Insight Fundraising Conference 2023

Steve White, Fundraising Data Strategy & Analysis Lead, Alzheimer's Society; and

Chartered Institute Insight Special Interest Group Chair

James takes you on a whistle stop tour of how data and insight has been placed at the heart of the fundraising strategy for Asthma + Lung UK, how that is driving change in approach and thinking for the entire organisation and why now, more than ever, fundraisers are worshiping at the insight alter

James Culing, Director of Fundraising and Engagement, Asthma and Lung UK

As as the Insight Special Interest Group of the Chartered Institute of Fundraising, focusing on data and insight, we aim to play a role in also providing data and insight about how the discipline is evolving. 

We periodically ask those working in the sector to share their views on a number of key metrics.This enables us to track attitudes and behaviour as well us helping us as a group focus our efforts on delivering content and support that’s relevant for the opportunities that exist.

Leading up to this conference, we surveyed those working in the sector and we’ll be sharing key highlights during this session. 

Key areas we’ll report on:

• The services provided by teams working in charity data and insight and how this has changed
• How insight is being used to drive fundraising
• The barriers to doing more with data and research
• How much time is spent on various activities
• What teams would like to spend more / less time on
• What this Special Interest Group should be prioritising 
• What internal stakeholders want from internal data and insight resources

The results should be useful to help with future planning and enable you to benchmark amongst the broader sector.

Paul Seabrook, Research Director, Beautiful Insights

Competition Annoucement:

Kayleigh Philps, Senior Data Insight Analyst, Prostate Cancer UK

With the cost-of-living crisis biting and charities starting to gather insight on how it is affecting their acquisition efforts, the savvy fundraisers will be exploring if some budget can be spent on other channels to deliver better return and lifetime value during this period. 

Join the Dots (Agency) and YMCA (Charity) discuss what insight and research should be taken when introducing new channels. What metrics and parameters should you measure. How do you test effectively and what are the key considerations. 

This is bought to life using a case study of YMCA's recent Christmas Direct mail, a new channel that has exceeded in forecast recruitment numbers during difficult economic times.  

Takeaways 

Best practise in considering and introducing new channels. How audience insight and available data tools can help justify and empower decisions. How to judge a successful test and the journey for campaign optimisation.  

Charlotte Cole, Head of Individual Giving and Legacies, YMCA

Nathan Rose, Director of Growth, Join the Dots

Make your job easier by building data models in an instant. Create instant insights powered by cutting-edge artificial intelligence, large language models and machine learning. Build survival curves, lookalikes and Charity-specific GPT outputs in an instant, all with accuracy, speed and intelligence. CauseCompanion AI will tell all.

Aimed at:

Analysts, heads of insight, fundraisers, and campaigners.

Three key takeaways:

1. Understand how to get the best of AI and machine learning for your own datasets.

2. See how charity-specific data models can be built in an instant.

3. Find out how to tailor GPT outputs to your charity's campaigns.

Magid El-Amin, Co-founder, CauseCompanion AI

Jamie Petherbridge-Conroy, Co-founder, CauseCompanion AI

Insight teams are continually producing insights through data analysis and research, but how do you ensure that these insights are actually making a difference? We’ll be sharing one of the methods we use at Action for Children to ensure insights are at the heart of the supporter experience.

We have been running workshops with delivery teams for the past 4 years, and have developed our technique to make sure that data, research and strategies are being embedded into the way that these delivery teams work. Data and insights are captured from across the organisation and brought together in these workshops, run by our Insight and Performance team, as one of the mechanisms we use to make evidence-based decisions on our activity.

This interactive session is an opportunity to find out what we have learned, hear our recommendations, and hopefully inspire you to implement something similar at your charities.

It’s a great fit for insight, research, marketing or CRM professionals who are looking to improve supporter journeys through the use of data, or anyone who is passionate about making sure that insights lead to tangible change!

