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Christmas is a time for giving and for many charities it's the time of year when they raise the most money. But for the well-meaning consumer, choosing which charity is most deserving of a donation can be difficult, especially when there's a tin-rattler on every street corner and every day's mail brings with it another charity's plea for help.

With mailers having to work harder for cut-through on the doormat, the charity direct mail business has never been so competitive.

This was the challenge facing The Salvation Army last year and half measures were not an option. With fifty per cent of its donations income coming in during December and January, the charity needed to ensure it fully capitalised on the public's festive largesse.

As part of its annual fundraising activity, the charity runs its Winter ±±¾©Èü³µpk10 every November to recruit existing and new supporters onto direct debit donations. And it's a campaign the charity has been building up for the past five years under a very specific strategy. Its launch was prompted by research the charity carried out in 1997. This highlighted the fact that the public perception of the Salvation Army was largely one of brass bands and old-fashioned uniforms that worked almost solely with the homeless. Unfortunately, this misperception was affecting its fundraising abilities.

In fact, the charity is the biggest provider of social services outside the government, as well as a worldwide church, running everything from parent and toddler groups to services for the elderly.

Work clearly still had to be done to alter the public's perception of the charity if it was to successfully increase donations. With its then newly appointed agency Target Direct, a five-year development strategy was set up around the Winter ±±¾©Èü³µpk10 to achieve exactly this.

Broadening campaign appeal

The Winter ±±¾©Èü³µpk10 was already large in scale. In 1997, it was using five media: DRTV, radio, direct mail, door drops and magazine inserts.

In 2002, it became the biggest Christmas charity appeal ever to run in the UK, with a multimedia direct response campaign that reached an audience of 81 million. The aims were simple: to boost donor numbers and broaden the appeal of the campaign out to younger audiences, while ensuring brand consistency across all communications. Planning for the 2002 campaign started in April because of its complexity and so new channels, including the web, could be tried out. The plan was to make the campaign 20 per cent bigger than the previous year.

In 2002, The Salvation Army was already in the fortunate position of having a database of approximately 800,000 supporters - a mixture of regular donors and occasional cash donors.

"Around half of the database are on some form of committed giving," explains Julius Wolff-Ingham, head of marketing and fundraising at The Salvation Army. "We write to them two or three times a year, and they're the most generous responders. The other 400,000 we mail about five times a year, trying different ways to get them onto committed giving."

The donor part of the 2002 campaign alone saw 671,000 existing supporters mailed. This included loyal supporters, which made up just over half, plus lapsed donors and inquirers, and people who had moved into a house where a supporter had previously lived.

The recruitment part of the campaign had a budget of £2.6m - 36 per cent more than 2001, and it used six different media: DRTV, direct mail, door drops, inserts, press ads and the web. A staggering 3.5 million names were mailed across 132 lists and 10.1 million inserts were distributed.

Activity started just over a month before Christmas, as it does every year. "We try to weight the campaign so that it starts close to mid-November,' says Wolff-Ingham. "Mail goes out from the second week onwards, and most of the inserts go out over an eight-week period. We're mindful that Christmas is our best time of year and we take advantage of this by staggering activity."

The charity also tries hard to get donors to feel involved with its work and as such was one of the first charities to put out an interactive mailer. Most of the packs that went out last year included a Christmas card that donors could sign and send back to be distributed to the needy.

"Hundreds of thousands came back," recalls Stephen Pidgeon, chairman of Target Direct. "It's a link with The Salvation Army's work and the donor wants to feel that they're doing good. For some people, it's the only Christmas card they'll get."

First-hand experience

Getting involved in the charity's work is just as important for Target Direct as for its supporters. "We couldn't do the job otherwise," says Pidgeon.

To be able to come up with strong, effective campaign, the creative team needs to understand exactly what The Salvation Army does and briefings alone aren't enough. "The Target Direct team comes out on meal runs and serves behind the hatch," says Wolff-Ingham. "They've also visited our centres in Dublin, looking at the work done with the homeless and children."

This was a huge help for Target Direct in its development of what was a complex campaign. It totalled more than 720 separate creative elements, and introduced eight packs, all focusing on the charity's work and beliefs.

The direct mail alone had 15 different creative treatments, the inserts, which went out in the Radio Times and Sunday supplements, had seven, and press ads four. There were two different creative treatments for the DRTV ads - which went out on Channel 4, Five and satellite channels - three animated banner ads, one radio ad and one door drop.

One of the new packs was the Credo mailpack, which focused on the charity's beliefs. This pack was central to The Salvation Army's aim of shifting public perception. "If we go back a few years, our direct marketing activity focused on our work with the homeless," says Wolff-Ingham. "This year I wanted to talk about our values and beliefs. And it worked - this pack got an eight per cent result rate. For 2003 we're expanding in terms of volume and also developing it into a door drop."

Getting the charity's beliefs and values across was crucial. "By talking about this we get people to buy into us at a fundamental level," he says.

"We can talk powerfully about our motivations. Propositions that show our values and beliefs work as hard as those about the work we do."

Pidgeon says there's a simple reason why this is the case. "People are innately good," he says. "They want this work to be done and they're willing to pay for it - they're glad that someone will do it."

As well as launching the Credo pack, 2002 was the year for a number of other firsts. It was the first time The Salvation Army managed to make press ads work, as past efforts hadn't done as well as hoped. It was also the first year it had specifically included web activity.

Integrating all this activity was hard work. "The biggest challenge was just getting everything out there on time," says Pidgeon. "This is the busiest period of the year in terms of production for printers and we had a huge amount of paper to go out."

But it worked, and the response was tremendous. The target set for the mailing to supporters was £3.1m. The income achieved was more than £9m, an ROI of 48.1:1. Fifty-six per cent of supporters who already give monthly gave a further cash donation, as did 39 per cent of active cash donors.

In the recruitment campaign, the best-performing cold mailpack achieved a response rate of 7.1 per cent and an ROI of 10.5:1. The press ads managed an ROI of 4.56:1 - 35 per cent over budget. "Effectively, every £1 spent delivered £2," says Pidgeon. "Most charities would look to make a loss on recruitment."

The database now has almost 175,000 supporters giving monthly via direct debit, and about 450,000 active cash donors. The plan is to do even better this year. Of the eight packs trialled in 2002, all worked, and these are being refined for the 2003 Winter ±±¾©Èü³µpk10. As Wolff-Ingham says: "We may be in a unique position, but we're certainly not resting on our laurels."