Flying to new fundraising heights

The elevation of Wiltshire Air Ambulance’s fundraising and public engagement ambitions through the development and delivery of a bespoke digital strategy. Together we created a new user led website and later integrated a new CRM system to enable the team to connect with their existing supporter base. By leveraging gamification, we created a fundraising app to enhance their fundraising goals and engage a new audience group.

Ambition

Wiltshire Air Ambulance’s mission is “We Save Lives” and they have been a lifeline in the skies of Wiltshire for over 30 years. Operating 19 hours a day and undertaking, on average, 3 lifesaving missions every single day.

Yet, they are entirely funded by donations from their supporters. Therefore, driving awareness, engaging with supporters and raising funds is vital to the continued delivery of the service.

Wiltshire Air Ambulance need to raise funds of £3.75m a year to keep serving the community.

We have been Wiltshire Air Ambulance’s digital partner since 2018. Our first engagement focused on bringing clarity to their vision, as we helped define their digital strategy. We were keen to evolve the ways they connected and collaborated with their donors by seeking to understand their supporters, their needs and their current digital journey.

This led to the development of a new roadmap of digital projects focused on enhancing their users’ experience, which included the development of a new website, a new fundraising platform and key infrastructure improvements to drive internal efficiencies.

The website is the key point of contact for their supporters, from understanding the charity’s mission to finding volunteering opportunities and sourcing the latest events to help fundraise. By transforming their website with UX navigation and making key accessibility improvements we created a fully articulated and consistent brand experience across multiple devices.

By simplifying donations and delivering information in the way each of their target supporter groups wanted, we ensured an enhanced user experience which resulted in a leap in donations through the website.

The charity was also seeking to encourage a new younger audience to engage with their purpose and support their fundraising efforts. The success of the new website spearheaded the move to explore their first gamification project and develop an app. Aware they, like many charities, risked fundraising fatigue, they wanted to create something new and fit for a new audience, and so Helifun was born! A digital platform to help share the charity’s story and enable them a way to interact with supporters of all ages.

The tech behind the applications

For the core content management we utilised Umbraco CMS, whilst the frontend of the website was built using a Bootstrap framework. This gave the charity a feature rich, yet easy to manage new website, so the site can continue to develop alongside the charity.

We made a series of improvements to the infrastructure including a more stable integration with CRM, integrating with thankQ to allow user data to be fully utilised by the team.

The fundraising solution is a combination of bespoke development and integration with the Eventbrite API. Donations are taken care of using the Braintree in page solution which offers payments via card, PayPal, Google Pay and Apple Pay. We also integrated with Rapidata so the charity could offer Direct Debit donations.