Battersea Arts Centre’s openness to trying new, digital ways to fundraise was instrumental in helping the charity recover from a devastating fire, as Kane Moore explains

We’ve been collecting online donations for a quite a while now. Using Spektrix as our box office system, we can give people the option of making a donation at checkout with ticket sales. More recently, we’ve been looking at how we can offer supporters more ways of giving. 

Through the box office system, we’ve been trialling various options for online donations; for example, what happens if you raise the amount of the opt-in donation, and how you can tether the amount of the donation to the amount they’ve got in their basket (so if they are purchasing £100-worth of tickets, the suggested donation amount will be higher than someone who’s got £20-worth of tickets in their basket). We have also been testing whether people are more likely to donate if their donation is going to a specific project or activity. 

Simple process

It actually takes very little time and resource to test this kind of thing. My colleague Anne is specifically focused on individual giving and memberships and, working with our communications and digital team, she will set the amount or the option to be tested. Generally we will trial something for a one- or two-month period, and compare the results to previous giving levels to see whether it’s had a positive impact and whether it’s something worth continuing with.

Even with a small pool of donors, you can get an idea of what fundraising methods and techniques work more effectively than others. One of the things we look at it the percentage of people who, when checking out, actually put a donation on top of their ticket sales. When we recently tested increasing the suggested donation amount according to the size of a customer’s checkout basket, that was quite positive: the takeup was quite good at the higher end.

Over the last year or so, we’ve also been trialling the National Funding Scheme’s DONATE platform, to see how it sits alongside existing fundraising messaging, and to test out ways of using their platform as part of a push to encourage micro-donations from audiences and to better communicate our status as a charity. 

Immediate need

In March of this year we suffered a major fire, which destroyed our iconic Grand Hall. 

We were immediately overwhelmed with thousands and thousands of messages of support – on Facebook, Twitter, through email – from people from across the globe who had a connection with our venue. Many wanted to make a donation but, without a specific campaign page running, were giving through the ‘Support Us’ section of our website. We realised, within the first few hours, that there was an immediate need to set up a campaign centred on the fire. 

However, without easy access to computers (our offices were destroyed in the fire) and other urgent priorities at the time, we did not have the capacity or resources ourselves to get this up and running. 

Within a few hours of the fire starting, I got in contact with William Makower at the National Funding Scheme to see if they could help us to set up a campaign. Brilliantly, predicting I would be in touch, they had already built a draft campaign page, pulling photos from the online press. 

Fast response

We quickly worked with them to get the page live, giving our amendments over the phone, and then, with help from some of our closest supporters, hooked in the campaign to the #bacphoenix hashtag, which was already gaining momentum through social media. Our communications team also were able to get onto our website to redirect supporters through to the campaign page. 

The campaign page proved to be an extremely valuable resource in communicating what was happening, and what our needs were as we started to understand the damage (physical and financial) from the fire. We were able to easily update the page in the days and weeks following the fire, to keep it current in the minds of our supporters as well as show them the impact their donations were making in the centre’s recovery.

Keeping in touch

From our perspective, it was hugely important that we personally stayed in touch with the 3,000 people who donated or offered to help. The page was set up to ask those who donated digitally to briefly share their contact details with us – and the vast majority of donors did this. This meant that beyond the automated thank you emails, we were able to download the contact details of these people and send out individual thank you emails from our artistic director David Jubb. 

Furthermore, we have continued to stay in email contact with everyone who supported (and provided their contact details), and we plan to keep them updated over the next year as we develop our plans for rebuilding the Grand Hall. 

We have found that the digital campaign offers us huge opportunities for retention and stewardship – much more so than if we had the ability only to accept only cash donations, where you can’t really have a follow-up conversation with the donors unless they become a member or become more actively involved in other ways. The opportunity to create longer-lasting relationships with our digital givers will undoubtedly be of huge value as we move forwards.

Digital = visible

To date, the Phoenix Fund has raised nearly £820,000. Of this, some has been directed to immediate short-term costs resulting from the fire (rehousing shows, getting offices up and running, additional staffing) which couldn’t be covered by insurance, and some to operational challenges from losing the Grand Hall. For example, our insurance covers two years of business interruption, but we anticipate the Grand Hall rebuild to take three-and-a-half years to complete. We have also started conversations with many of our existing funders who want to help.

Through the DONATE page alone we raised close to £80k, including Gift Aid. We have raised about the same again through donations on top of ticket bookings on our website, and through cash donations after shows; a further £46k through our fundraiser at the Southbank Centre; and £100k from Battersea Power Station. I don’t think any of these donations would have been possible without the campaign page and social media, which gave visibility to our cause. 

The additional £1m pledged from HM Government (with half directed to our building redevelopment project, which was not affected by the fire) also would have been far less likely to happen without the huge public support shown.

The love and affection shown for Battersea Arts Centre in the days and weeks following the fire shows the special place our organisation and our 120-year building holds for so many people, both close to home and further afield. The success of our digital fundraising campaign proved crucial for us. But it also makes a really powerful case for cultural institutions in the UK today and the breadth of public support. Digital fundraising is going to be increasingly important as a way of not just raising funds but also articulating our charitable status and demonstrating how much the public value the arts. 

Kane Moore is head of development at Battersea Arts Centre

https://www.bac.org.uk/