Connecting staff with supporters in a Christmas thank-you campaign helped The National Autistic Society achieve a much-needed cultural shift.
Traditionally, The National Autistic Society (NAS) hasn’t been a fundraising-led charity, but as times continue to get tougher for charities we recognise that we need to grow voluntary income in order to secure the charity’s future.
In 2012, when planning our 50th birthday celebrations, we wanted to do something that would not only show our supporters how much we appreciate them, but that would also kick-start the cultural shift needed internally for us to successfully grow our fundraising.
I’d recently seen the video produced by charity:water to mark their fifth birthday. It showed staff members thanking individual donors by writing personalised letters, emails, calling them on the phone, and filming short thank-you videos. I thought it was a fantastic concept - and one that we could quite easily implement ourselves at NAS.
We decided to establish a dedicated thank-you day, where staff in our head office would call up and personally thank a selection of the charity’s supporters. We got buy-in at a senior level, and set up a cross-functional team. We discussed which supporters to call, driven not just by the direct financial value of those supporters, but also by their importance to the charity as a whole; we felt it was really important to thank our campaigners and community organisers, for example, as well as our regular financial givers. It was a great success and was the start of an annual event for the charity.
A festive celebration
We decided that the best time of year to hold the next thank-you day would be around Christmas, when people (staff and supporters alike) are feeling happy and festive. And so we tied it in with our Christmas party, making it a day of celebrating and of making people feel good about working for the charity.
We laid on a few extra incentives, of course - supplying refreshments and Christmas music. On the day, wearing our Christmas jumpers and with festive music playing in the background, we got busy thanking our supporters.
Some staff members needed a little guidance as to what to say on the phone, and so we gave them a few tips, and even put together a little script for them; however, we told them not to read it out word-for-word but rather to use it as a guide - it was important for us that it felt like a genuine, personalised call, and not a scripted one.
The aim of the phone calls was not to make a financial ask of any kind, but simply to engage our supporters in a conversation about their connection to autism and why they support the charity, to thank them for their invaluable support - and to say 'Merry Christmas!' The importance of saying thank you cannot be underestimated; it makes people feel like they’ve done the right thing in giving, reassures them that we’re very grateful for their gift, and inspires loyalty.
Nice surprises
Last year, with over 60 staff on board on the day, we were able to thank over 3,000 supporters personally, with a further 80,000 receiving a thank-you email with a link to our specially created film. Some supporters were quite taken aback that the charity was calling them just to say thank you, with no financial ask - and that it was our actual staff, which included senior managers and trustees, and not an agency. They really appreciated the personal touch. In fact, a lot of the people I spoke to were people who have benefited from our services, and they said “you shouldn’t be thanking me, I should be thanking you”! Other supporters said “thank you so much for the call, I’d just been considering who to run the marathon for, and I think I want to do it for you.” And some of the major donors we spoke with invited us to come and speak to them in person.
The feedback from our staff was very positive too: they loved being given the opportunity to speak to supporters for the very first time and hear their moving stories.
Bringing people together
It brought our staff closer to each other, too; people were talking to colleagues in other teams whom they’d never spoken to before. Many of them said it was the best team-building exercise ever.
It was really important to us that it wasn’t just the fundraising team making the calls. We encouraged people from IT, finance, HR and other functions to take part. Getting people involved across the charity helps everyone to recognise the importance of our supporters and fundraising. It really has helped us in making a good start towards the cultural shift we want to achieve.
Furthermore, the information we were able to collect during our calls is very valuable - knowing why someone supports the charity, for example, and adding this to their supporter record, can be very powerful when it comes to communications. With our thank-you day now an established annual event, we hope to collect enough information over time that it will help shape our future communications strategy.
Carolyne Coupel is head of individual giving at The National Autistic Society
