Re-designing donor journeys for emergency appeals

Emergency appeals are the busiest times for the British Red Cross with hundreds of thousands of individuals and businesses making donations.

However, during the Ukraine Crisis demand out stripped resource and the manual process used to take large corporate donations was stretched to it’s limit.

Outside of emergency appeals, corporates and foundations value the human experience of speaking to a member of the team, helping them make their donation.

But during emergency appeals donors wanted to make their donation as soon as possible. The British Red Cross team were working round the clock, 7 days a weeks and it was still taking over 48hrs to get back to some prospects and cost the team £750k in donor drop offs.

Having volunteered with the corporate partnerships during this time I experienced the challenges of the manual process first hand. I designed an automated process to be deployed during emergency appeals with the relevant prompts and checks to satisfy both the compliance team and major donors whether that be ‘self identification’ ethical scanning or automatic receipting for tax rebates.