Challenge
A children’s hospital charity wanted to expand one of their core fundraising products – a family running event – so that they could reach a national audience. They needed a partner who could develop an audience-led vision and delivery plan that would deepen connection to their cause, grow income sustainably, and strengthen lifetime value across their fundraising ecosystem.
Approach
I worked as a contractor on the partner’s agency team, contributing to the agency’s tender response and pitch, project-managing the early-stage discovery and definition phases of the project, and working as part of a small consulting team on those phases. Together, we led the charity’s mass-pax fundraising team through a double-diamond project process.
We began by interviewing stakeholders from across the charity and the corporate partner’s citizenship team, running qualitative audience research activities, and analysing the product’s current financial performance.
Our research showed that although there was demand for the event beyond London, there were also significant challenges that the expansion would need to overcome. One of these challenges was that the event relied heavily on support from the corporate partner and therefore could not successfully scale without changes to the underlying revenue model.
Once we’d uncovered and made this challenge clear, we were able to adjust our approach to the following activities, designing a workshop that focused on strengthening the event’s revenue model, removing that barrier to expansion, and followed this with proposition development activities.
Outcome
Our work led to stronger revenue generation mechanisms, a three-year learning roadmap, clearer positioning that flexes across product formats, and upcoming pilots in regions identified during discovery as key to expansion.