Posted on: July 29th, 2010 by Roger Lawson

Integration is the buzz word at the moment (and has been for a couple of years).  With good reason.

We know that people want to be talked to by charities that understand them as one person who cares about their cause, not a donor, a campaigner and someone who does events for them as three different people.  They want to understand what it is that you do that allows them to engage with them in different ways (as they choose) rather than have three different messages being sent to them.  And they want to feel engaged with you in away that makes them feel needed and valued across the organisation rather than three different numbers on three different databases.

With this in mind we created the ‘Integration Afternoon’ at the recent Institute of Fundraising Convention.  I’m not aware of anything like it having been done before – a session where fundraisers and campaigners were encouraged to come together, learn together and debate together to help everyone, not least the supporters.

If the level of interaction and debate was anything to go by it was a great success (and the feedback forms certainly said this).  And now the slides are all available for you to download / view / distribute as you see fit.

I should state here that we don’t see integration as being about the integration of fundraising and campaigning – more that it is about how you can engage supporters with your mission, your brand, your successes and your campaigns in a way that speaks with one powerful voice.  But integrating Fundraising and Campaigning is as good a starting point as any and the most pressing issue for many people.

Matthew Sherrington kicked us all off by inspiring us all with the opportunity that good intergration offers and challenges us to talk about some of the issues that we all face when trying to develop more integrated supporter experiences.  We all know that Fundraisers are only interested in creating emotional engagement and plan everything months (sometimes years) in advance and that Campaigners are always right, have enough stats to win twenty arguments but couldn’t plan what they are having for lunch.  As Jonathan Smith, Head of Campaigns for Save the Children put it, “Fundraisers need to lighten up, Campaigners need to tighten up.”  Matthew discussed some of the issues in his introduction.

My role was to provide the consumer insight.  Those of you who know me know that I could talk endlessly about these areas, but I restrained myself to three brief introductions to three relevant thoughts.

Firstly I discussed the changing needs that people are looking to satisfy – particularly how the growing experience economy is showing that people are willing to pay a premium to have an experience rather than simply consume a product.  Given that we only offer experiences, I believe this way of thinking to be vital.

A bit later on I picked up on the theme of what people want again, by looking at our experience on motivations for support and the values that drive all our attitudes and behaviours.  This was followed by a quick introduction to the idea that we all make emotional decisions first, and so we need to engage people emotionally with our causes.  Did you know that we all have three brains?  Read this and you’ll see the impact this has.

For me the highlight of the afternoon was listening to Cathy Anderson from Greenpeace, Karen Rothwell from RSPB and Jonathon Smith from Save the Children talking about their experiences.

Firstly, Karen talked about the RSPB’s learning from the Letter to the Future campaign.  This fantastic campaign (which I’m proud to say The Good Agency worked with the RSPB to develop) was full of emotion, has so far engaged around a quarter of a million people, has provided an effective advocacy platform and is helping recruit and develop members.  Does anything get more integrated than that?  Karen’s brutally honest presentation shared both the campaign’s successes and the learnings that it has generated.

By the way, if you’re not yet one of the ¼ million people who have signed the Letter to the Future, please do so now.

Cathy talked about how Greenpeace use a social psychology model to engage people.  This is about understanding the social pressures that influence our opinions and attitudes.  She talked about the 90:9:1 model that I have blogged about recently.  This was all brought to life with the most fantastic Greenpeace stories showing BP, Nestle and Heathrow campaigns that left us all wishing that we had the guts to do what they do.

Matthew then followed this up by giving us some planning tools and using his Oxfam experience and how he applied it to Greenpeace USA’s campaign plans.  Useful stuff.

Finally Jonathon talked about his experience at Save the Children.  He showed us how campaigning is being combined into a more traditional fundraising organisation with tremendous results.  I particularly liked the way that the campaigns have been developed to meet the profile of the audience that they are talking to giving the examples of the Knit One, Save One campaign (asking older members of the Save the Children supporter file ot knit a hat for a child in Africa) and the Gaza campaign from early 2009 which engaged an entirely new audience for Save the Children.

Looking back, it’s always important to look at what we learnt.  I hope that we managed the right mix of educating, challenging, inspiring and giving tips.  As ever, we had a lot of content to cover and didn’t allow enough time for the discussion / break-out sections.  So maybe we’ll run something similar again and address this – watch this space!

By the way, this is only my view – if you attended please do feel free to add your thoughts in the comments section below.