An 8-week new product development journey to help Four Paws better understand their new potential audiences, and translate that into new fundraising mechanisms and messages which have been tested in the real world.

The Challenge

Four Paws is a global animal welfare organisation that rescues animals in need and protects them. The brand is less well recognised here in the UK compared to other countries where they operate, and struggle to compete with the household UK animal welfare charities. 

The ambitious new leadership team laid plans to grow income and increase the charities supporter base in the UK. 

To help achieve this, they identified 3 areas across Fundraising with the potential for growth, - regular giving, mid value donors and legacies. Our task was to take an audience led approach to designing and testing new ideas across each income stream to find new ways to attract supporters and donations. 

The Solution

We gathered new insights from the target audience by engaging them in a week long online community to better understand their views on Four Paws work, and specifically which aspects they found most compelling. We used that insight as the basis to create:

  1. A shortlist of 6 new regular giving ideas, that we quickly prioritised down to the leading 2-3 to take forward to a prototype

  2. Similarly, 6 new mid value donor propositions that again we prioritised down to the leading 2 to take forward

  3. A set of new legacy acquisition messages that could be put out and tested in the real world

The Potential Impact

They're launching our tests shortly so we don't have any results to share as yet.

  1. Introduction of two regular giving and mid-value products, allowing for diversification of income and creation of a mid-value to major donor pipeline  

  2. Opportunity to align advocacy messaging with fundraising – something the organisation previously assumed wouldn’t garner strong FR results

  3. Opportunity for the FR department to be seen as the game changers and pacemakers of innovation within the organisation

"Good Innovation made what can sometimes be a painful process of developing new ideas, and often end up becoming a redundant project for charities feel so effortless. They’re consistent in remaining donor-centric across all approaches, especially when it can be tempting to revert to business as usual ways of working and thinking. Our organisation now has tangible, data based evidence on how best to deliver marketing strategies across all key income streams." Paula Nyathi, Senior Individual Giving Fundraiser, Four Paws