The client is one of the global leading development and humanitarian relief organisations, dedicated to addressing the causes of poverty worldwide. They work in a number of areas including transformational development, emergency relief, promotion of justice, strategic initiatives and promotion of public awareness. Their main fundraising activities are child sponsorship programmes and charitable donations, alongside charity gifts, and fundraising and advocacy events, among others.

 For many years, the NGO's main fundraising strategy has been door-to-door fundraising. Faced with increasing competition and with online donations constantly growing over the past decade, the client tasked our team with the challenge of developing a comprehensive online strategy, including website development an ongoing digital marketing promotion, with the final objective of digital acquisition of child sponsors and donors on an ongoing bases.

Another key objective was to increase brand awareness. The challenge was for our team to create a digital design and strategy to increase public awareness among relevant target groups and personas and at the same time stand out from competitors, cutting through the noise of increasingly pervasive online advertising techniques. 

 Sponsorship is a long-term commitment of a sponsor to support a child and their communities through their developmental journey. Choosing an organization to sponsor a child entails research, consideration and trust building. For this reason, we decided to run a permeating and comprehensive digital campaign that established the client as a global leader organization in child sponsorship programmes and emergency response, and conveyed the imagine of a trusted non-profit brand in the controversial scenario of charities events that have eroded people’s trust in the NGO sector in recent years.

The website was redesigned to provide the best online experience from acquisition to retention, including increasing conversion rates, engagement, improved search engine ranking, usability, mobile experience, social media integration, and simplicity.

The main objectives of the digital marketing strategy were to increase brand awareness and lead generation. The objectives were pursued through a comprehensive set of goals and KPIs distributed across a number of digital marketing channels and tools. We profiled and targeted the audience though sophisticated targeting techniques, including demographic characteristics, locations, behaviours and interests online.

Digital marketing activities included: 

We established a set of metrics and key performance indicators to monitor and report in order to constantly improve channels performance, prospects journeys online and conversion rates on the website. Performance and conversions were tracked through E-commerce and specific sets of dimensions and metrics in Google Analytics, while search engine organic performance was monitored though Google Search Console and SEO Moz, among others.

We run bespoke campaigns for different initiatives and fundraising events with goals including events registrations, newsletter subscription, movie screening registrations, gifts purchases online, donations for emergencies etc. 

The digital strategy redefined the NGO's market position and became one of the client’s main source of sponsors and donors, establishing and consolidating the charity's position as a leader non-profit organization.
Retention digital marketing strategies reduce the drop-off rate of existing sponsors by 50%
The cutting edge digital marketing techniques attained global recognition from the NGO's International headquarters, with the local office becoming the leading regional office in Europe for the use of Integrated Digital Marketing techniques.
In addition to sponsors and donors, bespoke digital marketing campaigns also achieved excellent results in the acquisition of registrations to fundraising events, newsletter signups, lead generations and charity gifts sales. Lead generation in particular became one of the main conversion strategies, with a conversion rate 8 times higher than other acquisition strategies.

Our team's agile and dynamic working process facilitated the setting up and launch of donation campaigns immediately after humanitarian emergencies - such as the Nepal earthquake or the Syrian refugee crisis – when people are more likely to donate following widespread news publicity.
Website Traffic, conversions, lead generation, engagement, social media presence, search engines ranking and website authority have all increased and digital activities are continuously monitored and optimized to maintain and improve the NGO's digital performance.