Blood Cancer UK improve thanking & processing
Charities
Results & ROI
- Reduction in time taken to thank supporters from thirteen days to same-day
- Reduction in time spent coding and allocating income on database
- Backlog of 260 JustGiving fundraising pages removed
The client
Blood Cancer UK is the UK’s leading blood cancer charity, funds world-class research. It provides information, support and campaigns for those affected.
The challenge
A recent structural review of the Supporter Relations function resulted in a new team being established in Edinburgh, replacing a London-based Supporter Care Team (SRT). To support this transition a standardised process for Income Process and Thanking needed to be developed to clarify roles and responsibilities and improve supporter experience, across all income streams.
The approach
The review looked at all areas of income processing with the main driver being the very long elapsed time between a supporter being acknowledged for their income related activity e.g. making a donation or setting up an online fundraising page.
Value Stream Mapping of the process revealed very little time was spent actually writing the thank you and identified numerous handovers between teams, this impacted the capacity of multiple teams and led to delays in thanking. In addition a confusing coding structure meant that allocating income to the appropriate activity was time consuming and resulted in errors. This in turn impacted on the supporter experience and fixing errors consumed SRT capacity. Lastly a lack of criteria for leads being passed onto a relationship manager meant everything was passed on, yet, very little was actually followed up.
The process redesign focused on the supporter experience, reducing handovers and developing a standardised approach. A clearly defined coding structure was agreed to reduce ambiguity when allocating income. The requirements from relationship managers were clarified and used to develop dashboard reports. This has reduced the SRT time spend passing on information and allows relationship managers to pull leads when they have capacity to develop a new relationship.
The benefits
- With the time saved by removing activity which bore no impact on supporter experience, the team are now able to personalise each ‘thank you’
- The Finance team had taken on tasks equal to 30 hours work per week, these tasks moved into SRT giving Finance back capacity to complete other key functions. SRT also reduced the time taken on these tasks be 33%
- Information Centres were set up leading to a better understanding of performance and removal backlogs
“The work with Ad Esse has been critical to improving how support to those who generously fundraise for Bloodwise and to ensure as much of their donation as possible goes to funding life-saving research into blood cancer. Lean improvement work has delivered a single, standardised process with less waste and the supporter at the heart of the process.
All our internal teams are happier, significantly better able to manage their work and spend less time fixing problems.”
Rohan Putter, Director of Fundraising & Marketing