Today, people don’t trust organisations. Engaging your supporters in this environment is challenging, but presents opportunities for non-profits to leverage meaningful stories of social change. New technology can enable fundraisers and marketers to take advantage of these trends and create new and powerful forms of engagement.

Learning outcomes

• How a lack of trust across the world changes how we need to engage supporters
• How ancient myth and old storytelling frameworks can help overcome this lack of trust
• How new technology can be used to build trust and engage donors and advocates in powerful ways

Starting with an introduction to video content strategy and marketing, we’ll explore how charities can take an effective ‘audience-first’ approach to delivering relevant content throughout their journey –  from unaware passer-by right through to legacy giver. Along the way, we’ll watch and discuss films from charities of all sizes to help connect the theory to practice. We’ll end the session with three important takeaways that can help charities of any size focus and leverage video content in their organisations.

Learning outcomes

• Practical advice for planning and delivering video content
• Understanding how video content can bring long-term value
• Awareness of how other charities in the region have benefited from a strategic approach to video

Who should attend: Great for both large and medium-sized charities, this event is for those interested in marketing and content production. So if you want to go beyond ‘how to make a good video’, and instead effectively harness its power in the long-term, this is for you!

Session style: Our session will begin with an introduction to video content strategy – and why it’s increasingly important to understand and implement common frameworks within charitable organisations. We’ll then screen a number of films to help connect this theory with real-life campaigns. We facilitate a lively debate around the perception and effectiveness of the content – and how this could be applied to our audiences. We’ll end the session with clear takeaways that will help guide the audience in future in order to leverage the power of video content.

All great fundraising organisations can release the emotion that drives them and focus it internally for energy and externally for creating communications that work. The rational, structural bit of fundraising is essential, but it’s the emotional skills that set the best apart from the rest – from both a leadership and donors relations perspective.

Finding the emotional heart of an organisation is how one creates brands and campaigns that allow fundraising to flourish. (An emotional heart is like a USP but more powerful and more fun.) The process of finding the emotional hearts is also the best way to focus and energise an entire organisation around fundraising. In this session, Alan will demonstrate how the process to emotionally inspire your organisation is the same as “going to church”. For most organisations, this is a metaphor for the powerful mix of the question “Why?” and raw storytelling. For some though, it’s literal!

Research has previously shown that the greatest block to great fundraising growth is internal conflict within organisations. These conflicts are between fundraising and other departments and sometimes between fundraising and the board or leadership teams. Conversely, an organisation united behind its fundraising team is the one most likely to transform its income – and have the happiest fundraisers. In this power session, Alan identifies the key paralysing conflicts, pokes fun at the compromises organisations use to fudge the solutions and, most importantly, uses case studies to show what the fundraiser can do to overcome them and create fast, powerful, focused action. If you are, or have ever been, an evidence-based professional frustrated that your plans and ambitions are often compromised by the opinions of amateurs, then this session is for you. If you are taking on a new leadership role, or aspire to do so, it’s unmissable.

Bring your biggest marketing and communications issues, questions and challenges to this interactive, hands-on session in our Resource Café, and explores solutions with Grant, author of the renowned books, ‘Sticky Marketing’ and ‘Stickier Marketing’, among others. On the cutting edge of stakeholder engagement, Grant will unpack solutions and provide a strategic understanding of the new rules of engaging with stakeholders, volunteers and donors.

The development of the worldwide web together with social media and smart phones has revolutionised communication and the way information is absorbed and disseminated. Without a strategic understanding of what these changes mean for organisations, and the new rules of engaging with stakeholders, volunteers and donors, non-profits will struggle to achieve the fundraising goals they desire. This presentation will provide attendees with a critical understanding of how the communication landscape has changed and the implications for their organisations. It will provide the thinking necessary to deliver outstanding fundraising results in today’s digital economy.

Learning outcomes

• A clear understanding of how to communicate effectively in today’s digital world
• Strategies to improve the effectiveness of your communications and fundraising efforts
• Straightforward ideas and takeaways that can be used in your organisations immediately

Who should attend:

• Senior personnel and anyone responsible for setting the strategic direction of their organisation
• Fundraisers
• Marketing and communications roles
• Anyone needing to engage with donors, volunteers or stakeholders

The SickKids VS brand platform has garnered international awards for groundbreaking creative – but did it work? This session digs deep into the results of the campaign – what worked well, what didn’t, and some of the key learnings taken away by the strategic leadership on both the client and agency side of the project.

Learning outcomes

• The ROI of brand equity investments for NFP
• Understanding the “giving mind-set” in order to compel action
• Optimizing the integration of traditional and non-traditional tactics to drive results

Who should attend: Senior marketing and communications specialists, not-for-profit leaders

In an increasingly cluttered marketplace, charities, like corporations, are being differentiated less by what they do and how they do it and more by how they are treating their customers and the experiences they offer.

Customer experience – or Cx – is the new buzz term that is driving corporate engagement strategy around the globe, but the charity sector is being far too slow in keeping up. Lack of time, competing priorities, technological constraints, limited budgets are all too often used as excuses for not adapting faster which is why, in Australia, we are tackling some of the biggest sector challenges by investing in cross sector collaborations that put our supporter experiences at the heart of everything we do.

What these projects have shown is that we need to start listening to our supporters to understand THEIR needs and drivers, so we can create genuinely donor-centric communications and journeys that resonate with each of THEM as individuals. We need to move to creating genuine ‘two-way‘ relationships with donors so that we can collaborate and work together to solve the world’s problems because it’s only when we work ‘together’ that we truly can.

