Hospice freed to soar higher with software
built for their fundraising needs

Martlets takes its name from a mythical bird often shown “in perpetual flight
with open wings and no feet, never stopping to sleep,” a symbol of the round the-clock care the Hospice provides to people who are terminally ill in the
English seaside city of Brighton & Hove in East Sussex, and surrounding areas.
Behind the scenes, Martlets’ fundraising team has adopted transformative
software with built-in donation forms that is making them more efficient,
effective, and energised in supporting that continuous care as well as plans
for a new hospice building “where local people can be supported with
privacy, safety, comfort and respect at their end of life.”

Donations that used to require five to six processing steps with the hospice’s
previous technology now can be processed in batches with a single click
with Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT for fundraising and Blackbaud Merchant
Services for payment processing. That includes sending each donor an
automatically generated thank-you message.

Rather than cumbersome, individual and manual reviews, a quick check of
the coding and the integrity of the data is all that’s required before approval.
“By cutting out those manual processes, we are cutting out room for error,”
explained Martlets’ Donations Processing and Data Officer, Claire Docteur.
“It makes sure that we are fully accountable.”

The time saved on processing and reconciliation adds up, allowing her team
to focus more on creative communications and personal interactions to
further engage donors. “Blackbaud frees up time for our team to love our
supporters more,” Docteur said. “That’s one of the things that inspires me.”

Purpose-built Donation Forms

The advantages realised by Martlets with Blackbaud software have proven
essential as the Hospice has seen what Docteur called “a shift in people’s
behavior” with increasing online giving as supporters visit the website or click
through to donation pages from email campaigns and other promotions.
Half a year after adopting Raiser’s Edge NXT, Martlets became an early
adopter of the software’s online donation forms for charities in the United
Kingdom. The customisable forms include a built-in Gift Aid section and
consent feature that correlate with Government requirements. “For the UK,
it’s really important that we have an audit trail for any gift declarations that
we receive,” Docteur said. “We need to have full traceability.”

The forms can be adjusted easily in a variety of other ways as well. Key for
Martlets is offering a field where the donor can indicate a gift is in memory of
someone and then enter the loved one’s name. Nearly all donations Martlets
receives are “in memory” gifts, Docteur explained.

Before teaming up with Blackbaud, Martlets had to invest extra time and
expense in using a third-party vendor to create donation forms that didn’t
sync automatically with their fundraising software. Now with Raiser’s Edge
NXT, the donor’s giving history, including specific tributes, can be seamlessly
captured in Martlets’ constituent database for future reference. With the switch, Docteur said her team saved 14 hours of administration time in processing donations during their first end-of-year campaign using
donation forms in Raiser’s Edge NXT.

For Claire Kidd, head of individual giving and community for Martlets, the
difference cannot be understated. “I see the benefits of the donations forms with every activity we undertake,” Kidd said. “Being able to set specific forms for specific activities is already helping us build insight into our supporters’ giving.”

Drawing New Insights into Supporters

During that first end-of-year giving season with Raiser’s Edge NXT, Martlets
created four electronic campaigns with weblinks to online donation forms
designed for specific audiences including existing supporters, potential new
donors, and corporate partners. The form for a fourth campaign was built
around a raffle to benefit the Hospice.

While they feared economic concerns might lead to a drop in giving, Martlets
saw an uptick in website donations over the previous season, Docteur said. With precoding, the team can track and compare the results of the different campaigns, which will inform future appeals.

At the same time, the team is taking advantage of other valuable features
provided by Raiser’s Edge NXT, including the ability to build location-based lists
of supporters, which has allowed them to target postal appeals to those who
live in Brighton & Hove and tailor the messages with further segmenting.
“We’ve gone from a behaviour where we were sending 13,000 newsletters by post and getting a very small return to now segmenting our data and sending a mailing to half of that and getting triple results because of what we’ve been able to do with the database and the insight we’re able to build,” Docteur said.
Those kinds of results are boosting Docteur and her team as they head into a
season of pivotal giving around their new facility and their Shaun by the Sea art
trail, themed sculptures installed around the city featuring the lovable children’s character Shaun the Sheep. “I love Raiser’s Edge NXT and the way it has transformed our workings,” Docteur said.