Connecting the nonprofit donation journey

Making an impact

As a part of the largest humanitarian network in the world, the Canadian Red Cross (CRC) provides essential support to people and communities across Canada and around the world in times of need. The organization provides health services, first aid programs, education on violence prevention, and support to those impacted by emergencies and disasters.

Established in 1909, CRC is primarily funded by public donations. During its 2022 fiscal year, the charity brought in around $95 million in fundraising from the public. “We are reliant on public donations to run our programs in Canada and all over the world,” said Andrew George, Director of Direct and Integrated Marketing at CRC. “My main priority is revenue and making sure we meet our fundraising goals.”

Siloed channels and visibility constraints

CRC has numerous channels where donation revenue flows into the charity, including its website, email, SMS, telemarketing, direct mail and its contact center. With these touchpoints working independently of each other, the organization lacked visibility into the donor journey and the ability to create a seamless customer experience. And CRC couldn’t see where or why donor fallout was happening. It wanted to leverage journey analytics capabilities to identify and reengage with donors who abandoned their carts during the donation process.

“We had a major channel silo issue, particularly with our direct marketing channels,” said George. “All of the channels did a good job of engaging and converting donors, but nobody had any view on how it all worked together. It led to an incongruent donor experience.”

The CRC marketing team wanted to integrate data from all its customer touchpoints into one view so it could see how donors were interacting with the organization — across channels and over time. Its goal was to visualize the donor journey and link donor behavior to key operational and experience metrics. With limited resources, any solution they chose had to be user friendly, so it wouldn’t require the work of data scientists, while also yielding a high return on investment.

“As a nonprofit, we are under tight controls over how we spend money,” said George. “Before we invest in new solutions, we have to be able to demonstrate impact.”

Connecting the dots

After an initial search for customer journey analytics software, CRC evaluated several solutions and ultimately selected Pointillist. “We saw that Pointillist could ingest and aggregate data from multiple platforms, analyze donor behavior to maximize contribution efforts and help control costs across all engagement channels, where other solutions couldn’t,” said George.

The CRC team introduced the concept of journey analytics to the rest of philanthropy and how it differed from some of the other analytics already in place. “We had to show them how they could more easily achieve their revenue goals by moving from disconnected, single-channel analyses to analyzing donor journeys,” said George. “Pointillist allowed us to show quick wins and build hypotheses really quickly.”

CRC started out by identifying how its business priorities aligned with donor priorities. Then, they used Pointillist to integrate interaction data from their donor website, marketing campaign system, contact center, CRM system and email software. This enabled CRC to fully visualize the donor journey.

“We use Pointillist to visualize donor behavior,” said George. “We can reveal the actual paths that donors would take across channels over time, and not just how we wanted them to do it, but the way they actually did. We’ve been able to see how donor behavior impacts our key performance indicators like revenue, lifetime value, conversion, churn and retention. Pointillist has enabled us to improve business performance and drive better donor experiences as well.”

By combining prospect and repeat donor engagement data into a single platform, CRC was able to understand which journeys led to successful revenue conversion while also understanding failed efforts. This way the team can engage with donors individually at optimal points along their journey, using the most effective channel, like SMS or email, to improve outcomes.

Empowering better decision making

The CRC and Pointillist strategy targeted donor attribute behavior, contact center interactions and website traffic associated with campaign efforts for prospect and repeat donors to increase revenue while controlling operating costs. As a result, CRC has achieved new and unique insights from this customer journey management strategy.​

For a charity, finding automatic recurring donations is of the utmost importance; however, lapsed donations are a frequent occurrence on a donor lifecycle — and therefore a top priority for nonprofit organizations to reengage with these donors. CRC wanted to improve operations and experiences for customers to reactivate their recurring donations more easily. Its analysis focused on understanding the fallout points (the step at which donors ended their recurring donation journey), the operations behind reactivation and how they could be improved. As a result, it discovered two key problem areas in the donor reactivation journey: failures to reach out to all qualified donors for reactivation and operational gaps where donors who confirmed weren’t reactivated. This analysis showed that CRC could improve the reactivation rate by 20% by engaging with the right customers based on their behavior.

Another example where Pointillist empowered the CRC team to take action was around a holiday campaign it launched. To increase donations, the team prioritized a creative campaign that would focus on making it more clear how a donation would impact the donor’s community. Instead of increasing donations, the opposite happened.

“After analyzing the journey using Pointillist, what we learned was that this great new experience had doubled the amount of time it took for the customer to make their donation on the website — from about two and a half minutes to nearly six minutes,” said George. “Based on the journey analysis, we decided to stick with a simpler approach for next year’s campaign.”

Quickly maximizing effectiveness

With Pointillist, CRC can make consistent, customer-centric and data-driven decisions — decreasing analysis time from weeks to hours. And this was all possible without the need to hire data and analytics experts.

“My favorite attribute is the speed of Pointillist,” concluded George. “We don’t have unlimited resources like many corporate organizations. Pointillist allows our marketers and fundraisers to test hypotheses and generate actionable insights. The fact that I can now perform an analysis myself in hours without needing someone to write code is huge.”