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In the crowded charity market, it can be difficult to make a splash, especially from a direct-marketing perspective. Breast Cancer Care may have been established for some 30 years, supporting UK sufferers, their friends and families, but until a couple of years ago, it had never used DM to raise funds.

Now it runs three key activities a year, and under the head of fundraising Marcus O'Shea it is testing more and trialling a range of channels. O'Shea simply says:"There was a glaring hole in our income, with DM providing just one per cent. We're aiming to increase this by up to £0.5m."

According to O'Shea Breast Cancer Care faces several hurdles. He says: "The challenges are donor acquisition and a lack of profiling data.We have two major issues - we don't have many donors and we don't know anything about the ones we do have, so we're trying things out and seeing what works."

Window of opportunity

Currently, the charity has 3,200 donors - around 600 committed givers and 2,500 people who have donated in the past two years. All the charity knows about its donors is that the majority are female (82 per cent) with a south/south-east bias; twenty-two per cent give between £10 to £15, and 70 per cent have donated in the past two years.

Until recently, Breast Cancer Care had only used direct mail. At Christmas it sends out a card to donors thanking them for their support and gives them the opportunity to donate again. This has proved successful with an average response rate of 12.8 per cent. "We do well from this, but there's a huge drop in response rates from people who have given in the past 24 months compared with those in the last 12 months. I now know that I need to get at least one gift a year from people," says O'Shea.

Last Christmas, O'Shea sent out different versions of the card to see if that would affect the response. "We sent out two versions - one religious and one not and split the list straight down the middle. Two-thirds of the donations came back from those who had received the religious card," he says.

Another regular activity is a warm mailing sent out in the spring - a letter with a case study aimed at keeping donors "ticking over in the 12-month gift window", says O'Shea. This garners up to a 12.5 per cent response rate.

The charity's autumn activity is the most important in the fundraising calendar, with 75 to 80 per cent of its income dependent on it. October is Breast Cancer Care Awareness Month, comprising donor recruitment and a warm mailing. O'Shea has been experimenting here. "We tried lists last year - we took a 10,000-strong cold list for a trial with terrible response rates - all from people who'd shown a propensity to give to cancer charities." His slant on this is that where people have been personally touched by cancer and used a particular charity's services, they are unlikely to cross over from supporting one to another.

Testing new channels and activity is important to take DM forward. As well as cold lists, O'Shea tried cold inserts in a magazine and a third-party's account card mailing. "They did badly, but we made the error of not looking at where our audience is," he says.

Another experiment has been email and viral activity linked in with a daytime TV advert promoting the charity's services. The ad aired on C4, satellite channels and QVC for three weeks. It showed celebrities talking about Breast Cancer Care and directed people to the website, giving them the opportunity to join the mailing list, which grew from 3,000 to 35,000 in three weeks.

In response to this, the charity launched its first viral email. While the average open rate was 64.5 per cent, response then dropped. "Where we fell over was the ask," says O'Shea. "The average click-through rate was 10 per cent. We wanted people to tell a friend, donate or buy a wristband, but the viral response was low at 1.4 per cent. It didn't really achieve pass on."

Acting on impulse

O'Shea is also trialling text. "We wanted to give people an impulse option to donate, so we put a text option on the site. We have had about 80 text donations so far and people seem to be picking it up."

The charity has also linked up with Dorothy Perkins, sending out a mailing to 140,000 customers as well as its own segment of 6,000, and selling wristbands through the stores, which enables it to collect email addresses.

"In terms of raising awareness and profile, this is fantastic," says O'Shea.

"And the email addresses collected through the wristbands seem to be a new, younger audience."

With all this going on, it's a busy time for the charity, but it doesn't end here as the year ahead will involve heavy profiling, and gathering the results from the activity it is currently doing, O'Shea says.

VITAL STATISTICS

Name: Breast Cancer Care

Marketing challenge: To acquire donors and build up profiling data

DM spend: Approximately £650,000

Agency: Mindmatics for text. In-house for warm mailings

Media: Mail, TV, web, email, inserts

Competitors: Cancer Research UK, Macmillan, Marie Curie Cancer Care