Understanding donor preferences to optimise charity marketing and communications

Abstract

This case study explores how a leading charity, the British Heart Foundation (BHF), used research to ensure that the focus of its marketing and communications contributed to a story that people found engaging and were compelled to support. Amongst some staff, there was a view that the methodology of some of the BHF’s previous market research was not robust enough and that studies often lacked the quantitative data needed to develop marketing and communication strategies with confidence. Behavioural economics shows that there is usually a disconnect between what people say they will do and what they do in real life, the BHF wanted to develop a methodology that would interrogate this paradox. In doing so, it hoped to identify the areas of its work the public found most engaging and which would encourage people to support them. This insight would then be used to inform their new marketing communications plans. This note explains what the BHF learnt from involving explicit and implicit testing via a mix of qualitative and quantitative techniques.