Automating your Christmas tree collection campaign | Dreamscape Solutions

Automating your Christmas tree collection campaign

This year we’re working with Bluebell Wood Children’s Hospice to streamline their Christmas tree collection campaign.

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The hospice and their tree collecting partners have capacity to collect 2550 trees from local constituents with an average donation value of £15 per tree.

Like many hospices, this is a crucial campaign in their annual roster, so maximising income received and reducing cost impacts is imperative.

Increasing profit through automation

Firstly, let’s consider the volume of data that needs to be collected and processed:

  • How many trees
  • Business or domestic collection
  • Where the tree/s are located
  • Approximate size of the tree/s
  • How did you hear about the service
  • Title, first name, second name
  • Collection address (postcode coverage)
  • Billing address
  • Phone/mobile number
  • Gift Aid
  • Donation value
  • Additional donation, help with processing fee
  • Communications consent

Blimey, that’s quite a lot of data to be processing for a £15 donation. As you can imagine, reducing the resources and time required to process this volume of information should be a key factor when calculating the ‘profit’ that the campaign delivers.

Streamlining how this information is record and then stored into a hospices CRM should therefore be a top priority for fundraisers actively seeking to improve value for supporters and the hospice.

On top of this administrative mountain, hospices also have a duty to correspond with campaign participants. From basic receipts to email reminders of collection dates to final campaign totals – Hospices can also see the value of their campaigns further diminished due to communication requirements.

Typical data merry-go-round

Let’s look at how hospices typically tackle the administrative duties of a critical campaign such as Christmas Tree Collections:

  1. Data collection points
    The fundraising team will need to work with the marketing team to update the hospice website with landing pages and data collection forms. Often, this means that the marketing team will need to commission their website provider to create a bespoke form to collect the data from constituents. This adds more time and more costs – detracting from the campaigns value.

  2. Data processing
    The fundraising / data team will then need to extract this information from the website or third-party platform (Enthuse, Eventbrite, etc.) and then import it into the hospices CRM application (donorflex, Raiser’s Edge, etc.).

    This is often caried out in batch imports, or in worst case scenarios, manually entering the data into the CRM. In either case, there is a delay in the process, with time and resource costs detracting from the value of the donor’s gift.

  3. Communications management
    It goes without saying that the hospice will need to send out communications to participating constituents. From basic receipts to service reminders, each time communications are sent, there is more time and costs to consider.

    Often, a hospice will export data from their CRM application and import it into a mass mailing service such as Mailchimp. Data processing regulations aside, this process adds further time and costs impacts on the campaign’s positive outcomes.

A different way of thinking

  • What if there was a more effective way of managing campaign tasks?
  • What if fundraisers could create their own campaign coded donation points?
  • What if collected data synchronised to the hospice CRM in real time?
  • What if donor communications were sent automatically based on time and dates?
  • How much more value would be created if these time and cost impacts were nullified?

These are the questions that Bluebell Wood Children’s Hospice asked themselves and what brought them to use our services.

A hapi hospice

Without the need to change their existing website, BWCH were able to create their own campaign coded donation checkout points, with customised questions (tree size etc.) and recommended donation values.

And because these checkout points used donorflex’s new API functionality, collected data integrated with their CRM in real time, eradicating manual data processing duties.

Using partial and exact match functionality, BWCH were able to automatically calculate which donors were new and which were existing, allowing them to automatically create new constituent records without the fear of creating duplicate records.

Furthermore, our suite of communication automations allowed BWCH to design a range of digital communications sent to participating constituents in the lead up to, and post event.

I can’t reiterate enough the huge impact this will have on reducing administration time and costs for fundraising income!

Kelly Gerrard, Individual Giving Manager, Bluebell Wood Children's Hospice

What’s stopping you improving campaign performance?

Our hapiLite service (used by BWCH) costs from £300 per month, and covers all forms of income generation, including in-memory, campaigns, appeals, events, and peer-to-peer.

This service immediately reduces data administration and donor communication overheads meaning that more of the money you generate goes to delivering improved outcomes for patients and their families.

If you would like to find out more about how Bluebell Wood Children’s Hospice are increasing income generation and reducing costs, get in touch with us today to arrange a demonstration. The time to change is now.

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