Connecting to Our People
Fundraising Innovation Sprint #3
The Fundraising Innovation team runs a sprint every couple of months to quickly test a new feature of a product in our pipeline or to take on a problem from someone in the British Red Cross.
Recently, we ran a sprint around the latter: we were approached by one of the Global Surge managers (the guys who are deployed to respond quickly to crises around the world) who wanted to see if we could put our supporters / donors in direct contact with our staff & volunteers on the frontline to show them exactly what we do and build a real connection.
This was a challenge that fit nicely with recent findings from our current insight cycle around Millennials, where many of the people we interviewed mentioned how much they trusted the NHS as they really admired the passion and sacrifice of the doctors and nurses working there.
And so our objective was born:
How could we develop a product that would connect our supporters to our frontline staff and volunteers in an authentic way in order to build trust.
How the week went
On Monday we started off by interviewing experts from around the BRC to understand what challenges we face in connecting our supporters to our frontline staff and volunteers. We used their comments to set ourselves a focus for the week and came up with a few questions that we wanted to have answered on Friday. We also, individually, created several potential solutions to our challenge.
On Tuesday we spent time reviewing and voting on the concept solutions, and made decisions on which ones we wanted to experiment with to solve our challenge. Once we made our decision, we created a detailed storyboard for the prototype.
On Wednesday and Thursday we bent time and space to create a high fidelity prototype and planned out the interviews for Friday.
You can check out the prototype here: link to the prototype (click the play button in the top right of the screen).
On Friday, we tested the prototype with 5 potential users. We know how difficult it is to get people at short notice to donate their time, but every interviewee was a goldmine of feedback and they’ve really given us a good steer on how to improve the product going forward.
Let’s quickly look at the long term goal from this first week and our initial sprint questions.
Sprint Questions
[KEY QUESTION] Can we find the right fundraising hook / business model for this product? Yes (maybe not the right one but we have some options).
- Regular gift (subscription) — there was almost an expectation from the users we tested with that this would be a subscription product that they would pay to access.
- Virtual gifting — the virtual gifting options and their relevance to the problems of the situation really resonated with our users.
- Crowdfunding — a few of our users mentioned that they would be interested in contributing to a bigger donation ask which has more impact for our beneficiaries. An interesting avenue to explore.
Can we make the content choices supporter / data driven, not BRC “this is how we do it” driven? Sort of.
- We tried a personal tone of voice in the messages which really landed well
- The thank you message after the donation struck a real chord with all the users
- More work would need to be done around validating the type of content communicated and the tone of voice
The solution
The solution we came up with was Candid: a messaging platform that connected our supporters directly to the people working on the front line. Users would choose the humanitarian of their choice based on their profiles (in this case ‘Carlos’) and sign up to receive text, photo and video updates from them.
During moments of real crisis, the messages would have asks for donations, pointing the users to a virtual gifting page where they could choose to buy an item relevant to the crisis they were receiving messages around.
Quick Points
The overall concept was very well received by all interviewees — we really felt that we had answered the overarching question of how we could connect our supporters to our frontline staff & volunteers!
What worked
- None of our users had ever seen this form of engagement and really liked the personal feel to it.
- They all felt very connected to ‘Carlos’ and his challenges out in Brazil.
- The ask for a donation felt really natural and relevant to the situation, and the inclusion of virtual gift options resonated well.
Challenges
- It took a while for people to grasp exactly what the concept was — only really once they got on to the WhatsApp messages did it really click.
- There was some concern around how frequently they’d be receiving texts. They didn’t want to be inundated with messages and they also didn’t want to be taking someone away from their actual job for too long.
- There’s still some uncertainty around whether or not it would be a two-way dialogue (and whether that would even be feasible at scale).
Next Steps
We’ve mapped out our key uncertainties as a result of the user testing and have come up with three high-priority questions:
- What is the business model for this?
- Are we doing one way or two way communication?
- Are we allowed to do this [in the BRC]?
Are we allowed to do this?
Ben will be speaking to some of the key decision makers over the next week or so to understand first whether they think we would be able to do this from a feasibility perspective within the BRC.
What is the business model for this?
If things still seem positive, then Alex will look into developing some business models to understand whether any are particularly profitable and worth pursuing over others.
Are we doing one way or two way communication?
Bethan is doing some research into WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger to understand how we might use these platforms for the product and she’ll also be looking into the wider sector for examples of how they’ve been used elsewhere.
So that wraps up the sprint week. Now it’s time for the real work of potentially developing this into a real product — we’ll keep you updated with how things progress!
