Achieve amazing response rates – year on year

Loyalty, love and The Camphill Family

• Audience insight: “It’s very heartening in this world of so much bad news to know that there are places like yours where there is love.”

Through living and working in the eleven communities of the Camphill Village Trust, adults with learning disabilities find a way of life that’s uniquely fulfilling. As fundraising success story, the CVT-Burnett Works partnership is singular too.

Whether the appeal is to help to renovate homes at Botton Village in North Yorkshire or create a brand-new enterprise in an urban community, people give so generously and loyally, year after year, that the programme nets £1.5 million per annum from just 70,000 friends.

Response rates in large segments range from up to 40% – 60%. Regular givers frequently give additional cash gifts. Each year around one in every three friends donates at Christmas. Such is the love that when the snows of 2010 held up the Christmas mailing, people phoned in, anxious that they might have missed out.

What’s the secret? Treating people not as donors, but as friends. We ask them to tell us how often they wish us to be in touch, and whether they would prefer not to be asked directly for a donation. (Interestingly, people choosing that option are some of the most generous donors.) And we don’t segment by value of gift – or use prompt amounts.

Creatively, this warm and respectful approach is matched by communications that, in the words of one friend, ‘are like the first daffodils in Spring – full of hope and beauty.’

Direct mail / Donor development / Media planning