This edition of Rally Reads comes from Antonia May Cross.
It’s a good one. We first met Antonia on the internet and have subsequently met her in real life. We get inspired by people like Antonia because they give out massive get shit done vibes.
Thoughts on Digital Mobilisation in 2025 for charities and campaign groups in Romania.
Twitter is dead to us. We’ve moved on. We think we all should.
In this edition the always awesome Zoe Amar writes about the books that have had an impact on her and her career. Enjoy.
This year Rally was proud to collaborate with M+R to bring their Digital Benchmarks Study to the UK for the first time. As we’ve said before, comprehensive, accurate digital benchmarks help everyone in the sector to raise their ambition and gain a better understanding of what excellent looks like. So once again, we’d like to thank the amazing 55 UK charities who participated in the study and made it all possible.
Our key takeaways from this year’s study were:
1. More people are giving online. What are we doing to engage and mobilise them?
2. We need to transform our approach to email to unleash its full potential.
3. We need to build our whole digital ecosystem, not individual channels in isolation.
You can read more about these observations in this blog: UK DIGITAL BENCHMARKS STUDY IS LIVE! And of course, all the participating charities have their personalised reports which highlight their specific areas of opportunity.
We have an update about what’s happening next with the UK study: essentially we are going to skip one year of the study in 2022 and, if the sector still wants it, we will bring back a UK specific study for 2023. This means interested charities would need to sign up in mid to late 2022.
Our decision to pause is due to a staffing squeeze at M+R who crunch all the numbers and produce the website. Rather than plough on and potentially deliver a project that didn’t match our high standards we decided to take this short break.
But do not despair. If you want high quality digital benchmarks in your life in 2022 you can join M+R’s Global study. And it’s free. The main difference between the two studies is that there won’t be a specific UK comparison made in the reports. Your data will be benchmarked against your sector and all participants, irrespective of their country of operation. You can register right now for the free 2022 Global study here.
We'll be in touch next year about the next UK-specific Digital Benchmarks Study.
In the meantime, as this year’s UK Benchmarks Study showed us, we have plenty to be getting on with if we want to unleash the potential of our digital engagement programmes. The data helps us focus, prioritise and make better, insight-led decisions to improve our efficiency, invest to improve performance or exploit where we have a competitive advantage. So let’s get to it and maximise the success of our digital programmes and the change we can bring about.
Main photo by frank mckenna on Unsplash
It’s been an incredibly exciting week here at Rally HQ. The inaugural M+R UK Digital Benchmarks Study has just been launched, bringing comprehensive digital benchmark data to the UK for the first time across a wide range of disciplines including fundraising, digital advertising, email and social media.
Better data will help us make smarter decisions
At Rally we’ve always believed we need accurate and relevant data to help us make smarter decisions about how we invest our time and budgets and where to focus to maximise the success of our digital programmes and the change we can bring about.
But when working with clients, time and time again we see that the sector lacks an understanding of what good looks like in digital engagement. And without this understanding, we see myths get built up, decisions get based on opinions rather than facts and poor performance accepted as the norm (or even as success) as the data often doesn’t exist to prove otherwise.
So we’re extremely proud to have partnered with M+R to bring their Digital Benchmarks study to the UK. The 55 amazing charities which participated in the study have access to their own personalised reports. But because we believe it’s so important for the sector as a whole to have a better understanding of our collective digital performance, the summary report and data is available to all.
Our three big takeouts
As you’ll see there is A LOT of information in there. We could go on for hours about the findings and what they might mean for unleashing the potential of our digital engagement programmes. But if we were to pick out the three biggest things, they would be these…
1. More people are giving online. What are we doing to engage and mobilise them?
UK online revenue increased by 35% in 2020 - extraordinary growth, even accounting for the COVID pandemic. What’s even more exciting is that this growth in revenue is driven by many more (27% more) people giving online, rather than people giving higher amounts.
