Yesterday Paul was asked to speak on a panel at the Engaging Networks London event. The panel featured the incredible Georgie from Hope not hate, Helen from Forward Action and Rhiannan from Care2.
Each panelist was asked to speak for a few minutes before questions from the floor, so we’ve pasted Paul’s notes below in case they are useful! Excuse the typos!
We all need some inspiration. This will move you. We recommend high volume and full screen.
We asked ChatGPT to describe Rally and the types of organisations we wouldn’t do good work for. It nailed it.
e.g. Rally values authenticity and would likely disapprove of organisations that engage in greenwashing, performative activism, or insincere corporate social responsibility efforts.
We are such fans of this initiative from Somerset Wildlife Trust.
Everything is political.
Charities can’t be party political.
But they can bring their supporters together and talk about the issues.
The 2024 UK Charity Digital Benchmarks Study has now launched and you can now register your organisation’s participation.
Rally exists to help build power. To show people they have it and help them to use it.
One way to do this is to bring together like minded people who don’t know each other in an attempt to create connections that didn’t exist, which can lead to collaborations that otherwise wouldn’t have happened.
A few weeks ago our founder Paul de Gregorio and one of our favourite people in the world Georgie Laming, collaborated to put on a virtual screening of an episode of the incredible US documentary ‘And She Could Be Next’. In the film makers words - ‘a documentary series that focuses on a defiant movement of women of colour, transforming politics from the ground up’. Here’s the trailer…
One of Rally’s founding principles is that we want to drive change at a scale that is bigger than our size. And that central to creating change is exposure to new ideas and partnerships. So we are always keen to be generous with our knowledge and network, helping make connections to spark change that otherwise wouldn’t happen. This is a story of one of those moments.
In January 2020 - back when being out and about was ‘A Thing’ - we spent three fantastic days touring the coffee shops, charity meeting rooms and lunch spots of London with one of our favourite people in the whole world.
Meet Adrian. Adrian is a Dublin based pal of ours, he’s a brilliant thinker and all round Facebook fundraising genius. We love him.
Adrian.
He’d been developing a new approach to virtual challenge events that was delivering mind blowing results with his clients in Ireland, achieving both scale and huge returns on investment. He does it all on Facebook and it’s transformational. Honestly. Transformational.
We could see the results and knew the UK needed what Adrian was doing. Thankfully Adrian also believes in being generous with knowledge and was keen to share the approach beyond Ireland.
Back to our tour of London.
Adrian was keen to meet people who were smart, agile, open to new ideas and able to make decisions quickly. So with that brief Rally set Adrian up with a load of meetings with the right people at the right organisations. And we accompanied Adrian to make the introductions and show these clients, who didn’t know Adrian, that we really believed in him and his model.
In those two days we generated a lot of inspiration, some excitement and a lot of enthusiasm to try new things. We had 8 meetings in three days. Adrian got back on the plane to Ireland with connections that turned into 6 charities testing his approaches. Over the next few weeks and months, as the pandemic hit, we set up Zoom sessions that turned into another 5 relationships.
And the point of this story?
Well it’s the impact our collaboration has had - especially at a time when events fundraising has been severely impacted by the pandemic and many charities have experienced huge challenges in income generation, just when their services are needed more than ever.
We’re delighted to have helped inspire charities with new ideas in the most challenging of fundraising and working environments. And to have enabled them to access expertise to test and roll out a new approach to virtual events.
One year on we are incredibly proud that those introductions have turned into millions of pounds raised for the charities who chose to partner with Adrian. When we checked at the end of January they’d made £4,611,084 from an investment of £550,301. Which blows our mind.
And we know there are already a couple more million (yes, MILLION) pounds to be added to the income total - as some of those organisations have virtual events live right now.
And it’s honestly more than the money. The clients who’ve worked with Adrian have started applying his methods to other elements of their digital programmes and are seeing incredible results. And the eyes of organisations have been opened to the true potential of creating, engaging and empowering digital communities, whose members share values and passions with each other and the charities themselves.
All of this means that in the course of a year - because of COVID which has forced charities to act quickly to innovate and diversify - those meetings back in January have helped change the way digital is done across the whole sector.
