curve with as much going wrong as being a success, but one area that I wanted to share a bit more info about was our text to give campaign.

It's the first time in a decade I've used text giving, but from talking to people I trust* it seemed like a good fit for the campaign.

Here's how the campaign worked and some headline results for you to consider:

We ran a train campaign over a two week period and a poster campaign throughout the appeal.

In total we received 725 texts donating £3. This equates to a cost of around £13 per text.

We followed the texts up with a phone call within two/three weeks of texting asking if people would help spread the word about the appeal by telling their friends/family.

Towards the end of the campaign we asked people to make a direct debit via telephone.

After removing duplicates and 'do not contacts' we had a penetration rate of around 60% and a take up rate of over 10%. The average gift (including gift aid) was around £100 per year.

In total the cost per new direct debit donor will be around £125, which means we should break even within 18 months (attrition permitting).

The people who agreed to advocate responded at about the same rate as people we were unable to contact. If attrition rates aren't better, then I would miss this stage in the future and try to contact people straight away to ask them to make a regular gift.

I'm really pleased with the results and I'm a convert to text giving.

It's relatively cheap, accessible for most charities and offers lots of opportunities for testing. It has performed far better than other recruitment methods I've tested this year and I'm hoping to roll it out further later in the year.

I'm particularly excited at the thought of recruiting donors direct to a monthly gift via their phone.

If you've had any experiences with similar campaigns and would be interested in sharing your results, then I'd love to hear from you.

p.s. If you want to test monthly giving by mobile, then you can give £3 per month to the Little Heroes Nursery Fund by texting NURSERY to 70007.

A big thank you to Paul de Gregorio, Mark Phillips, Cymba and Pell & Bales for letting me pick their brains and teaching me all about making mobile giving a success