Why was Hubbub's Causes right for Northumbria University?

Following the launch of our pioneering Higher Education Without Barriers Campaign in January 2022, we needed a user-friendly interface to process large numbers of online donations from a range of regular giving activities including telethons, direct mail pieces and Giving Tuesday appeals. We had ambitions to greatly increase our regular donor pool and having conducted comprehensive research across the sector, we felt that Hubbub’s online Causes platform could help us to fulfil our aims and objectives. 

To date, the Higher Education Without Barriers Campaign has raised over £2.3M to support those most in need across the Northumbria University community and many of the gifts which have contributed to this fantastic total have been generated through our Causes platform. This shows just how much Hubbub have revolutionised regular giving at Northumbria University. 

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Can you tell us a bit about the impact the platform has made?

Hubbub’s Causes platform has had a transformational impact on our regular giving activities and enabled us to pursue a range of regular giving activities which have appealed to a wide range of our highly diverse alumni community. In the last 18 months our Causes platform has been at the heart of a series of successful telethon campaigns, direct mailings and also played a pivotal role in the University’s most successful Giving Tuesday appeal to date at the end of 2022. 

In addition to helping us generate more support, our Causes platform has also made it much easier for us to track donations, steward supporters in an efficient and effective manner and produce high quality reports which allow us to monitor the progress of different appeals and projects against their targets and relay key information to senior figures across the University community in a simple and timely manner. 

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Are there features of the platform that you particularly like?

Having the ability to fundraise for several projects simultaneously was imperative for us given the multi-faceted nature of our Higher Education Without Barriers Campaign. Hubbub’s Causes platform gave us the ability to do this and create separate donation pages for all six areas of our campaign. These donation pages easily link up to our newly redesigned giving website which has greatly enhanced our user journey and played a big part in our increased supporter engagement since launching our campaign in January 2022.  

The platform’s hidden campaigns feature is also one of our favourites, as it allows you to generate bespoke donation links for different segments of your target audience. This is really important for large scale fundraising campaigns such as Telethons where you are aiming to contact current donors, lapsed donors and non-donors with your campaign ask. Using the hidden campaigns feature gives you the flexibility to alter your messaging to each of these groups and acknowledge their different statuses within the donor pipeline and this more personalised approach yields better results from all supporter groups. 

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What was your experience of working with the Hubbub Team?

The Hubbub Team are fantastic! Their knowledge and expertise have given us the confidence to try a variety of new fundraising approaches which have transformed our regular giving offering and contributed greatly to the overall success of our Higher Education Without Barriers Campaign. The Hubbub team are all extremely supportive and approachable and always go the extra mile to offer timely support and advice which allows us to maximise the effectiveness of our different regular giving activities across the year.

Our quarterly catch-up sessions with the team are always extremely insightful and allow us to regularly assess our performance in a clear and concise manner. 

The team offer a wealth of technical and strategic support and I look forward to a long and prosperous future of working with them to deliver more regular giving success at Northumbria University.