Only time will tell if this shift in giving patterns will be maintained as the pandemic becomes less dominant over our lives and activities. However, what we do know for certain is that right now as a priority charities should be engaging this influx of digital donors to inspire ongoing actions of support. This means having great onboarding communications and easy things for our new donors to do to continue to make change happen.
2. We need to transform our approach to email to unleash its full potential
Which brings us to email. Last year saw an incredible 38% growth in email list size compared to 2019 but the proportion of UK online income from email remained flat at just 5%. For context, in the US, email delivers 20% of online revenue.
We believe this points to big opportunities to build the engagement of our email subscribers and transform the number of actions of support they take. For many charities this will involve an overhaul of their approach to email: from being clear on its purpose and elevating its importance to building our skills, capabilities and better data. Above all it means increasing communication frequency and simplifying content to focus on one topic and one ask to inspire action. We’ve been banging this drum for a while and can’t wait to work with more of our clients on making email the powerful engagement and activation tool it can be.
3. We need to build our whole digital ecosystem not individual channels in isolation
The study shows UK nonprofits’ digital advertising spending grew by a massive 62% year on year as fundraising programmes were adapted to meet the challenges of the pandemic. Return on Ad Spend (revenue that can be directly sourced to an ad) of course varies by channel with search coming out top, but for us the key takeout is that we need to look at the digital ecosystem in the round rather than focussing on channels in isolation. Our supporters don’t just operate in one channel and neither should we.
If we want to really unlock the potential of digital engagement and make the most of this increased investment, we need to appreciate how channels work together to influence people’s behaviour and how people interact with them. This will help us join up our thinking, integrate our approach and invest in the right areas to both attract interest and convert that interest into action in the most effective way we can.
Using benchmarks to focus and prioritise
Benchmarks alone won’t improve our programmes. But they can help us focus, prioritise and make better, insight-led decisions. If we can identify where we have a competitive advantage, we can choose to exploit it. If we know where we have untapped potential, we can invest to improve our performance. If we can see where we are being inefficient, we can take steps to optimise.
So dive in, compare your own results to the numbers in the report and the experiences of your peer organisations, and reach your own conclusions for your organisation.
Header Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
Rally exists to help build power. To show people they have it and help them to use it.
One way to do this is to bring together like minded people who don’t know each other in an attempt to create connections that didn’t exist, which can lead to collaborations that otherwise wouldn’t have happened.
A few weeks ago our founder Paul de Gregorio and one of our favourite people in the world Georgie Laming, collaborated to put on a virtual screening of an episode of the incredible US documentary ‘And She Could Be Next’. In the film makers words - ‘a documentary series that focuses on a defiant movement of women of colour, transforming politics from the ground up’. Here’s the trailer…
One of Rally’s founding principles is that we want to drive change at a scale that is bigger than our size. And that central to creating change is exposure to new ideas and partnerships. So we are always keen to be generous with our knowledge and network, helping make connections to spark change that otherwise wouldn’t happen. This is a story of one of those moments.
In January 2020 - back when being out and about was ‘A Thing’ - we spent three fantastic days touring the coffee shops, charity meeting rooms and lunch spots of London with one of our favourite people in the whole world.
Meet Adrian. Adrian is a Dublin based pal of ours, he’s a brilliant thinker and all round Facebook fundraising genius. We love him.
Adrian.
He’d been developing a new approach to virtual challenge events that was delivering mind blowing results with his clients in Ireland, achieving both scale and huge returns on investment. He does it all on Facebook and it’s transformational. Honestly. Transformational.
We could see the results and knew the UK needed what Adrian was doing. Thankfully Adrian also believes in being generous with knowledge and was keen to share the approach beyond Ireland.
Back to our tour of London.
Adrian was keen to meet people who were smart, agile, open to new ideas and able to make decisions quickly. So with that brief Rally set Adrian up with a load of meetings with the right people at the right organisations. And we accompanied Adrian to make the introductions and show these clients, who didn’t know Adrian, that we really believed in him and his model.
