Improving sponsored ‘Organise your Own’ fundraising journeys with service blueprinting

Manifesto helped Prostate Cancer UK begin standardising service design across their large portfolio of sponsored ‘Organise your Own’ fundraising events, mapping out the people, processes, data and technologies underpinning each journey, and identifying opportunities for optimisation and automation.

Standardising a diverse portfolio of sponsored ‘Organise your Own’ fundraising event journeys

Prostate Cancer UK funds research to stop prostate cancer being a killer. Central to the charity’s fundraising efforts is a large portfolio of individuals and groups organising their own sponsored events, focusing on running, walking, cycling and skydiving. Having grown organically, it contains a diversity of sponsorship models, fundraising platforms and supporter resources, making for a large number of paths through event registration and participation. Prostate Cancer UK engaged Manifesto to help map and better understand these journeys, with a view to standardising both service design and supporter experience across the portfolio.

Using a service-design approach to optimise customer experience

Over the course of two day-long workshops with people from the community fundraising, technology, data and supporter experience teams, our service design consultants helped the charity take a deep dive into the people, processes, data and technology underpinning their customer journeys, DIY versions. Mapping out the various paths through the activities using a service-blueprinting approach, we helped the team confront important questions around the value provided by long-standing features, issues caused by manual processes and how third-party platforms affect the integrity of their data flows.

Identifying opportunities for incremental improvement

In addition to identifying areas where processes could be automated for greater efficiency, the workshops dramatically improved the team’s understanding of the different possible paths through the various customer journeys. This has helped the Prostate Cancer UK community fundraising team embrace an entirely new way of working, one that sees them question the status quo, look for the root causes of issues and visualise processes rather than rely on verbal reasoning alone. Rather than waiting for large digital transformation projects to improve customer experience, they are now confidently pursuing incremental changes which deliver continuous improvement.

“Working with Manifesto has been an insightful and enjoyable experience. We have truly valued the structured sessions and the tools introduced, that we can now use to develop and enhance our current and future projects.

Neil was a fantastic trainer, he was very patient, positive and explained the process clearly. This gave us the time and guidance to think more creatively, and identify short/long term actions to make our activities better. We are already seeing excellent results from these sessions and are implementing the learning throughout other areas of the charity.   

We look forward to working with Manifesto in the future so that we can continue to grow, and become more efficient with our time and procedures.” – Seren Evans, Community Fundraising Manager