Anna Hackney, Senior Insight and Performance Manager, Action for Children

Maddy O’Bryen, Senior Insight and Performance Analyst, Action for Children

As Ted Lasso says “be curious not judgemental”.  In this session, we are going to take you on a journey of curiosity and supporter retention; how going back to basics with fewer fundraising analysis reports has generated fresh insight and a change to our fundraising audience and product focus. 

The Supporter Insight team at Alzheimer’s Society has been busy during 2022 implementing a planned suite of PowerBi dashboards.  We’ve called this work the reporting roadmap, a suite of a dozen reports that cover the majority of fundraising stakeholder needs.  From Maps to Lifetime Value to Philanthropy to Events to Legacies and so on … we have one dashboard for each fundraising department and a few higher level PowerBi reports for the leadership team to get curious on our overall fundraising performance.  Each dashboard is underpinned by single supporter view datasets. 

We will give an overview of the PowerBi roadmap, our thinking behind it and show some examples of the reports such as Lifetime Value and Mapping of the UK that have found us challenging our previous assumptions!  We will summarise how these reports have been used alongside other data facts to firm up insights that have ultimately influenced fundraising decisions and organisational wide thinking.  But we must not stop there, it is also essential to question everything and find out more about our supporter’s experience with us through golden questions…

Steven White, Fundraising Data Strategy & Analysis Lead, Alzheimer’s Society

Charli Hitch, Supporter Journey Manager, Alzheimer’s Society

To fund a new strategy aiming to support even more people in crisis, the British Red Cross set itself an ambitious target to grow income by £30m by 2030. To deliver on this order of growth would require a significant step-change, and the Red Cross set about transforming the way it fundraises.

Change can be as hard to swallow as it is necessary. But positive change, when we understand why and are part of deciding what must be done and how, can unite us. Melanie McNeill (British Red Cross) and Mark Cook (11 London) will share the steps they took to build a foundation of objective insight with and for the fundraising team to take brave decisions together. In this session, they will share the collaborative approach they took to portfolio analysis that has buy-in across teams. And they’ll share key outputs from the analysis along with reflections on the approach they took.

In this interactive session you’ll take away practical tools to apply to your own programme, and get fascinating insight into how BRC are finding their way through some of the most pressing fundraising challenges many charities are facing today.

Melanie McNeill, Head of Public Fundraising Transformation, British Red Cross

Mark Cook, Director, 11 London

Want to get your charity making smarter fundraising decisions, but don’t know where to start?

Or don’t have an Insights team or big budgets to make it happen?

Then this session is for you!

We’ll walk you through the fundamentals of getting started with insights and how to get your colleagues (and boss!) on board. You’ll come away with practical tips, tools and guidance to boost your fundraising results.

Franka Fueller, Head of Public Fundraising, Surfers Against Sewage

Jacey Russell, Data & Insight Manager, Surfers Against Sewage

For the past 9 months, GOOD Agency has worked in partnership with YouGov to monitor what effects the evolving cost-of living-crisis would have on fundraising, if any. Our three waves, conducted using YouGov’s robust nationally representative panel monitored changes in July 22, October 22 and February 23. We present the findings of our latest wave, including conclusions of the long-term study. We match this audience data with surrounding economic context and interviews with senior fundraisers across the sector that paint a picture of fundraising has been affected.

Our research looks at the cost-of-living crisis through three lenses: 

1) The impact on people’s personal financial feeling and the cultural mood; 

2) The hardship and poverty caused by the cost of living crisis in the UK, and how this affects the public’s giving priorities;  and finally

3) The impact on the public’s propensity to give to charity in a variety of ways, broken down by demographic and preferred giving behaviour.

Altogether, the findings present not just a picture of what has been happening in the past year – but insight on which to build a roadmap for creating a future-resilient fundraising portfolio.

Pete Esuola-Grant, Head of Planning, GOOD Agency

With so many organisations forced to restructure as a result of the pandemic and now the cost of living crisis, many charity insight functions have been in flux over the last three years.  