Main photo by Nastya Dulhiier on Unsplash
When we say a digital mobilisation model, we mean an approach which engages the public at scale by elevating values over transactional ‘products’. And then using those values to attract people who share them and to inspire them to take actions to make change happen - all in a digital space.
"We loved working with Rally on this project. Their skill, expertise and collaborative way of working helped us at every stage of the process – from designing the approach and engaging our trustees to connecting us to the very best delivery partner in Forward Action and supporting us throughout the project’s execution to ensure we delivered against our strategic goals. Jasvir Kaur, Director of Fundraising & Communications at Brooke
It was our second birthday recently.
To mark the passing of time we decided to send some post to all the people who inspire, support and work with us. And then this happened!
Which made us feel warm inside and very proud to be part of the community we are in.
We’ve got some stickers left if you want some.
We’re now two years old.
Which means we’re on our way to becoming part of the establishment right?
Nope.
We’re just as committed today as we were two years ago to help our clients attract the public’s support at scale and convert that support into action.
We're still committed to challenging the status quo and being a positive force for change in how the sector approaches the challenges it faces.
We’re still convinced that the sector needs radical change in the way it seeks to attract the public's support in order to remain relevant. We recognise that change is unsettling and for some it’s an uncomfortable process. But it’s a necessary one. As Saul Alinksy said. ‘Change means movement. Movement means friction.’
We know we’re really lucky. We’re lucky to be a part of a brilliant community of people, clients and partner organisations who share our values and ambition.
So we want to say a HUGE thank you to our amazing clients for putting their faith in us and equal thanks to our AMAZING partners who help us make it all happen. We are immensely proud of the collaborations we’ve created and the impact that has come from them. And we’re honoured to work with such an inspiring group of radicals, rebels, agitators, activists and troublemakers.
Being part of such a badass community brings us real joy.
And before we go... Keep an eye on your letterbox. You might get a little something from us.
If lockdown has taught us anything it’s that perspective is important - taking time out to pause, reflect and refocus. So at Rally, we’ve done just that with our first ever client, Peace Direct.
A partnership to build a new approach
When we set up Rally, we wanted to create a new way of working: one that is focused on collaboration and partnership, so clients are empowered to transform how they mobilise the public at scale. A movement, not a moment. Lasting change, not a one hit wonder.
We share these values with Peace Direct. Their approach to peacebuilding in the field is unique amongst INGOs and they wanted to carry on this non traditional approach to radically change how they engage the public at scale. All of this with a view to ultimately making their income - and with that their work - sustainable.
So we were both really excited to be able to form a partnership back in November 2018 to work together to create a Digital Engagement Strategy. A strategy to build an engaged community of digital supporters, joined by a desire to build long term peace - and so lay the foundation to create sustainability and lasting, impactful change.
As Gemma Britton, Head of Fundraising and Communications at Peace Direct said, ‘Our work together has felt very much like a partnership because Rally’s values and approach are so well aligned with our own work with peacebuilding partners around the world. Those of collaboration, learning, innovation, being honest about what’s not working, and always holding long-term success and sustainability at the heart of what we do.’
A joined up plan for lasting change
Key to our approach was establishing the levers that would drive us forward to deliver scale, sustainably and for the long term. This meant reviewing Peace Direct’s whole digital ecosystem - from search to social, content to conversion - so we could understand how everything works together and then identify opportunities to take co-ordinated action to transform performance.
From this we created a plan for radical change: a plan where our actions were always led by data and in service of a clear goal shared across fundraising and communications. Namely to deliver, more reach, more action, more money and more impact.
We made it easier for people to find us, overhauling our use of the Google Grant to transform the number and quality of visitors to our website.
And because there’s no point increasing web traffic if you make it hard for those visitors to take action, we focussed on improving our conversion in our priority areas for engagement - our email sign up and donation pages.
Alongside that, we updated our opt-in wording to help build Peace Direct’s community of digital supporters so we could have ongoing communication with as many supporters as possible.
And to make that communication more effective and responsive, we overhauled our email programme - its frequency, content and call to action - to make it geared towards inspiring ongoing action from the community we’re building.
