The Background
Lock The Gate is a grassroots movement of farmers, traditional custodians and everyday Australians fighting destructive coal and gas projects across the country. Through effective campaigning, community engagement, access to legal advice and research, they protect Australia’s natural, cultural and agricultural resources – securing our land, water and food supply for generations to come.
While grants and major donors had been strong income sources, there was an ambition to diversify and grow individual giving, creating a more balanced and sustainable income mix.
Call To Action was engaged to develop Lock The Gate’s Individual Giving Fundraising Strategy – covering the full breadth of their IG program including cash and regular giving acquisition and retention, their shop, gifts in wills, and campaigning activity.
The Challenge
Lock The Gate’s small and talented team was predominantly focused on grants and major giving income streams, as well as campaigning to protect our natural resources. While they’d identified an opportunity to grow individual giving, and knew their campaigning supporters were an untapped resource, they didn’t have capacity to plan a strategy and map a clear path forward.
It was therefore crucial that our fundraising strategy accounted for their resources, budget and capabilities. If the strategy wasn’t actionable, it might as well never be written!
To help Lock The Gate achieve their goals, we needed to:
Establish clear, measurable KPIs for IG fundraising activity
Conduct market research to determine who their existing and previous donors were
Segment audiences based on propensity and motivation for giving, then build out detailed personas
Determine the right fundraising model for an advocacy-led organisation
Develop strategies for both one-off and regular giving acquisition and retention
Identify opportunities across additional revenue streams
Create a clear roadmap for rollout
Provide all the tools needed to implement the strategy
The Solution
We followed our Discover, Decide, Deliver methodology:
Discovery & Workshops
We kicked off with a deep-dive discovery phase that drew on stakeholder and donor interviews, an internal donor survey, donor data analysis, campaign and email performance reviews, sector benchmarking and peer analysis of organisations including Greenpeace and Climate Council.
This data helped build a comprehensive picture of Lock The Gate’s audiences, fundraising activity and the wider individual giving landscape. We identified what was currently working and what wasn’t, resulting in a clear list of opportunities to maximise and challenges to overcome. Crucially, we found that Lock The Gate had all the tools to employ a proven campaign-to-donate fundraising model – converting their passionate base of petition signers and action takers into financial supporters.
After presenting our discovery findings, we held two collaborative workshops with Lock The Gate’s team to co-create the strategy – setting KPIs, targets and a shared fundraising vision, and mapping detailed donor journeys.
Strategy Development
The resulting strategy laid out Lock The Gate’s individual giving playbook for the next five years. It included:
KPIs, objectives and targets
An overarching value proposition and refreshed case for support for both cash and regular giving
Messaging framework spanning evergreen and campaign-specific asks
Detailed audience personas and donor journey maps
A campaign-to-donate model as the primary acquisition engine
Strategic initiatives covering acquisition and retention, gifts in wills and the merchandise shop
A fundraising calendar of activity by channel
Detailed implementation playbooks
A clear roadmap for rollout
Crucially, the strategy came with a toolkit containing media plans and performance models – giving Lock The Gate the tools to make informed budget and investment decisions.
Delivery
Following the strategy, we were engaged to implement one of our low-hanging-fruit recommendations – setting up and launching Lock The Gate’s Google Ad Grant account, unlocking $10,000 per month in free search advertising.
The Result
Comprehensive 5-year strategy with clear KPIs, targets and a roadmap to acquire thousands of new donors annually
Landing page and checkout optimisations drove an immediate uptick in new donors
$10,000/month in free Google Ad spend unlocked through Ad Grant setup
Call to Action have been a breath of fresh air and pivotal in developing our fundraising strategy. They took the time to understand our challenges and worked collaboratively with us to identify achievable solutions. Their insights were not only actionable but also aligned with our capacity and resources, empowering us to move forward with confidence.
Sharyn Stein
Giving Relationship Coordinator @ Lock The Gate