In those two days we generated a lot of inspiration, some excitement and a lot of enthusiasm to try new things. We had 8 meetings in three days. Adrian got back on the plane to Ireland with connections that turned into 6 charities testing his approaches. Over the next few weeks and months, as the pandemic hit, we set up Zoom sessions that turned into another 5 relationships.
And the point of this story?
Well it’s the impact our collaboration has had - especially at a time when events fundraising has been severely impacted by the pandemic and many charities have experienced huge challenges in income generation, just when their services are needed more than ever.
We’re delighted to have helped inspire charities with new ideas in the most challenging of fundraising and working environments. And to have enabled them to access expertise to test and roll out a new approach to virtual events.
One year on we are incredibly proud that those introductions have turned into millions of pounds raised for the charities who chose to partner with Adrian. When we checked at the end of January they’d made £4,611,084 from an investment of £550,301. Which blows our mind.
And we know there are already a couple more million (yes, MILLION) pounds to be added to the income total - as some of those organisations have virtual events live right now.
And it’s honestly more than the money. The clients who’ve worked with Adrian have started applying his methods to other elements of their digital programmes and are seeing incredible results. And the eyes of organisations have been opened to the true potential of creating, engaging and empowering digital communities, whose members share values and passions with each other and the charities themselves.
All of this means that in the course of a year - because of COVID which has forced charities to act quickly to innovate and diversify - those meetings back in January have helped change the way digital is done across the whole sector.
Main photo by Nastya Dulhiier on Unsplash
When we say a digital mobilisation model, we mean an approach which engages the public at scale by elevating values over transactional ‘products’. And then using those values to attract people who share them and to inspire them to take actions to make change happen - all in a digital space.
"We loved working with Rally on this project. Their skill, expertise and collaborative way of working helped us at every stage of the process – from designing the approach and engaging our trustees to connecting us to the very best delivery partner in Forward Action and supporting us throughout the project’s execution to ensure we delivered against our strategic goals. Jasvir Kaur, Director of Fundraising & Communications at Brooke
Last week we released the names of the first UK charities to sign up to take part in the UK Digital Benchmarks Study we are launching in collaboration with our friends at US digital agency M+R Strategies.
We are absolutely delighted with this first wave of charities that have confirmed their participation! And we’re receiving really positive signals from many more UK charities. So we expect to be adding to this list very soon.
The study has been run in the US for over 14 years and in 2020 reviewed over 100 digital data points from over 200 US charities. So you can imagine how excited we are to partner with M+R to bring this incredible resource to the UK. You can read all about the study in this post.
And a huge thanks to UK Fundraising for helping us spread the word and for being so supportive of the project. You can see their article here.
Main photo by Emily Morter on Unsplash
If lockdown has taught us anything it’s that perspective is important - taking time out to pause, reflect and refocus. So at Rally, we’ve done just that with our first ever client, Peace Direct.
A partnership to build a new approach
When we set up Rally, we wanted to create a new way of working: one that is focused on collaboration and partnership, so clients are empowered to transform how they mobilise the public at scale. A movement, not a moment. Lasting change, not a one hit wonder.
We share these values with Peace Direct. Their approach to peacebuilding in the field is unique amongst INGOs and they wanted to carry on this non traditional approach to radically change how they engage the public at scale. All of this with a view to ultimately making their income - and with that their work - sustainable.
So we were both really excited to be able to form a partnership back in November 2018 to work together to create a Digital Engagement Strategy. A strategy to build an engaged community of digital supporters, joined by a desire to build long term peace - and so lay the foundation to create sustainability and lasting, impactful change.
As Gemma Britton, Head of Fundraising and Communications at Peace Direct said, ‘Our work together has felt very much like a partnership because Rally’s values and approach are so well aligned with our own work with peacebuilding partners around the world. Those of collaboration, learning, innovation, being honest about what’s not working, and always holding long-term success and sustainability at the heart of what we do.’
A joined up plan for lasting change
Key to our approach was establishing the levers that would drive us forward to deliver scale, sustainably and for the long term. This meant reviewing Peace Direct’s whole digital ecosystem - from search to social, content to conversion - so we could understand how everything works together and then identify opportunities to take co-ordinated action to transform performance.
