Co-designing a data led, supporter centric strategy

Challenge

Concern Worldwide is a leading humanitarian organisation tackling poverty in the world’s poorest communities.

Concern Worldwide needed to secure vital unrestricted donations amidst institutional funding cuts and shifting donor attitudes in the Irish market. Their loyal donor base was key, but internal challenges hampered growth. The team faced three core challenges:

• The need to get teams working together more closely towards a shared set of KPI’s  

• The ability to manage the trade offs between  limited capacity and investment 

• Access to a shared understanding of data and insights to inform strategic growth opportunities

They needed a cohesive, high-impact strategy to meet challenging targets and evolve their donor and supporter engagement. Concern engaged Manifesto to facilitate this process in an open and collaborative way providing sector and market insights, a safe space for challenge and curiosity and future looking strategy that considered the Irish market, technology, data and AI and evolving audience needs. All in service to the wider global strategy to eliminate extreme poverty and the reduction of suffering in fragile countries.

Solution

To unite Concern Worldwide's fundraising and development team behind an insight-driven and supporter centric strategy, we began with a comprehensive discovery process. This involved engaging stakeholders via interviews and a team-wide survey, and analysing a huge range of documentation, donor data, and market research. The resulting discovery report provided the evidence-based foundation and the strategic drivers that would underpin the strategy. 

Facilitating collaborative strategy for team alignment

The solution was a collaborative and co-designed strategy framework that provided clear direction and ownership. We utilised Manifesto’s open strategy framework to guide the shift across a number of levers including shifting from:

• Outputs to outcomes

• Channel and product to audience led 

• Data reporting to insight driven decision making 

• Siloed working to cross team collaboration 

• Trying to do it all to strategic and conscious prioritisation

• What we’ve always done to an openness to change and learning  

We worked together through a series of workshops with key stakeholders, utilising product portfolio frameworks to evaluate growth strategies based on whether they involve new or existing products and markets and prioritisation models. We also explored team capacity, capabilities, skills and maturity and the structure and ways of working needed to support the new ambition. These sessions helped identify key drivers, assess ideas for feasibility and impact, and build consensus.

A core deliverable was the establishment of a defined mission, strategic goals with shared KPIs and outcomes, Core Activities (BAU work), and Strategic Bets (calculated risks). To support this, we focused on establishing key enablers like improved data quality, shared planning, and cross-directorate engagement fundamental shifts in approach. The 'testing' came from the robust, challenging debate within the workshops, ensuring the goals were grounded in reality and collaboratively owned. 

A fully actionable strategy and roadmap

The final deliverables included a ready to roll out strategy on a page, launch materials to build clarity, a shared understanding and importantly a sense of ownership and excitement for the next five year ambition. 

We developed a prioritised roadmap of fundraising and development activities - ensuring enablers, capacity, investment and capabilities were clearly identified and outlined. There was a mix of ‘core’ tasks:

• Optimising proven high-value activities such as consolidating acquisition targets and budgets

• ‘Strategic bets’ - experimenting with new ideas to diversify fundraising models, like working with celebrity ambassadors 

Collaboration and gradual extraction of our support meant the team fully owned this plan, and were equipped to deliver it, flexing and adapting it as required.

The team learned the power of evidence-based goal setting and shared accountability, moving them towards a stronger position for maximising impact.

“I wanted to thank you for yesterday’s workshop. I thought that there was a lot of positive energy in the room and the conversations that I had with people were really enthusiastic. It was also good to start to discuss what all of this might look like in practice.” - Gaby Murphy, Director of Development and Strategy

Impact

Manifesto combined sector leadership, strategy, audience and data insight expertise to help Concern Worldwide develop a 5-year fundraising strategy focused on income growth, donor retention, shared planning and evidence-based decision making.

The Fundraising and Development Team entered the new strategic period with a clear direction and focus:

A shared direction of travel: The strategy, designed around cross-cutting goals gave teams a clear set of shared KPIs and targets rather than team-specific measures to ensure collaboration and alignment

Focus and priority: Using data and insights, the highest value and impact activities and goals were prioritised, ensuring efforts were targeted for impact and outcomes

Practical implementation: The roadmap organised activities into a practical plan, ensuring that sequencing and delivery was achievable. Internal alignment, planning and clarity on roles and accountabilities at the start ensured that the foundations were steady before moving into the ambitious plans.