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

There are many reasons why I love my job at Open Fundraising. The office, the clients, the work and of course my colleagues.

But the thing I think impresses me the most is the annual cash giveaway. Tim & James take the view that once we’ve hit our targets we should give some off our cash back to the sector. So we are all given £1,000 to donate to the charities of our choice.

A few weeks ago we had an afternoon together where we each told the story of why we had made the choices we had. There were tears, some laughs and a lot of clapping. Some choices were very personal, others gave money to clients. All in all it was a great afternoon.

I gave £250 of my £1,000 to Somerset Star. A small charity based in Somerset that tries to bring joy to the lives of kids who have had a fairly rough start in life. They do small things, like pay for football kits, singing lesson or sports training – but their support helps youngsters escape the harsh reality of their day-to-day lives and just enjoy being kids for a little while.

The rest of the money I gave to Send a Cow. I love Send a Cow. £750 buys a cow for a family in Africa, which gives them milk to drink and sell as well as manure for their land. But the bit I love is that every family who get a cow make a promise to pass on a gift to another family in need. It might be the first female calf, seeds, saplings or skills training. But no matter what it is, each gift keeps the chain of giving going.

And Send a Cow send good thank you.

Paul de Gregorio

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

Here’s some nice new work from our friends at Action on Hearing Loss (formerly RNID) and the very talented people at Hat-trick.

Much more brand/awareness than the response-driven stuff we do here, but lovely nonetheless.

You can watch the accompanying video here too, but I reckon they’re much stronger in print.

It’s a shame the sharing stuff at the end of the video feels a little bit tacked-on rather than integral to the campaign. Experience shows us that all of these easy little actions (Facebook shares etc.) make for better donors/conversations.

Richard

I love this new viral from Cancer Research UK. Clever stuff.

Hannah

A friend talked to me about this. Said she’d heard about it on Radio 4. Then discovered it in store, when shopping with the kids.

She said she loved it. So did the family. They brought one. In fact she said lots of people were buying them.

I then read about it in the Guardian.

JWT the agency responsible for the idea say that they’re ‘putting charitable giving in the context of people’s everyday routines.’ Budgens say it works because ‘this method of donating is very quick’. The IOF say ‘at a time fundraisers are chasing less money…established charities are having to be more innovative’.

And it is a fantastic idea. It ticks all the boxes. It’s only £1. All proceeds go to the Alzheimer’s Society. It’s easy to purchase. It’s novel and looks lovely. The kids tune into the charity message. Everyone feels good. Job done.

Make it tangible. £1 will pay for a coffee/biscuit/cake at one of Alzheimer’s Society’s cafes and response might be even higher.

But a word of warning.

Job done is not good enough. Selling hope on the same shelf as beans turns the charity into a commodity. A fleeting impulsive purchase is fine but only if we can then nurture on-going support and engagement.

The problems with a barcode reader on a block of wood is that it can’t provide the contact details that the Alzheimer’s Society need to start a relationship with their new friends. And without this, consumers will never become donors and great ideas like this will struggle to join the ranks of traditional direct channels…

Tim

]]> http://openfundraising.com/2012/04/08/happy-easter-from-open/feed/ 0 http://openfundraising.com/2012/04/01/lets-talk-about-text-baby/ http://openfundraising.com/2012/04/01/lets-talk-about-text-baby/#comments Sun, 01 Apr 2012 11:09:13 +0000 Richard http://openfundraising.com/?p=972

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