This session will outline the fundamental principles of good Cx management and measurement and the tactics that can be used to design experiences that surprise and delight our supporters. Drawing on 3 case studies from the Australian charitable sector we will demonstrate how:

• Delivering dynamic, multi-touch point, responsive journeys are better at meeting donor needs and expectations and influencing them to do more
• Charities working together to test, share and learn is leading to industry-changing insights that offer to shift the power imbalance between charities and F2F suppliers and to increase donors willing to start a conversation about leaving a legacy gift. Indeed, the charities in the test put their brands aside to tackle the problems we face – together

Agenda

Part 1 – Theory: why we have to change, the importance of Cx, fast data, dialogue marketing and meeting donor expectations

Part 2 – Case study:  how divergent journeys and behavioural economics nudges were used to significantly increase net income for this multimillion-dollar community fundraising event.

Part 3 – Case study: how a multi-charity collaborative trial used touchpoint feedback to understand donor experience commitment and motivation to identify attrition propensity in face-to-face acquisition. What we learned and what is next.

Part 4 – Case study: how three leading Australian charities tested different survey frames and nudges to optimise the bequest consideration pipeline.

Part 5 – Wrap up: key learnings and what you can do tomorrow at your charity to start a two-way conversation with your donors that results in divergent and donor-centric journeys that are designed to engage.

Learning outcomes

• Understand 3 x real examples of how dialogue surveys have been used to increase net income and decrease attrition
• How behavioural economics nudges can be used to influence donor behaviour
• How to correlate O, X and Y data to forecast segment value and ROI to drive better investment

Who should attend: This session is aimed at anyone wanting to improve donor engagement to drive better returns, who wants to understand how to use predictive analytics to make better investment decisions, and who believes that we need to engage our donors in two-way dialogue to build engaging relationships that last.

Session style: The presentation will be a combination of theory around dialogue surveys, technical solutions to creating “create your own” adventure journeys and behavioural economics nudge theories. The session will be designed to maximise participant engagement by showing live dashboards enabled by live technology and by asking delegates to participate in exercises to get them thinking about how they can use fast data to create meaningful relationships that last longer.

One of the biggest challenges facing medium-large charities today is planning, producing and managing their video content for fundraising. The sheer amount of content audiences consume in their everyday lives is raising the bar for charities that want to stay front of mind, but many are not rising to the challenge as internal resources, stakeholders, processes and budgets are not aligned.

In this interactive workshop, we’ll learn about Marie Curie’s 18-month journey from producing sporadic videos to designing and implementing a comprehensive content strategy. Central to this strategy was supporting its Great Daffodil Appeal (one of the UK’s biggest annual fundraising campaigns), while amplifying other activities to engage audiences throughout the year.

Learning outcomes

• A practical, real-life example of how the strategic use of content benefitted fundraising
• How to effectively collaborate with internal stakeholders to plan and integrate content into campaigns
• How to create successful long-term partnerships with your creative agencies

Who should attend: This session would be most useful for communications, marketing and content producers within medium-large charities who are looking to review their content strategy, don’t currently have a content strategy and want to learn more about how to get started, or who have produced some content in the past but are looking to improve impact and ROI.

Session style: This will be a joint presentation between Marie Curie and Raw London detailing how we built a strong and collaborative partnership to raise funds, awareness and understanding of the organisation’s cause. Offering practical advice at each stage, we’ll also facilitate group tasks to involve the audience and help them walk away with tactical ideas. We’ll of course include interesting, relevant and fun videos and encourage discussion at every opportunity.

In this session we will explore the way in which the latest thinking in behavioural economics and decision science will change how you think about donors and the way in which they engage with your cause. The session will draw on original research by =mc and the work of Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. We will share practical examples of how agencies from UNICEF to Greenpeace and from SOS Children’s Villages to the US Olympics team are using decision science techniques to improve their fundraising results.

Specifically, we will explore:

• What behavioural economics is and what it tells us about how we make decisions
• Why we all are predictably irrational – and what that means for fundraising
• How companies use behavioural economics to persuade us – and what we can learn
• The key rules and heuristics that change our attitudes and behaviour unconsciously
• How you can change supporters’ behaviour without changing their minds.

Learning outcomes

• How to frame decisions effectively for supporters
• Understand the key heuristics
• Appreciate the difference of system 1 and 2

Who should attend: A range of professionals

Session style: Interactive activities, chances to apply the learning to your own work, and a chance for questions

By their nature, stories are a collaboration – an intimate relationship between the subject, the teller and the audience. As fundraisers, the better we get at the craft of storytelling, the more likely it is we’ll all be able to mobilise, engage, excite, acquire, activate, ignite, inspire, retain and motivate our fellow change makers around the world.

In this masterclass, you’ll leave the village of your day-to-day work for the forest of creativity – a place where the unexpected, the unusual and the sometimes slightly scary happens. We’ll share lessons from the subtle art of translating the information-dense language of the brain to the emotionally brimming language of the heart. And we’ll explore that magical territory beyond brand, beyond organisational borders, beyond issue-specific communications: the epic story of human progress toward a mythic land where we’re kinder to one another and to the Earth and its creatures. What’s our chapter in that story – as organisations, as a network, as a movement, as fundraisers, as human beings?

Join us for a journey to the heart of those questions, and return to the village of your daily work with a new bag of tricks, a bit of pixie dust, and the power of story tingling at your fingertips.

Learning outcomes

• Learn how to spot and spar with the big stories — the modern secular mythologies that invisibly shape our behaviour, our beliefs, and our sense of what’s possible.
• Learn practical tips for creating better stories, how to chase the rabbit of inspiration, and how to fall down a rabbit hole with a grace that looks like flying.