Chatting Direct Marketing with Kathryn Holloway, Friends of the Earth.

Episode 15 of Cracking Charity Chat is with Kathryn Holloway, Head of Individual Giving and Supporter Care at Friends of the Earth.

Kathryn is a brilliant fundraiser, an excellent baker and all round wonderful person. She’s also my go-to person on all things direct marketing (DM), so it was lovely to meet up and chat for Cracking Charity Chat podcast.

We cover:

• Supporter journeys
• Digital channels and should you have Instagram?
• How Friends of the Earth (FoE) is recruiting and retaining supporters
• GDPR (genuine excitement from Kathryn at this point)
• British Home Stores’ lighting section in the late 90s

The key themes that I took from the chat were:

1. Conversations. Although big budget ATL campaigns will continue to be valuable for many organisations, the general shift in DM over recent years has been away from interruption techniques and much more towards building engagement and conversations right from the get-go. At the heart of this is an understanding of your audiences and having conversations with them where and when they are ready. FoE’s success in regular giving recruitment from paid social media is a good example of this. Greenpeace have taken this a step further with their use of Facebook Messenger and it sounds like it’s working well too.
2. GDPR, etc. Seeing GDPR and sector regulatory changes as opportunities is refreshing! But it’s true – the drivers for many of these changes are in line with what we stand for as a sector, such as respect and transparency. This mindset, along with cookies and a Spotify playlist seem to have held FoE in good stead.
3. Get the basics right. At its core, a lot of direct marketing is about basic communication skills and decency; having conversations, asking nicely, saying sincere and timely thank yous. It sounds like Kathryn’s grounding in customer service from BHS back in the day prepared her well for the job she’s doing now.

You can find Kathryn chatting pasties, gin and Devon @KatHolloway or being very insightful and important at various fundraising conferences.

You can listen on SoundCloud,  iTunes or my website. I hope you enjoy it – if so, do share on social media and rate on iTunes. I’d also love to hear your feedback.