Where does your story begin?

At the University of Leeds, the Regular & Leadership Giving team are focused on raising funds to support students and to level the playing field in terms of the support they receive, whilst making sure that they can all access the same experiences regardless of the background they're coming from. 

Our programme aims to put alumni and supporters at the heart of everything we do, from the channels we communicate through, the case for support, or bespoke asks, we are always thinking about how our donors typically behave and respond.

My team had a target of £1 million in 2023-24 which we exceeded, so for future years it will be about how we can maintain that average and consistency over this. 

Why did you choose Hubbub for your digital fundraising?

In our Regular and Leadership Team a lot comes from individual giving through our mass fundraising programme and what we call our ‘One to some’ programme - which is more of the leadership giving approach. We use telephone campaigns, an extensive direct marketing programme and some digital fundraising and face-to-face where appropriate. 

Our existing platform provider was becoming obsolete, and it was not user friendly in the slightest. The biggest focus for our team is on donors, who we put at the heart of everything we do, so if we didn't have a user-friendly online giving experience that was just not going to cut it for us. 

A key part of our criteria was whether it could look like our University website to have the trustworthiness, plus being able to take regular gifts (Direct Debit and regular by card). We already used Hubbub for our Crowdfunding platform and that had been a really slick and easy process to get all of that up and running. Hubbub provided everything that we needed, could brand it like the University and offered account management. Everything was just really strong and that's why we went with Hubbub for our Causes platform.

What impact has Causes had on your goals?

We've certainly seen an increase in the number of donors converting to a gift once they've gone through to the Causes page. Quite early on we did some data analysis work with the Hubbub team which made a difference. At the time we were linking to the project page from our direct mail, rather than the pledge / donation page, which meant people had to click one step further. It was a light bulb moment when we changed, then we suddenly saw a huge increase in people converting to make a gift! Having Hubbub’s support has been really impactful as we might not have realised. 

May 2023 was one of our most successful appeals that we’ve sent out, where digital giving with Causes was integrated into our wider appeal using telephone and direct mail. Over a third of income and donations received came from people giving online.

Tell us about your experience of using Causes

We've had a lot of feedback on the donor wall element, because that was something that we used to have in-house that was created by the donor relations team, but which is now a feature on the Causes platform. We get quite a bit of feedback that people like that they can see either their name or other people's names.

The usability of it was a huge factor for us, it's really simple and easy to use. It's just a seamless process.

Being able to process donations and put them on our database has been really slick. When creating the pages themselves it's very easy to put the information down to be able to personalise each project, plus working with the support team to make sure that we've got the right tracking links enabled, that's really simple.

What was your experience of working with Hubbub?

I certainly need to make more use of the quarterly review and insight sessions that we have because they are so valuable. We get a lot of information from you guys to be able to make improvements and there's always something that we can test that comes out of those sessions. That's the great thing about being online: you can make a tweak and see straight away the impact that it has. The time that we have with the consultants and others is hugely valuable and strategic. 

It's always been positive and I think I'd go back to what I've said, the insights and the knowledge that comes from the Hubbub team it's just really invaluable.

What advice would you give others? 

I think the biggest piece of advice would be to just give things a go and try. If someone's got a bit of advice or a little tweak, just see what happens. For instance, we changed our strategy quite extensively in about 2018 to be really retention focused which was a huge risk at the time, but it really paid off for us. Our retention stats are now amongst the highest in the sector, if not the highest in some areas, that wouldn't have happened had we not just given it a go to see what happens. 

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