How Platypus helped Haven House Children’s Hospice develop a supporter-centric approach to digital fundraising

Haven House’s mission is to provide specialist care and support for children with life-limiting or life-threatening conditions and their families

The charity is committed to using digital as a key tool for engaging and growing their supporter base, but felt that it did not have the resource to take it forward.

We delivered a digital fundraising review, identifying key challenges and opportunities to help Haven House build towards success.

The challenge

Haven House does brilliant work bringing specialist care and support to children who experience life-limiting or life-threatening conditions.

They knew that they needed to improve their digital delivery, with the goal of utilising digital to fundraise more effectively. They knew they were committed to digital, but they didn’t have a strategy in place, and needed help setting priorities.

So they approached Platypus to help them create a plan.

What we did

We knew we had to understand the way Haven House does digital – how they think about it, talk about it, and do it. How their team, budgets, and resources create challenges and opportunities for the charity.

So we planned a series of interviews across the charity. We spoke to stakeholders from a range of teams and from different levels of seniority.

We distilled our interview notes into common themes. This helped us understand what the key pain points are across the organisation.

We compared the findings to what we know about how other charities deliver digital, and our experience of best practice.

Finally, we delivered a full report outlining our findings and recommendations.

What we achieved

We found that teams at Haven House were really keen on digital, and really eager to learn and grow. Their audiences were really engaged in the work that they did, and the way they talked about it – but they just needed a more joined-up approach to asking them to give, and better systems in place to track and measure this.

Our detailed discovery and analysis process led to three key recommendations:

Create a unifying digital strategy. This would help to unite its digital work under common goals, which the fundraising and communication teams could meet together.
Improve tracking infrastructure. Solving this would give the team more accurate insight into what’s happening across their digital channels.
Create a supporter-focused approach to marketing. This strategic shift for marketing and fundraising would lead to more supporter acquisition and retention alike.

We provided them with a roadmap that broke specific recommendations down into timelines and priorities. We equipped them with a guide to developing a strategy, and gave them the tools and thinking to develop a supporter-centred approach to digital.

Haven House is excited to get started on the recommendations in 2022, with a focus on building their digital capabilities.

Teena Antoniou, senior marketing manager at Haven House, said, “We were delighted with the report that Platypus created. They worked with the team really well and it’s been a great help to have the review to hand as we’re expanding and prioritising our digital fundraising at Haven House.”

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