It’s a New Year, making it the perfect time to reimagine alternative ways you can make waves with your charity’s important work.
No matter how grand or modest the campaign, fundraising is essential to keep charities going from strength to strength during tough times.
For example, in 2023, 60% of people in the UK struggled to give to charity compared to the year before due to the cost-of-living crisis.
With the mountainous task of trying to secure and increase funds, it’s therefore no surprise why charities lean on outsourced, specialist companies to help boost income. Not only this, but agency support can also see charities maximise their internal resources and cement strong relationships with new and existing donors.
What are Fundraising Services?
While it may seem niche, fundraising services are pretty broad!
For example, there’s everything from consulting and strategic planning right through to call handling and fulfilment management.
In our case, the fundraising sector is one of Mango’s largest, where we deliver everything from small to large scale telemarketing campaigns, encompassing everything from response handling, live chat, email, to good old reliable telecon!
We are so fortunate to play a part in supporting fundraising for so many lifechanging organisations locally, nationally, and internationally.
Here’s a few ways we do it, and how these services can help maximise your charity’s intake and overall operations.
Telephone Fundraising
Telephone has long been at the heart of fundraising, providing a direct connection between supporters and their chosen charity, and vice versa. We usually divide telephone campaign types into inbound (supporter to charity) and outbound (charity to supporter).
For inbound campaigns – which relate to calls being made by supporters in response to charity appeals such as telethons, newspaper ads, direct mail etc. – it can be difficult to estimate impact and volume. Having an external fundraising team that acts like an extension of your team can help in many ways, such as:
- Saving the charity money
- Giving inhouse teams more availability to work on other upcoming projects
- Boosting answer rates by accepting calls on your behalf
- Establishing relationships with supporters
- Processing one-off donations and upgrading existing Direct Debit amounts
- Capturing data to expand the charity’s donor database with full compliance at the forefront
As well as taking the weight off, giving your wider team peace of mind and allowing you to better focus on other essential tasks to optimise success.
With outbound campaigns, this type of fundraising service involves reaching out to supporters to re-engage lapsed donors, upgrade monthly donations, or even just say thank you for previous giving.
This is a specialist type of campaign which requires an experienced team. At Mango, our team are highly skilled and trained to interact with supporters in a friendly, effortless and considerate way, something that can reap plenty of great rewards for charity clients.
Fulfilment and Response Handling
Charities make a huge impact through their investment in print communications (such as door drops and direct mailings).
However, with this successful method, comes a lot of careful steps that need to be mastered to ensure a prompt and seamless service – something which, without external support, can put a strain on a charity’s internal operations.
That’s where charity fulfilment and response handling services come in to help.
From printing and packaging right through to payment processing and posting returns – fulfilment and response handling are intricate procedures which need to be perfected by a team with expert knowledge and experience.
In our time, we have seen charities come to us to make use of this type of fundraising service for the following purposes:
- Storage of branded merchandise and promotional materials
- Printing, picking, packing and posting
- Data entering and validation in-line with GDPR and ISO 9001 standards
- Payments e.g. managing cheques and linking with credit cards processors to take donations securely
- Reporting e.g. bespoke income reports and copy scans for full transparency and insight
Whether your charity requires ad hoc or full-time support with this fundraising area – we understand that every little helps – and that’s why Mango offers a flexible model, meaning that we can always quickly adapt and give you the peace of mind that, as your fulfilment and response handling partner, we will take care of all your needs.
Find out more about response handling by checking out our blog: What are Response Handling Services? + 3 Benefits
SMS Fundraising
Fundraising via text message has long been a staple for its speediness and ease of use for the supporter. For the charity, it’s a modest technology tool that’s effective, inexpensive and practical.
Fundraising efforts using texting services achieve a 45% response rate, making it a key focus for charities big and small to implement. With SMS fundraising being a high demand yet specialist area, many charities seek additional help from a third party like us to ensure everything is covered from writing message contents, segmenting distribution lists, following compliance and conducting call backs.
At Mango Direct Marketing, we have worked with lots of charities across the world to create and deliver tailored, integrated SMS campaigns that generate positive, tangible results.
With this, we can assist at any capacity – whether it be giving advice on SMS strategies to implementing our intuitive tech to help you see an instant ROI boost.
At Mango, our extensive services give charities the freedom to concentrate on achieving their goals and missions, while we take care of the rest. If you are considering lightening the load by outsourcing a fundraising service agency, then feel free to talk to Mango and we’ll give you a full rundown of how we can help.