And we didn’t just build a digital community through email, we radically improved our performance in social too, using a storytelling approach to transform reach and engagement.
Embedding new ways of working
All of this was underpinned by a focus on fundamentally changing how the Peace Direct team works forever. Firstly they busted through the old silos of fundraising and communications and put in place shared goals and plans to deliver them. And we adopted a long term view - that this was a never ending journey, where we would always be testing and learning from the data to refine our approach and keep moving forward and building success.
Most importantly Rally helped equip the Peace Direct team to be self sufficient to carry on this journey themselves by bringing in the right partners to share their expertise - Jon who helped us shape the strategy, Chris who trained us in how to use our Google grant more effectively, Rachel who helped us learn how to make our email programme more responsive and Jean who worked with us to build scale, response and engagement in Facebook.
Gemma says ‘After many years in the non-profit sector, it’s been a refreshing change to work with an agency partner which isn’t closed off to working with other experts and most importantly does not create a cycle of long-term over-reliance on their support. A core facet of our work together is that we identify the gaps in our knowledge and operations so as we deliver improvements, the team is also upskilled to do this work ourselves moving forward. This makes it much better value for Peace Direct, much more fulfilling for the team, and crucially we will be able to continue delivering really impactful digital engagement work in the long term’.
Seeing the cumulative impact
A year and a half down the line, with Rally’s help, Peace Direct have not only created the foundations for long term sustainability, but have already made tangible strides forward in their digital engagement approach.
The email file has grown by over 600% since January 2019 and it continues to grow at an extremely cost effective rate.
We’ve increased reach and engagement in Facebook by over 400% and successfully converted this engagement into action through more effective paid social strategies.
The quality of web traffic has significantly increased as we have focussed on our use of the Google Grant. Traffic from this source has increased by over 150%, with an incredible 1,000%+ increase in the conversion of this traffic to our engagement goals.
We’ve launched Facebook fundraising campaigns that have delivered significant income through the use of virtual events.
A new dynamic for the future
These are the first steps in a long journey to transform how Peace Direct engages the public at scale digitally, but we are all excited by the cumulative impact of our efforts so far. And based on what we’ve learnt to date we’ve set goals for the next 12 months to keep on growing scale and improving engagement.
And this success is sustainable because the Peace Direct team is empowered to keep evolving and refining the approach using the skills, confidence and knowledge they’ve acquired - all with an unrelenting focus on their shared goal and with the tools to measure their progress.
Gemma said, ‘Peace Direct’s work with Rally has been transformational. It’s provided us with knowledge, ambition and a real focus on delivering results which will ultimately allow us to shine more of a spotlight on people building peace around the world and give them the support which works for them. We no longer seek out small wins - in a niche sector which has struggled to cut through with the public, we are now seeing that with the right strategy people do believe in our cause and are willing to support us. Rally has given us the confidence to know we can and should be striving for growth and scale.’
So while Rally is still very much part of the next chapter, thanks to how we’ve worked together our dynamic has changed. The Peace Direct team is firmly in the driving seat. And we couldn’t be happier about that. Because that was the initial plan.
Photographs are supplied by Peace Direct and were taken by Greg Funnell.
Early in the UK COVID-19 lockdown, inspired by a tweet containing an image of some graffiti on a wall in Hong Kong, we reached for our ink pad and alphabet stamps and made some marks onto a piece of blank paper.
It made us feel better.
We posted it on Instagram, some people liked it, some people said we should turn it into something. So we did. And we posted it to a few people whose home address we had. Who posted it to their social media. Which meant more people asked if they could have one. So we sent more. And that kept on happening.
We’ve sent close to 200.
To people we know and to people we don’t.
We sent one to someone we’d never met before, who asked us to send one to her gran whose dog had passed away that week as she thought it would cheer her up. We hope it did. And we sent one to a mate who messaged us back to say thank you and then died a week a later. And we miss him terribly.
And now the words that we borrowed from a tweet seem even more relevant than they did in March.
If you want one in the post let us know. International dispatch subject to delay.
Main photo by Nicholas Green on Unsplash
