2015 Bronze Best Use of Email Marketing

RAPP

JustGiving

Social Notifications

The Team
Cathy Calver, Laura Bader, Ben Hammond, Tom Wong, Simon Harwood, Carolyn Stebbings

Campaign overview

JustGiving is the fastest growing social fundraising and crowdfunding platform in the world, with over four million registrations last year alone.

At the heart of its strategy to become ‘the’ social platform for giving, it wanted to help fundraisers reach more people, inspire more action and raise more money.

The campaign used social notification emails to achieve this goal by combining fundraising and technology expertise with the insight that people are more likely to donate, share and support a fundraiser when they either know them or have a strong connection with the cause.

By using smart technology, the campaign successfully increased both the number of users returning to the site and the number of donations made.

Strategy

JustGiving used Hadoop technology to harness the power of its GiveGraph to understand a fundraiser’s relationship to other fundraisers, sponsors or donors. Based on the capture of 85 million nodes, over 400 million relationships and a million social signals a day, the system identified new targets for a fundraiser to reach out to.

But JustGiving also had to give the fundraiser the choice of whom it could contact on their behalf. So before broadcasting any notification emails, it first notified the fundraiser and encouraged them to manage their own network (email distribution) through a process called Social Select. This returned an individual’s JustGiving transactional history, Facebook connect and PYMK (People You Might Know) network, displayed on an Exact Target landing page, for the fundraiser to pick whom they’d like to contact regarding their fundraising activity.

Creativity

Once a fundraiser selected their network, subsequent emails were triggered: 1) A fundraiser has created a page; 2) A fundraiser has reached 80% of their target; 3) A fundraiser has reached their target; 4) A fundraiser has an event the next day; 5) A fundraiser has updated the blog on their fundraising page.

Creatively, the team ensured the notifications promoted the fundraiser and their cause, not JustGiving. Emails had simple but appropriate calls to actions and never explicitly asked a user to ‘give’ or ‘donate’, but encouraged them to view the fundraiser’s page or to share it to Facebook.

With 65% of JustGiving emails opened on a mobile or tablet device, all emails were designed in a mobile responsive framework and broadcast from Exact Target.

Results

The results have been really impressive since going live in Autumn 2014.

Five million notification emails have been sent, with a 47% average unique open rate and 42% unique click-to-open rate showing a strong maintenance of engagement and fundraiser page views. Over a million users have returned to the site as a result.

The very low 0.19% unsubscribe rate shows that the campaign achieved an engaging balance of personalisation and relevance to the recipient.

The average number of recipients who donated rose 52% versus a control group that didn’t receive the campaign, while the average page enjoyed three extra donations.