Teenage Cancer Trust and Wood for Trees
A transformed communications plan and creation of a supporter-centric approach for fundraisers
Background
Every day, seven young people aged 13-24 hear the words “you have cancer”. From that moment, everything changes. Cancer doesn’t just devastate young people’s health, it threatens to take away everything they care about – their identity, their independence, and their dreams.
As well as funding specialist nurses and hospital units within the NHS to provide the very best clinical care, Teenage Cancer Trust does everything it can to make sure cancer doesn’t stop young people living their lives, during treatment and beyond. It’s the only UK charity dedicated to meeting this vital need.
The challenge
A significant part of the fundraising programme sees income from mass participation events, with 1,500 supporters registering their own places for all manner of activities since 2019 and opting to fundraise for the charity. The goal was for each participant to receive up to nine emails, dependant on the time between registration and event, including personalisation and dynamic content.
Watch the full customer story
Watch our video which covers the full impact of Apteco marketing software on Teenage Cancer Trust, presented by Harriet Durban at Teenage Cancer Trust and Nick Cook at Wood for Trees.
The Apteco Solution
The stewardship process related to events was previously to manually download participant lists from a database and create mail merges in Outlook, which was time-consuming and restricted tailored messaging and the ability to provide robust and consistent support, plus the impact on the team was significant. Historically, registered participants received a ‘welcome’, ‘good luck’ and ‘well done’ email. The previous manual process took two full days every week. To manually implement the new journeys would be the equivalent of a full-time job. With the help of Apteco marketing software, this process is now fully automated, streamlined and accessible to many. The charity has more time, resource and functionality to focus on building and implementing wider strategies. This supporter-centric approach will create brilliant experiences for fundraisers, whilst building brand awareness and increasing supporter retention and engagement.
The previous manual process related to the original three-step email journeys and growing the email contact database took two full days of an employee’s time a week during event high-season. Furthermore, to manually implement the sheer quantity and quality of emails included in the new journeys (with up to nine tailored, dynamic and time-sensitive emails per event participant), would be the equivalent of a full-time job. But the power of Apteco software and the expertise and consultancy provided by Wood for Trees has delivered Teenage Cancer Trust a fully automated and streamlined email stewardship process, accessible to numerous users. From this, employees have been, and will continue to be, upskilled and unified in data solutions and analysis.
Supporters now receive more personalised and relevant, bespoke and higher-quality email content, more often, the aim being to increase email engagement and engagement with the charity as a whole. In turn, this will ultimately grow fundraised income and ROI, with year one projected at a £200-£300k uplift in ‘own place’ income. In addition, it’s anticipated that with prompts now being included in emails, more fundraising event pages will be created as a result. Not only is this likely to increase fundraised revenue but it’ll also improve the way in which funds are processed. Many event participants would transfer money they raise via direct payments and this has been another burden on resource at the charity in trying to match up participants, events and funds from hundreds of transactions (there have been 1,500 event bookings in the last three years, which is set to increase, aided by these improvements).
We’ve found the use of Apteco FastStats and PeopleStage to be of great benefit to our organisation, allowing easy access to our CRM data to perform quick and detailed data selections, whilst also offering a much greater analysis and supporter journey platform than our CRM system is able to offer.
Rachel Thomas, Head of Mass Participation, Teenage Cancer Trust
Rachel Thomas, Head of Mass Participation, Teenage Cancer Trust
The impact on the business
The charity now has more time, resource and functionality to focus on building and implementing wider strategies – operational and financial. With solutions and systems in place to track analytics, benchmarks can be established over time and, from this, longer-term strategic KPIs and objectives created and monitored to the overall benefit of the charity and its supporters. Ultimately, this builds a supporter-centric approach to the charity’s stewardship to create brilliant experiences for its fundraisers, personalising their journeys and tailoring to their needs, which should build brand awareness and increase supporter retention and engagement in the long-term as more journeys across the charity take on this model.
Supporters now receive more personalised and relevant, bespoke and higher-quality email content more often.
Teams have been upskilled and unified in data solutions and analysis across the charity.
A projected £200-£300k uplift in ‘own place’ income in year one as a result of an overall increase in email engagement and engagement.
The creation of brilliant experiences for fundraisers, personalising their journeys and tailoring to their needs through effective communications.
Apteco marketing software has enabled us to deliver a highly detailed and tailored journey, using a range of the software’s capabilities, from expressions in FastStats to PeopleStage’s journey management functionality. All of this has been achieved in a short space of time owing to the software’s ease of use.
Nick Cook, Senior Solutions Consultant, Wood for Trees
Nick Cook, Senior Solutions Consultant, Wood for Trees