The focus of our session will be on how we can create a culture of insight in the midst of organisational change where most people continue to work online or hybrid.  

We will cover the importance of:

• Investing for growth: The Children’s Society opted to invest in insight and expanded its audience insight function to increase our impact.

• Breaking down silos: Our new structure at The Children’s Society centres around multi-disciplinary ‘activity groups’ where the work gets done and ‘knowledge groups’ where colleagues share learning and line management sits. A structure designed to remove siloes has helped to embed our new insight function into the organisation and enabled more joined-up working and end-to-end insight.

• Building stakeholder relationships: The key to any successful insight function is spending time with our stakeholders, and embedding insight colleagues into key activity so they understand opportunities and challenges and can feed insight in at the right time.

• Focusing on inspiring: Looking outside the sector for inspiration and creating regular insight sessions pulls colleagues to our insight function and creates a dialogue.

• Building new processes that put insight at the heart of everything we do: These include embedding insight within the organisational planning process, promoting a test and learn approach across activity and live performance management via insight dashboards.

Stefanie Tetenburg, Head of Supporter Insight, The Children’s Society

Alice Whyborn, Director of Social Impact Innovation and Insight, The Children’s Society  

How do you know what Insight tools and techniques you could be using? And whether you’re asking the right questions of your data? This session covers what you could and should be doing to understand your audiences, evaluate your campaigns and improve your fundraising decision making. 

Jon and Ruth have a wealth of experience in delivering and embedding insight in charities. Ruth runs BoldLight, working on digital and insight projects for a range of charities. She especially loves qualitative research where she gets to hear from supporters first hand. Jon has spent over 15 years helping charities get the most of their data. Specialising in CRM data his passion is focussed on delivering enhanced supporter insights to fundraising teams around the world. 
 
Together they are aiming to share this experience and give you the knowledge and understanding to develop the use of insight within your charity. Starting from basics they will guide you through the different areas you should be considering and the key metrics and information you should be analysing. 

Ruth Smyth, Planning & Insight Director, BoldLight

Jon Kelly, Data Insight Consultant

Arron will be specifically focusing on how FIFA developed the data department to collect the largest data set in football, while ensuring it was the most robust and consistent data set in world football. Attendees can expect to learn how data-driven insights have allowed FIFA to report on their findings and help all stakeholders make better-informed decisions, ultimately leading to better overall performance.  Focusing on the strategy, the implementation and how FIFA report such data to the world.

Arron Ackerman, Football Performance Analysis Senior Advisor, FIFA

Following the unprecedented years of Covid-19, Macmillan Cancer Support knew that our supporters would be in a different place, both in their lives and in terms of how they perceived ‘Doing Good’. Macmillan understands ‘Doing Good’ as giving time and money for others, which can encompass a range of charitable or social action activities, including fundraising, donating, volunteering, or campaigning. A number of Macmillan’s fundraising products did not seem to be recovering as expected following the lockdowns and so research was required to ‘check in’ with our key audiences and to see what, if anything, had changed.

Takeaways

Macmillan commissioned Thinks Insight and Strategy to deliver qualitative research to provide detailed insights on our key supporter groups and the two overarching research questions below:

• How have audience behaviours, motivations and needs changed over the last 3 years, and since the pandemic in particular?

• How can we win back core audiences? Do the broader changes mean there are opportunities to engage non-core audiences?

This will be relevant to...

The research delivered an overview of the Doing Good landscape and how this has changed since our pre-Covid insight. This session would be of interest to any charity researchers or fundraisers who are looking to reengage with their supporters since Covid and understand what has changed over the last three years. The project indicates some wider trends in the fundraising/Doing Good space for all fundraisers to be mindful of.

