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What’s In Your Heart?

National Deaf Children’s Society had always enjoyed good results from mailings that identified people interested in supporting the charity with a gift in their Will, but found that response rates were dwindling for colder prospects.

Additionally, the change in legislation around contacting existing supporters via the telephone meant that we needed to devise a new mail-based approach to legacy giving.

The Story: National Deaf Children’s Society had always seen good results from DM legacy packs, but as they began to test approaching people who had less of a relationship with the charity, they found that response rates were also dwindling.

At the same time, like many others, the charity found that they were unable to contact many existing supporters via telephone, which had traditionally been one of their main channels for generating enquiries.

The Brief: Devise a new approach to legacy giving for NDCS.

Our Response: Our response was to develop a survey pack that asked about the supporter’s initial reasons for supporting NDCS; what areas of work they were aware of and enjoyed hearing about; how they felt as a supporter and the work that the charity did now and, importantly, how they saw the direction of the charity going forward.

We split tested the new survey pack against a more traditional case study-led pack.

Why it Works: This survey pack came as part of our work with NDCS across the whole of their legacy strategy, including audience insight via qual and quant research, legacy proposition development and testing and end-to-end creation of materials to support a new legacy supporter journey, including a Fulfilment Pack to send to enquirers and a Free Will pack to be used at various points of the journey such as driving initial enquiries from colder audiences as well as to encouraging ‘intenders’ to make or change their Will.

Results: The results were clear: the survey pack generated a ‘positive’ response rate (i.e. people enquiring and not opting out of future communications about gifts in Wills) that was 6 x that of the case study-led pack, and an overall response rate that was 3 x higher than the more traditional pack.

I’ve worked with Black Bear Creative for many years and always been impressed by their professionalism, their flexibility and their ability to dig into a brief and get the best results.
Chris Keating, Head of Supporter Retention

300% increase in responses

I’ve worked with Black Bear Creative for many years and always been impressed by their professionalism, their flexibility and their ability to dig into a brief and get the best results.
Chris Keating, Head of Supporter Retention