Bringing together teams for a better supporter experience British Red Cross wanted to improve the onboarding experience of new supporters, creating a strong connection from the outset. By welcoming in a consistent and timely way with relevant, personalised content, the objective was to increase engagement and lifetime value and reduce attrition. Bringing together BRC teams across Supporter Marketing & Engagement, Supporter Experience, Business Intelligence & Analysis, Fundraising Operations and Creative, we not only achieved this objective, but also created a blueprint to be used in the future for the design and automation of new journeys across the Fundraising programme. Value-centred journey design Through a series of deep-dive sessions, the teams agreed the journey objectives, principles and KPIs, captured detailed empathy maps for priority audiences and reached a shared understanding of where the team wanted to take the supporter over that journey both behaviourally and emotionally. We defined 4 key stages within the onboarding journey and agreed the purpose of each of them, underpinned by BRC’s strategic, financial and non-financial audience goals. These stages were then broken down into their specific communication touchpoints working out messaging, channel hierarchy, timing & frequency. The output was a fully-mapped nursery journey across 4 meaningful relationship stages, with a clear focus on the channel of greatest impact. Signal’s support has been fundamental to enable BRC to put supporters at the heart of our communications, with content that is timelier and more resonant with our audiences. Ami O’Neill Supporter Engagement Manager, British Red Cross Journeys that can live in the real world To ensure that the new journeys could be brought to life using the skills, tech and tools available, it was critical to involve colleagues from business insight, creative and data operations during this early planning phase. This operational session explored the feasibility of our plans across a whole host of practical considerations (production formats, data sources, data fields, creative assets, delivery channel hierarchy and integration) to make sure we had removed all possible blockers to the rapid, automated deployment of each of the planned communications within the journey. Automation and optimisation The system receives, standardises and segments data and then automatically composes DM and emails using a combination of creative templates, campaign specific creative assets and personal data. This happens at each of the defined phases of the journey and with no intervention required from the team – a game-changer in terms of internal resource. This approach not only means less effort required for BRC’s team, it also ensures the same business rules for message composition – regardless of channel, which means a consistent experience for supporters whatever their channel preference. With instant access to key metrics via a programme dashboard, the ongoing performance of these journeys can be monitored, periodically reviewed and optimised as needed. A win, win, win. BRC have created multiple new journeys that are aligned to their objectives and have been thoughtfully designed to meet their supporters’ needs in a far more personalised way. The end-to-end journey planning means the supporter experience aspiration has always been aligned with the technology and tools available. And with a fully automated set-up, the teams can spend less time managing rolling campaigns and more time focusing on driving engagement and value. As they go on to map further journeys for more products and life-stages, this new blueprint for journey design and activation will be a valuable tool for the team at BRC. Enabling them to plan effectively, save time and focus on their most important supporter experience goals. Capabilities CX planning Technology consultancy Centralised processing Automation Personalisation Dashboarding Uniting the right experts Even without major tech investment, you can make big improvements to supporter journeys, just by bringing the right experts together at the right time. As the team at BRC found, working with colleagues to understand what's possible using the tech and tools you already have, can lead to great progress.