Gemma Mehmed, Senior Research Insight Analyst, Macmillan Cancer Support

Hettie Hill, Associate Director, Thinks Insight and Strategy

Now, more than ever it's super important to be getting the most out of donor recruitment campaigns to enable growth in donor base and income with the struggles of the cost of living taking it's toll on donor retention. This session will provide listeners with a best practise guide on key, in depth post-campaign analysis & insight topics to aid future campaign optimisations, along with strategies for testing to get the most out of mail campaigns and improve performance year on year. From simple creative testing, to more exciting tests through exploration of print formats and personalisation, we'll talk through the tests all charities should be doing, and some bolder options for those who are more adventurous.  

Jodie Hanrahan, Media Account Director, Join the Dots

Jenny Broadley, Marketing Manager Donor Recruitment, RSPCA  

Good insights rely on good data. And having good data relies on a good database. In this session we will chat CRM systems and how we can get the most from them to support fundraising and insight. We have a panel of expert speakers who will look at the different stages you might be at with your CRM system: 

• Considering moving to a new CRM: should you or not? 

• Planning or in the midst of a CRM migration: what to think about & focus on. 

• Getting the most from and embedding a new CRM: making it work for you. 

• Getting more from your current CRM: what to do if you’re stuck with what you’ve got. 

Takeaways

The session will give you top tips and things to think about at whatever point you are at. And as you’d expect from the Insight Conference this will focus on data, reporting and analytics.   

Elizabeth Essex, CRM & Data Consultant / Senior Product Owner, Consultant at British Red Cross

Kirsty Neal, Insight and CRM Consultant, Bright Corners Data

Sarina Jesudason, Head of Operations, Crohn's & Colitis UK

Ruth Smyth, Planning and Insight Director, Bold Light (Host)

British Red Cross have shifted their fundraising strategy in recent years, diversifying investment from a narrow set of direct response activities to a much wider and more varied portfolio of channels and campaign types.

Attend this session to find out about how a new measurement framework was developed to address the challenge of measuring more complex fundraising campaigns (including marketing attribution), and how advanced data modelling has been used to support a case for investment by providing clarity on what really drives fundraising income.

The session will include tips on how to:

• structure a measurement framework;
• streamline the data collection process;
• understand the relationship between brand and financial kpi’s; and
• navigate alternative (and sometimes contradictory!) sources of insight on marketing effectiveness.

Jon Moxham, Head of BI & Analytics, British Red Cross

Matt Champion,  Head of Advanced Analytics, Powered By Data

Will Davis, Chief Data Officer, MediaLab Group

Hear how Make-A-Wish identified their audiences using real time social media data. Hear how using Starcount, allowed them to delve deeper to understand their donors motivations and then use it to directly acquire and develop their fundraising plans and products around them.

We’ll tell you more about the data tool and how a digital segmentation tool has been built for the charity sector to identify and target people who support UK wide causes and how this can be applied, like Make-A-Wish, to your fundraising initiatives.

This session would work well for anyone who is keen to understand new ways to undertaken audience research, in particular how it can be practically applied to acquiring and retaining existing supporters.

Katy Mead, Impact, Data & Experience Lead, Make-A-Wish

George Milne, Senior Consultant at AAW Consulting 

Rowena Humby, Co-founder & CEO, Starcount

Katie Wimpenny, Senior Partnerships Manager, Guardian Angel

Jen Crobett, Legacy Manager, National Deaf Children's Charity

Broad demographics and wide question sets can make it really hard to apply generalised polling insight to fundraising work which is rooted in the need to understand people’s values and beliefs. But it is possible and in this session we’ll tell you how.

We’ll take you on a practical journey of our work to show you why our approach to finding out what people really think about the burning issues in the charity sector is different and how the insight could work for you.

We’ll take you through:

• an introduction to the ‘British Seven’ segments and why they are so useful;
• our approach to constructing useful questions and drawing connections between audience responses; and
• lessons that can inform your own work.

