Why did OneKind decide to start a charity lottery with the GivingLottery
We haven’t been able to attend festivals, face-to-face events or run challenge events this past year so we have had to find other ways to fundraise. To be honest, a lottery had been on our list for a long time and the GivingLottery was a great way for us to start a charity lottery, given that we have such little time and resources to run our own charity lottery in-house. Having the dashboard and all the resources and implementations the GivingLottery offer has taken a huge weight off of our shoulders so that we can concentrate on recruiting players, raising income and giving them a great journey with us.
What planning did you do before launching a charity lottery?
We planned how to start a charity lottery 2 months after signing up to the GivingLottery. We thought about how we would market and put together a plan. Our designer created some additional content that we knew would appeal to our supporters, including memes for social media.
How did you market your charity lottery?
When we decided to start a charity lottery we put together a social media marketing plan, which consisted of:
- An email launching the lottery to our entire email opt-in database (around 24k)
- 2 social media posts per week (across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter) and 2 Facebook ads running for 5 days every 2 weeks.
I have done some analysis and identified that the vast majority of our players are people who were already on our database but had either not donated to us before (but had taken part in actions – petitions, etc.) or had donated some time ago. Essentially the GivingLottery appeals to people on our database that haven’t engaged well with our other fundraising campaigns.
How else do you engage with your GivingLottery supporters?
We write to those who have signed up to the GivingLottery to say thank you and also to those who have not purchased tickets. I am in the process of setting up an email journey.
I have a further email planned to go out to those who received the first email but didn’t open it.
You’ve done really well. Is there a large team running your charity lottery?
It’s so nice to hear that you think we are doing well. I have no idea how this works for other charities and we are a tiny one (with 9 staff)! We recruit roughly 5-10 regular donors each month so to have the number of players we have already, has also blown us away, especially given our size. It’s myself and my colleague Kirsty who are responsible for the entire fundraising of the charity, which runs solely on funding (we receive no Government funding and have not been supported by any of the packages offered to charities during Covid).
Have you spent anything on advertising your charity lottery?
After deciding to start a charity lottery, I put a marketing journey in place for January as a test and I intend to increase the advertising on social media going forward. So the players we have recruited so far cost us £30 in total! That’s all I spent on the first social media ads. Now that I know the success of month one, we will be increasing that so hope to reach more people.