The Brain Tumour Charity creates award-winning donor experience with Salesforce Professional Services

Personalised engagement is at the heart of every successful customer journey, and to deliver personalisation, you need to know your customers and what they want.

Like many charities, The Brain Tumour Charity previously had many different definitions for its supporters and donors which were constantly evolving – and used inconsistently across the organisation. To streamline this process and take its marketing to the next level, the charity needed a unified way to intelligently classify and segment its audience.

This was one of the first challenges that the Professional Services team helped solve. By the second workshop, Salesforce data scientists had already analysed the last five years of the charity’s supporter data. This provided unprecedented insight into customer behaviour and enabled a clear division of the supporter base into persona cohorts, laying the groundwork for a supporter-centric strategy.

“I don’t think so many people have ever fallen in love with segmentation so quickly,” recalled Almond. “It’s given us a clear and logical way to talk about our different supporters, and it’s become central to our campaign planning and reporting.”

While The Brain Tumour Charity is still working alongside Salesforce to refine its segmentation and find the best ways to leverage it, the new, data-driven approach is already enabling the charity to deliver more targeted, relevant, and engaging customer interaction.

With its new-found Marketing Cloud expertise, and with supporting methodologies and segmentation in place, The Brain Tumour Charity began work on its initial campaign – Jeremy Daubeny’s ‘Tour de Full English’.

In 2018, Jeremy’s father passed away from a brain tumour, and he lost his mother soon after to Motor Neurone Disease. To honour his parents, Jeremy embarked on a seven-week cycling challenge, touring the country in search of Britain’s Best Breakfast in order to raise awareness and funds for both conditions.

Jeremy’s challenge captured imaginations throughout the country, and presented the perfect opportunity for The Brain Tumour Charity to put what it had learned from Salesforce into action. The charity amplified the story through an interactive email campaign, utilising Journey Builder’s capabilities to deliver a 1:1 personalised experience for each supporter. The charity worked together with the Salesforce experts to design a series of seven emails, with each one inviting the recipient to choose what content they wanted to see next. For instance, they could choose to hear Jeremy’s thoughts on the best breakfasts, or learn about brain tumour research projects.

The combination of interactivity and rich, personalised content proved immensely successful, resulting in thousands of pounds in incremental revenue in the first two weeks, a 2x uplift in donation per donor, and a 1.7x increase in amount per donation. However, this success was only the beginning. The charity immediately took what it learned from the pilot project, refined the campaign, and began testing with a new audience.

“We started seeing better results in the second test straightaway,” said Clements about the iterative test-and-refine approach. The Brain Tumour Charity is now applying the best practices that it has developed through the initial tests to an upcoming, large-scale early diagnosis campaign.

Gina Almond explains: “It’s a multichannel, multi-year campaign that will be one of the biggest things we do within the charity for the foreseeable future. Brain tumours don’t discriminate, so the audience for this will be everyone. The enormity of the project, of how we’re going to track it, and the kind of journeys we’ll need to create is almost overwhelming – it wouldn’t be possible without Salesforce and the lessons we’ve learned so far.”