Teenage Cancer Trust and Wood for Trees

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).

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.