Where Tax meets
animals in need

Overview

The Challenge

For RSPCA NSW, like many charities, maximizing their 2018 Tax Appeal was vital to their annual fundraising efforts. The Tax Appeal campaign was one of the largest annual campaign efforts RSPCA NSW uses to raise funds before the end of the financial year. Finding ways to acquire and engage prospective supporters is always a key challenge. Encouraging new supporters through online experiences that motivate them to donate, as well as facilitating regular donations, is pivotal.

Not only did RSPCA NSW specifically want to draw in new supporters through their Tax Appeal, but it also wanted to capture their interest and maintain their continued support.

Campaign Goals

  1. Maximise their 2018 Tax Appeal
  2. Increase online Donations 
  3. Build an Effective Campaign
  4. A/B split testing landing pages
  5. The use of website popups and banners to convey urgency of campaign
Technology

WordPress

Client

RSPCA NSW

What We Did

Landing page design, WordPress development,  Online Tracking/Testing

Building an Effective Campaign

For the 2018 campaign, RSPCA NSW had a number of objectives.

First, they wanted to utilise conversion rate optimisation data from previous years to inform the marketing and remarketing strategies to increase donation volumes and average gift size.

Second, since the RSPCA NSW has multiple audiences they wanted to target, they recognized the need to confidently create audience-specific and general landing page templates. The team wanted A/B split testing functionality enabled, giving them the ability to test different elements of multiple landing pages, and ultimately allow them to have the ability to quickly switch to the best performing landing pages based on live results.

Additionally, the RSPCA NSW team had great ideas on how to keep this campaign fresh year on year so they were keen to test different layouts for the page, static vs GIF assets, short vs long form copy and generic vs highly personalised copy.

Finally, the team also wanted to use website popups and banners to promote a sense of urgency for donations towards the end of the campaign.

The 2018 Tax Appeal in Action

Leafcutter’s work with RSPCA NSW’s 2018 Tax Appeal campaign relied on the experience of our work on the 2017 appeal and the development plan created from the 2018 campaign objectives.

The specific actions for the 2018 Tax Appeal included the creation of multiple landing page templates within the new website, which gave RSPCA NSW the ability to confidently spin up multiple new landing pages. In total, 11 landing pages were built, including a main “default” page to serve as a destination for all sources of traffic. Landing page templates gave the RSPCA team the ability to create multiple landing pages that were consistent with their messaging and reflect the wider efforts of the organisation, including their social posts.

Through the ease of creating a new landing page, the team was able to quickly change its tax strategy. This was especially valuable, when towards the end of the campaign it allowed them to respond to a cruelty investigation that was gaining traction online at the time. Changing content from a broader advocacy focus on generic winter warmers messaging, meant to educate their donors about the challenges RSPCA faces during winter, to reflect urgent cruelty response was invaluable for keeping supporters engaged.

Enabling the A/B split testing functionality through a plugin installed on their WordPress site gave the team live results on what worked and what didn’t work. This allowed them to be in a position to serve the best performing landing page based on the audience type.

During the campaign, a split test was run to determine whether a static middle image would affect performance vs. a GIF middle image on a landing page which was served to donors through an EDM. As the results showed a still image outperformed the GIF, the RSPCA was then able to direct donors (those who did not open the first EDM) to the still image landing page. Additional tests showed that EDMs sent in the morning had better conversion rates but those sent in the evenings had better open rates. Similarly, split tests of two different landing pages (a generic one and a second, longer form landing page), highlighted a more generic page incurred higher conversions.

Ensuring flexibility of the website popup and banner gave the team the ability to switch it on and off, place it on different pages of the website and utilise it at the right time to generate new conversions, generating more income.

Lessons Learned

Looking forward to future campaigns:

  • The search optimised page will be leveraged more in future campaigns.
  • Based on the results from the A/B split testing, RSPCA NSW found the layout, style, copy & image that spoke best to their supporters.
  • The website popup used during the last few days of the campaign was the 2nd & 3rd best source of online income for the Tax Appeal campaign.
  • The 2018 campaign raised 18% more than the previous year’s campaign, highlighting the importance of the multiple landing pages and value provided by split testing functionality.
  • The social landing page converted better the previous year, so we will be exploring this more throughout the campaign this year.
  • As the pages were built with the mindset of being managed internally, this reduced lead times, reduced costs spent on the development of these pages and increased content turnaround times, allowing for greater capitalisation on current opportunities.