Save the Children experiences donor growth with Adobe

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by Samuel Pordengerg Jan 31, 2023 News
Save the Children experiences donor growth with Adobe

There was a race against time to get aid to the country. Save the Children was able to raise £1.5 million for the Disaster Emergency Committee's Ukranian appeal in just two weeks, enough to provide 150,000 food baskets, 220,000 family hygiene packs and 90,000 emergency first aid kits to those most in need.

The charity might not have been able to contribute as much if the invasion had taken place a few years ago. Save the Children used Adobe Experience Cloud for all of its digital content creation, marketing and donations. When the Ukranian invasion happened, the charity was able to provide personalized homepages using Adobe Target, something which previously would not have been possible. Linda McBain is the chief digital officer at Save the Children.

Emergencies are our bread and butter so whatever technology we're on, we always need to ensure it does that. What we saw with Ukraine was, we had a higher volume of returning donors to the site. We don't usually see that with emergencies, people often just give a one-off donation. Because we saw that was happening, we put out a test and offered a different experience if you'd already donated to show the impact of your donation and tell that story so it's slightly different. That increased donation revenue from second donors.

A change in supporter behavior prompted Save the Children to start updating its website. Online donations were increasing while people wanted to interact with the charity over the phone and post. The experience for online donors was poor and donations weren't supported on all devices.

The charity set out to develop a digital strategy to increase and improve the online experience and to engage more supporters with a best-in-class digital experience. McBain speaks.

Our technology set-up was quite lo-fi, I often say everything was held together by elastic bands and Sellotape. We knew that interest in Save the Children through digital channels was growing. We wanted to better be able to harness data to provide more relevant and personalized experiences so we could increase long-term support. That wouldn't have been possible with the set-up that we had before we made that decision.

Experience 

A full assessment of the options was done by the organization. Adobe was able to deliver on Save the Children's ambitions as well as integrate across multiple products. The charity had a good experience with Adobe campaign manager. Save the Children wanted to give their supporters data personalization, so the new technology platform needed to work well with that.

It took 18 months for the Experience Cloud to be up and running. Save the Children had an equivalent to Adobe. It was using the free version of the analytic tool. McBain makes an addition.

I'm not critical of any of those technologies, but the way we had them set up was not right. It was either a rebuild completely of all of that and a consideration of how we better utilize it, or pay for paid versions, or a move to Adobe. All these technologies are very similar in many ways, but it's about what you want to try and harness or how easily they integrate for the customers.

Save the Children decided to go for the latter option, with an Adobe one-stop-shop for all of its digital content, marketing and donation needs. To build a strong support base for Save the Children, the aim was to bring in new supporters, engage current supporters, encourage donations, upgrade them, and get people to donate frequently. McBain speaks.

Ultimately we want someone to take out a monthly gift with us. That's always our ultimate ambition to have that financial knowledge so that we can help children as best we can.

Digital donors

The charity was prepared for the push to digital because of the new technology platform. McBain remembers something.

What we saw overnight was a shift in demand to have much more digital experiences, even from those supporters who might have previously been uncomfortable about that. Where 45% of our total mass income was coming in digitally pre-pandemic, now it's at 60-66%. That shift is not abating, in fact it's increased.

Save the Children's website is now fully compatible with any device a user has, with support for Apple Pay, PayPal and SMS donations, as well as via sites like Facebook orInstagram.

Save the Children saw an 85% increase in website visitors converting into donors after the Adobe implementation.

Save the Children has invested in both technology and people in order to move to digital. Prior to the Adobe project, there was only one person managing, maintaining and editing the website from a content perspective. McBain speaks.

It's a big shift. We've gone on a journey beyond technology here. This is about shaping new skills across multiple teams. Our marketers are all expected to be digital-first marketers, we don't call them digital marketers.

A lot of people were involved in the delivery of the program. Save the Children has a model of devolved content creation which means any team who manages pages on the site needed retraining to understand how they could edit content on the new platform

Our CEO's office might want to update a report, our policy and advocacy colleagues want to post content or our media team want to put the press releases out. It really did touch so many areas of the organization and even if they weren't content editing, we needed to sense check all the new content before we ported it over onto the new site.

McBain's team worked closely with internal comms to ensure a smooth roll out, as well as having digital champion for each team to keep people updated on the project.

I ran a series of lunchtime talks every month through the program and brought in experts from loads of different tech companies to also spark inspiration, getting Google in to talk about user research, and design or brand marketing expertise from people like Innocent.

It was really trying to get people up front to be thinking about what it would mean when the new technology landed so that it wasn't like, 'These things turned up like a space shuttle, what do we do with it now?'

Creating a buzz

The team sat in a central location so other staff could see them and create a buzz so people would be more interested. McBain is thinking about replicating that in the new era of hybrid and virtual work.

Nothing has that same level of visibility anymore. That's my experience in the change with remote work. It'll be much harder now than it was being in the building and going around talking to people all the time about it.

Save the Children has been using Experience Cloud for around five years now and has the same kit it originally deployed as it works well for the organization. One thing the charity would like to see more support for is building more experts, according to McBain.

With the move to low and no code, how does Adobe get its MarTech stack to be as simple and usable as possible, with ease of use for as many different staff roles as possible? It's all about simplifying and meaning you can empower staff to do their own work easily without loads of training.