Why are we trying a new online approach
24/09/2008
As many of our supporters realise, we have never done TV advertising or major newspaper advertising and some years ago we stopped using Direct Mail as a means to find new supporters. This is part of the reason why, even though globally we are probably the world's largest non-government children's charity (to be fair the gap between us and Save the Children is within exchange rate fluctuations) we are not as well known to the public at large as some much smaller but more vocal charities.
Most of our new supporters come to us online. Our online strategy has been very successful and we are growing fast (around 30% a year). The cost of finding new supporters online has also been very encouraging (around one fortieth of the equivalent cost of direct mail per £ raised). So as this is working well, why are we trying advertising more visibly?
What we want to achieve
However quickly we are growing, we want to do much more. Our 2016 strategy is to ensure a million more children grow up in a family than would have been possible without us. That's a serious challenge and we think we need a million sponsors and regular donors to manage it. We will grow rapidly on word of mouth and natural traffic and we don't want to turn into a very "in your face" kind of charity but we do feel there are a lot of people who would want to know the extraordinary story and vision of SOS if they had the chance. So in the most cost effective way we can find we are starting to do a little advertising. We do not plan to exceed 2-3% of our income doing this and it will mainly be online. If you are one of our existing charity donors, who comes across our adverts, do please feed back to us your reaction. But anyway we thought we should write this explanation so that you know what we are up to.
I also ought to assure you that we do not fund this from child sponsorships. 100% of all the funds we receive for child sponsorships goes straight out to where the need is. However we do have other income from reclaimed giftaid tax and donations where people have said they are happy to support our running costs. This "unrestricted" income significantly exceeds our UK expenditure on things like fundraising, these adverts and the admin costs of child sponsorships, and we use the extra unrestricted income for projects where the need is greatest.