Have you got the talent needed to join a hand-picked team of creatives, project managers and analysts who are working hard to make the world a better place? If so, our door is open.

Open Fundraising is looking to hire: three Copywriters, one Designer, one Account Manager and two Account Executives.

If you can craft killer direct marketing copy, manage challenging direct marketing jobs in your sleep, or want to learn how to do the latter, please send your CV and a nice email to: jobs@openfundraising.com

What happens when you really integrate a campaign and fundraising ask? Well if you’re Shelter, you get 50% more income than you budgeted for – and you double your active campaigner file! We mailed warm supporters telling them about the rogue landlords who are making a killing out of families’ misery and asked for two things – a cash donation and a signed campaign letter to Grant Shapps (Minister of State for Housing and Planning). The format was so simple it was embarrassing. But the results were anything but. That’s the team in the photo hand-delivering 1,720 signed letters to his door.

Alex

Recently we’ve been working with Action for Children on their SMS based Big Egg Hunt . Over 200 eggs have been planted around London for hunters to collect by text and each has unique longitude and latitude coordinates.

The eggs were marked on Google Maps and colour coded according to number of times they were collected. And we were able to use this data visualisation to develop two new fundraising strategies…

1) We deployed street fundraisers near the most popular eggs over the weekend of 10th March, which boosted sign-up on these eggs by 1.8 times against control eggs.

2) The following weekend we sent an SMS asking every player to help us promote the egg hunt. We received 254 positive responses, 40% of them within 30 minutes – proving that no other media can compete with SMS on open rates or response times. Unfortunately it rained (a lot), but the volunteers still managed to boost response by 50%.

What have we learnt? Google maps is a very nifty way of visualising data and SMS communications will become ever more important in the future as people get even more attached to their phones.

Paul Smith