Helping charities undergo digital marketing transformation
The North West Air Ambulance Charity (NWAA) is one of the largest air ambulance charities in the country. It covers a vast area of the north of England totalling 5,500 square miles and over 8 million people
Despite being a critical care service, it receives zero government funding.
Every mile covered by the air ambulance, every life saved is funded by the generosity of supporters.
With costs of over £12m every year, it’s a full time job raising all the money necessary to fund the service.
Traditionally the air ambulance has received the majority of funding from older supporters.
In 2021 the charity recognised that to secure its long term future it needed to change this and build a pipeline of younger supporters that the charity could rely on to support them through the years.
As Paul Partridge, Strategic Head of Supporter Engagement and Development explained:
“Our audit identified that we needed to reach a younger demographic. To achieve this, we knew we had to undergo a process of digital transformation.
“Post-pandemic, older generations are also increasingly moving online, so the timing made perfect sense.
“Reaching out to those audiences is key for us.”
NWAA turned to Marketing Yeah! to advise on how to transform a more traditional charity marketing operation for the digital age.
An actionable roadmap for digital change
Our brief was to review every aspect of NWAA’s marketing operations – data, technology, audience targeting, content strategy, web, search and social – and advise on how they should adapt to meet the needs of both older and younger audiences.
We needed to produce workable recommendations that were sensitive to NWAA’s existing organisational structure and ways of operating.
Anything we proposed would need to be implemented step-by-step, to allow time for the organisation to adapt.
The final output was a roadmap for change: clearly actionable recommendations that would allow the charity to meet the demands of supporters both young and old.
Data, tools and systems
A key part of our brief was to identify what the charity needed by way of data, tools and systems to implement the roadmap.
Like most established organisations, NWAA had its fair share of legacy systems.
While each system fulfilled its purpose, the lack of integration between them made it difficult for the team at NWAA to access the data needed to power a successful digital marketing operation.
To resolve this, we identified and cataloged relevant data held across NWAA and outlined how it should be drawn together.
The team at NWAA also recognised the importance of testing and optimisation strategies and the need for systems and technologies that supported this data-driven approach.
As Paul commented:
“You’ve got the larger charities that have the budget to be able to do a lot, whereas we don’t as a charity and so we need to be more cautious with our spend.
“Making sure that we adopt a test-and-learn approach is key for us so that we can learn what works before investing more.”
We reviewed the current systems being used to execute marketing activity and recommended relevant migrations and upgrades to give the team an integrated marketing stack that could support their ambitions.
Throughout the project, our team used our understanding of NWAA’s existing data and systems to ensure the changes we proposed were both practical and achievable.
Adapting products for the digital world
Over successive years, the charity has created a range of ways in which people can support them.
These include entering the charity’s lottery ‘Lift Off Lotto’, taking part in a sponsored event or simply making a donation.
The charity recognised that these products might not appeal as effectively to younger audiences as they do to their existing audience.
Our analysis focused on how these new audiences might perceive the value of each product and what could be done to increase their perceived value.
We proposed subtle, but important changes to adapt these more traditional products to the digital age while minimising changes to the products themselves.
We also identified opportunities to generate income in new ways.
Creating a connected supporter experience
Identifying which internal teams should talk to which supporters, about what and when is one of the most challenging – but perhaps most important – things to get right.
Part of our brief was to recommend how communications could be unified across teams so that the charity spoke to supporters with a coordinated voice.
In partnership with the charity, we developed a strategic framework for supporter communications based on supporter engagement.
Taking advantage of new technologies, the framework identifies the most appropriate communications for individual supporters at every step and enables those messages to be sent automatically.
This new approach allows NWAA to create individually personalised supporter experiences that encourage supporters to become progressively more involved with the charity over time.
Final thoughts
The North West Air Ambulance Charity funds incredible, life-saving work.
Working with the team was awe-inspiring and to be able to support them to secure the future of the charity for decades to come was a real privilege.
Paul Partridge Strategic Head of Supporter Engagement and Development commented:
“Around that whole digital space, we appreciated that we needed to do a bit more and Marketing Yeah! provided us with a very cohesive plan, drawing together all of the elements we needed.
“It was fantastic working with Marketing Yeah!.
“The outputs of the work have most certainly put us in a very strong position going forward.”
“Ultimately they gave us the tools we needed to shape that digital strategy for the years ahead.”