St Mungo's fundraising list growth

St Mungo’s already had a strong and well established offline fundraising programme - but their online fundraising was relatively new and small-scale. Here’s how more onion helped them to grow their online fundraising programme through a lead generation pilot project.

I really value the expertise that more onion brings to the table, and the collaborative way of working. They feel like part of the team; it's a great way to work. We’ve all learned loads working with more onion and would definitely recommend them.

Patrick Beswick
Assistant Head of Public Engagement (Digital)
St Mungo's

Digital fundraising accelleration

St Mungo’s were at the beginning of an ambitious programme to scale up and optimise their digital fundraising work. Given their initially modest sized list of emailable supporters, one of the key parts of St Mungo’s plan was to grow that list. So they partnered with more onion to run a pilot project to grow their list of emailable supporters.

Topline results

26,894 people opted in to receive emails from St Mungo’s
Around 4% of signups made their first donation right away on the signup action’s thank you page
Over 2,000 people provided a telephone number with consent to contact
Test result data showed the clear impact of including a telephone field (impact on conversion vs telephone opt in rate) - this data will inform future work
Test data provided valuable insights as to what action types, messaging and visuals have the potential to bring in high volumes of suitable supporters at a low cost. This will also inform future recruitment work

Using these pilot project outcomes, the charity will be able to optimise and scale their recruitment work even further in the future.

Here’s how we worked together to achieve these results:

Lead generation fundraising model

We started by exploring different possible models available for online fundraising and jointly decided that a lead generation model would best fit St Mungo’s needs. In this model supporters opt in to hear from St Mungo’s as a part of a simple sign-up action. The charity then works to build the relationship with the supporter, encouraging them to make their first donation in the months following signup (and beyond).

St Mungo’s wanted to ensure that they were spending their money wisely before scaling up recruitment projects, so we worked together on a lead generation pilot where testing and learning were at the core of the objectives.

To achieve these learning goals we supported the team to implement landing page testing as well as developing a multivariate testing approach for Meta (Facebook) that would yield insights as well as results.

Low bar actions

With the lead generation strategic model in hand, we needed to create simple sign up actions and framings. St Mungo’s doesn’t campaign so we couldn’t rely on petitions and other campaigning actions to generate the volumes of traffic we needed, so we needed to get creative. More onion designed and facilitated a creative ideation session to come up with ideas for opt-in actions.

Through a two hour session we guided the St Mungo’s team to create over 300 ideas for actions, hooks and messaging.

“The creative ideation sessions were beneficial for us internally as well as for the outputs themselves. Even the stuff we didn't use got the creative juices flowing and brought teams together. They were an amazing way for people across the organisation to get involved in the project."
Amy Jarvis, Head of Public Engagement, St Mungo's

Using feasibility, appeal and expected impact criteria, these were then whittled down to three easy to do signup actions for us to test in the pilot. We also tested one additional action which St Mungo’s added in response to a shocking statement from the then Home Secretary, and one higher bar action (a message exchange).

We designed and helped to execute the Meta (Facebook) ads to promote these five actions, generating not just new supporters but also insights into what framings, messaging, images and calls to action most resonated with their target audiences.

As St Mungo’s used the Impact Stack platform to implement their actions, they were able to seamlessly implement donation asks on the thank you page that users see after they sign up. These thank you page donation asks were able to achieve an immediate return on some of the ad spend for the handraiser actions and provided valuable insight into how likely different audiences were to donate. These learnings will inform future framings, audience messaging and targeting.

The higher bar action, as we expected, delivered new supporters at a higher cost per lead but those who did sign up this way were much more likely to donate.

Using Impact Stack’s telephone opt-in fields, St Mungo’s also collected over 2,000 phone numbers with permission to contact, which they are using to launch their telemarketing activities this year. We carefully rolled out the inclusion of the telephone field on the forms, measuring its negative impact on form conversion rates against the value that the telephone numbers create. This means that just over half of all forms used in this pilot included a phone field - so we would expect the phone opt-in rate to be almost double in the future.

Strong foundations

This pilot project significantly increased the list of emailable and callable supporters for St Mungo’s as well as generating learnings which should make lead generation going forward even quicker and cheaper, enabling them to scale and boost their digital fundraising income for years to come.

Using a lead generation strategy for supporter recruitment has the potential to boost your general supporter and donor lists in a cost-effective and sustainable way.