In May, I joined the Fundraising Everywhere Supporter Experience Conference alongside RNIB Director of Customer Engagement, Brette Alsop to share some of our key learnings from what started as a fundraising brief and became an impactful supporter engagement programme.
Supporter journeys aren’t always as straightforward as they seem. When RNIB gave us a brief with a fundraising target from a specific audience, it wasn’t a surprise – many organisations arrive with a financial goal and a hope that a new campaign or tool will help deliver it. But what we discovered together was something more powerful: by pausing, listening, and reframing the challenge, the opportunity became much bigger than a single fundraising target.
Our research and insights allowed us to move our focus from transactions to relationships. From that moment, our process enabled RNIB to build something more meaningful, unlocking greater and more consistent value.
Getting comfortable with uncertainty
Initially, the brief centred around turning supporters into donors. However, when we dug into the problem, and the data behind supporter behaviour, one thing was clear: the timing wasn’t right. While RNIB’s fundraising goals were valid, we saw that many potential supporters weren’t ready to give - they didn’t yet have the relationship with the organisation that would make them want to.
We needed to step back from solutions and get comfortable asking better questions. The real opportunity wasn’t in hitting the immediate target, but in designing an experience that could lead to long-term engagement across a number of organisational objectives including supporting campaigns, fundraising or even volunteering.
Design thinking framework that grounded the work
We used the Double Diamond framework to guide the process, starting wide and exploratory, then narrowing into problem definition before ideating and testing solutions. This structure helped us to focus on real problems and over time gave the team a shared language, created room for genuine partnership, and ensured the work stayed focused on user needs.
With RNIB’s existing audience insight, we were able to layer in Synthetic Users’ data. Synthetic Users is an AI tool that provides user insights based on scraped public online behaviour and social content. The tool then allows for combining the insights with existing research to generate user interviews, which we used to validate early hypotheses. This gave us confidence in forming audience segments based on actual needs and expectations, not assumptions.
Building a journey, not a single ask
Together with the RNIB team, we created experience principles and began designing a supporter journey centred on what the audience needed - trust and relevance. The final experience included a wellbeing phone call, eight tailored emails, with segmentation that allowed us to personalise the experience to the needs of each distinct sub-segment of the audience.
DotDigital enabled us to segment, personalise content based on those segments, and run A/B tests within the email journey, while VWO enabled us to test structure and language on landing pages.
Early outcomes and lasting impact
The results were striking. Email open and click-through rates far outperformed benchmarks - improving the performance by 84% and 59%, respectively. Segmented users consistently outperformed unsegmented ones. Qualitative feedback from the wellbeing calls and email responses reminded us that many customers still felt a strong connection to RNIB, even if they hadn’t engaged in years.
We also surfaced some important lessons. Fundraising asks delivered too early underperformed, confirming our hypothesis and research. An unexpected insight also emerged around proxy communications—many people weren’t receiving messages because the contact details on file belonged to a family member.
A shift in thinking, not just tactics
The project became about more than performance metrics. It helped RNIB identify internal blockers, reassess how they use their digital tools, and shape a more strategic approach to supporter engagement.
Importantly, we saw that involving stakeholders early - sharing findings, building engagement across a larger stakeholder group, and building shared understanding - led to better alignment. Even when outcomes shifted, the shared process helped leadership stay onboard, and understand the reasons behind our recommendations.
Why this matters
This journey with RNIB shows what can happen when you resist the pressure to rush toward a quick win. By focusing on relationships, using evidence wisely, and trusting the process, you can build experiences that serve both organisational goals and audience needs.
Watch the full talk
For more detail, including more detail on our process and learnings, watch the full session on Fundraising Everywhere - use the code manifesto-free-session to view.