Three key takeaways:

1. How the ‘British Seven’ are redefining approaches to segmentation

2. How applying a values-based segmentation to polling can give you better actionable insights than demographics

3. Insights to use today!

Helen Hamilton, Business Director, 11 London

Tyron Surmon, UK Associate, More in Common

A quick walkthrough of using Power BI with data from Engaging Networks to get a deeper understanding of your supporters.  

In this presentation, we will explore how to use Power BI to analyse data from the Engaging Networks platform. With a live demo of what Rennie Grove Peace Hospice Care have done to dig a little deeper into their online supporters.

By the end of this session, you will have a solid understanding of how to use Power BI with Engaging Networks data to gain valuable insights into your supporters and improve your fundraising efforts. Whether you are a fundraising professional looking to improve your data analysis skills or a non-profit leader seeking to optimize your fundraising strategy.

Anne-Marie Henry, Marketing Executive, Rennie Grove Peace Hospice Care

Anthony Fawkes, Director, Actually Data Analytics

David Dawson, Head of Marketing & Communications, Peace Hospice Care

Paul Hayward, Director of Business Development, Engaging Networks

In this session Wood for Trees will present their much-awaited State of the Sector report which is created through their Insight Hub reporting dashboard. Taking data from a number of charity participants, this benchmark will begin by looking back over the data and learnings from 2022. Wood for Trees will then share the first look at Q1 for this year and see if any trends are coming through. 

Rob Dyer, Data Scientist, Wood for Trees

This session will share comprehensive research into the little understood but much-talked-about online gaming/streaming market for fundraising.  As people’s engagement with online gaming/streaming platforms such as Xbox, Playstation and Twitch continue to grow strongly, many charities are rightly – and successfully - targeting these environments to create new forms of community fundraising. 

But our research – conducted for Battersea Dogs & Cats – shows that fundraising success is not easy nor quick, and that the ‘gaming market’ and the typical gamer is more complex than you might think. 

Based on several recent market research studies, the session will share facts on the make-up of the gaming/streaming fundraising market – and the needs of gamers/streamers – to help fundraisers assess the opportunities and investment needed for their charities.  Combined with the experiences of Battersea to break into this market, the session will deliver ‘must see’ content for anyone eyeing up this new fundraising market.   

Takeaways: 

Key facts on the size, donation habits, demographics, value, and preferred causes and content of the online streaming/gaming market 

 ‘Do’s’ and ‘Don’ts’ of fundraising in this area, based on research and the experiences of Battersea Dogs & Cats A view on the organisational requirements and attitudes needed to fundraise from this audience 

Who is the audience? 

Digital fundraisers, fundraising innovation staff, supporter insight and research managers 

Emily Hugo, Innovation & Products Specialist, Battersea Dogs & Cats Home

Steven Dodds, Managing Director, Beautiful Insights

There is value in prioritising an audience centred approach, since engaged individuals tend to do more than one thing with the charities they support, driven by contrasting motivations and revealing a range of different behaviours when they do so.  In this half-hour session we will present insight and segmentation solutions that uncover the deeper dynamics of charitable support which, once embedded in strategy, can drive smarter and more rewarding fundraising and customer journeys. 

We will show you how to immediately set up reliable development strategies for increasing income and engagement from your existing warm base, an approach to segmentation that is useful for assessing the longer-term health of your fundraising products by looking at clusters of activity and secondary behaviours rather than absolute product verticals, how to think and segment laterally to redefine the supporters on your database and how to uncover new and emerging audiences who might be warm to supporting your charity but who may need to be recruited and developed in a different way. 

We hope you leave this session encouraged to use your data to uncover more about the person that is supporting you, their world views, motivations, attitudes, behaviours and appetite to support, rather than seeing them just as a count in a report or a mailing selection. 

Stuart McCoy, Data Strategy Consultant at DM Insight

Key learnings of the day. 

Steve White, Fundraising Data Strategy & Analysis Lead, Alzheimer's Society; and

Chartered Institute Insight Special Interest Group Chair