From this we created a plan for radical change: a plan where our actions were always led by data and in service of a clear goal shared across fundraising and communications. Namely to deliver, more reach, more action, more money and more impact.
We made it easier for people to find us, overhauling our use of the Google Grant to transform the number and quality of visitors to our website.
And because there’s no point increasing web traffic if you make it hard for those visitors to take action, we focussed on improving our conversion in our priority areas for engagement - our email sign up and donation pages.
Alongside that, we updated our opt-in wording to help build Peace Direct’s community of digital supporters so we could have ongoing communication with as many supporters as possible.
And to make that communication more effective and responsive, we overhauled our email programme - its frequency, content and call to action - to make it geared towards inspiring ongoing action from the community we’re building.
And we didn’t just build a digital community through email, we radically improved our performance in social too, using a storytelling approach to transform reach and engagement.
Embedding new ways of working
All of this was underpinned by a focus on fundamentally changing how the Peace Direct team works forever. Firstly they busted through the old silos of fundraising and communications and put in place shared goals and plans to deliver them. And we adopted a long term view - that this was a never ending journey, where we would always be testing and learning from the data to refine our approach and keep moving forward and building success.
Most importantly Rally helped equip the Peace Direct team to be self sufficient to carry on this journey themselves by bringing in the right partners to share their expertise - Jon who helped us shape the strategy, Chris who trained us in how to use our Google grant more effectively, Rachel who helped us learn how to make our email programme more responsive and Jean who worked with us to build scale, response and engagement in Facebook.
Gemma says ‘After many years in the non-profit sector, it’s been a refreshing change to work with an agency partner which isn’t closed off to working with other experts and most importantly does not create a cycle of long-term over-reliance on their support. A core facet of our work together is that we identify the gaps in our knowledge and operations so as we deliver improvements, the team is also upskilled to do this work ourselves moving forward. This makes it much better value for Peace Direct, much more fulfilling for the team, and crucially we will be able to continue delivering really impactful digital engagement work in the long term’.
Seeing the cumulative impact
A year and a half down the line, with Rally’s help, Peace Direct have not only created the foundations for long term sustainability, but have already made tangible strides forward in their digital engagement approach.
The email file has grown by over 600% since January 2019 and it continues to grow at an extremely cost effective rate.
We’ve increased reach and engagement in Facebook by over 400% and successfully converted this engagement into action through more effective paid social strategies.
The quality of web traffic has significantly increased as we have focussed on our use of the Google Grant. Traffic from this source has increased by over 150%, with an incredible 1,000%+ increase in the conversion of this traffic to our engagement goals.
We’ve launched Facebook fundraising campaigns that have delivered significant income through the use of virtual events.
A new dynamic for the future
These are the first steps in a long journey to transform how Peace Direct engages the public at scale digitally, but we are all excited by the cumulative impact of our efforts so far. And based on what we’ve learnt to date we’ve set goals for the next 12 months to keep on growing scale and improving engagement.
And this success is sustainable because the Peace Direct team is empowered to keep evolving and refining the approach using the skills, confidence and knowledge they’ve acquired - all with an unrelenting focus on their shared goal and with the tools to measure their progress.
Gemma said, ‘Peace Direct’s work with Rally has been transformational. It’s provided us with knowledge, ambition and a real focus on delivering results which will ultimately allow us to shine more of a spotlight on people building peace around the world and give them the support which works for them. We no longer seek out small wins - in a niche sector which has struggled to cut through with the public, we are now seeing that with the right strategy people do believe in our cause and are willing to support us. Rally has given us the confidence to know we can and should be striving for growth and scale.’
So while Rally is still very much part of the next chapter, thanks to how we’ve worked together our dynamic has changed. The Peace Direct team is firmly in the driving seat. And we couldn’t be happier about that. Because that was the initial plan.
Photographs are supplied by Peace Direct and were taken by Greg Funnell.
