Good News from Hear and Say

July 6, 2020 Lachlan Crawford

Hear and Say's Online Giving Day

The impact of COVID-19 saw Hear and Say face significant funding shortages to deliver frontline services for children born deaf or hard of hearing. A design-thinking planning process, evidence-based best practice and data analysis informed an innovative 24-hour Giving Day campaign, ultimately resulting in $240,000+ raised from 500+ individual donors.

Despite urgent financial need, a strategic build-up was applied to gradually shape supporters’ understanding of what was at stake – including emotive, nostalgia-driven communications in the lead-up. This resulted in the single biggest result through a Hear and Say campaign.

Challenges

With an online Giving Day confirmed, key challenges included:

Small pool of active donors; supporters of cancelled events had also not typically donated to other opportunities.
Limited internal digital/matched giving campaign experience or in-house digital technology.
General economic stress created uncertainty regarding our supporter base’s current propensity for giving.

We worked to overcome these challenges through:

A planning process that focused on a people-first, data-driven approach, backed by sector research.
Targeted, well-researched investment in external expertise, including Mycause and Ruby Communications.
Integrated and segmented communications strategy, including staff/families mobilised as advocates and personalised/segmented communications.

Impact

The cancellation of three major fundraising events, coupled with reduced clinical income, necessitated an urgent campaign solution to help bridge our anticipated FY2019-20 funding gap. The financial metrics to measure the Giving Day campaign’s success included: financial result ($240,000+ raised against $200,000 target); total individual donations (500+) and average donation. Other key metrics included number of new acquisitions; growth in gifts; re-engagement of lapsed donors; identification of future major gift prospects; media reach (43 million via 49 pieces) and social media results. Detailed post- analysis is currently underway, which will inform future campaigns.

Click through to the campaign below: