Fundraising can be a bit of a lottery

Recently at Newcastle Dog and Cat Shelter we launched a new fundraising solution – a Mobile Lottery – a weekly lottery that our supporters can enter quickly and easily, using just their mobile phone. In this article we explore why we launched it and how we hope to benefit from it.

For over 125 years, we have been helping thousands of lost, unwanted, neglected, abused and abandoned animals. Our objective, put simply, is the promotion of kindness and the prevention of cruelty to animals and we are proud of our mission, to save lives in the North East. On a day-to-day basis, we work hard to reunite lost animals with their owners or to find loving new homes for those no longer wanted. Based out of Newcastle, with two shelters at Claremont Road (arrivals) and Benton North Farm (rehoming) we cover the whole of the North East.

Whilst we have been established for a long time and have many loyal supporters, like many charities, we are feeling the pinch of the general cost of living crisis. For us, the energy cost rises are hitting us directly. It costs us over £46,000 a year to heat our Rehoming and Arrivals centres which care for animals from their first day up until they leave the shelter into their forever homes.  These costs are only going to rise higher and we knew we needed to do something and quickly.

Our ‘Heat a Home’ campaign, with an online donation page, had some success, however we knew we needed to do something else to cover our growing costs.

A key priority was to create ongoing, stable income for the shelter. The heating costs, with some seasonal fluctuations, are an unavoidable cost to us, if we could find a fundraising solution that could provide constant and consistent income to cover these costs – it would be ideal.

When considering new solutions, we were mindful the fundraising landscape has changed significantly in recent times – the Covid-19 pandemic and changing demographics and the personal circumstances of charity supporters is different today to what it was a few years ago.

Cash donations are much less at Newcastle Dog and Cat Shelter, mainly because there is less face-to-face interactions with supporters. On the flip side, digital fundraising has grown during the same time frame. By working through the options, we considered online giving, text based donation options, QR codes, and other cashless options.

The move to digital fundraising works well for a big slice of our demographic and how we now interact with them. Our wider fundraising strategy has moved increasingly to digital solutions, we currently use sites such as Amazon Smile, Amazon Wishlist, and various online donation pages.

Finally, we wanted to be aware of how we approach supporters – both existing and new – and how we engage with them and move them to donate.

Research shows that ‘Generation Z’ (those born between 1995 and 2010) is the group most likely to give to charity, with ‘Millennials’ (people between 1980 and 1994) not far behind. These two groups are also considered to be the most tech-savvy and social media-savvy as well. To reach that key audience, we are active on social platforms including Instagram and TikTok, this means many of our supporters access our content and engage with us, primarily, on mobile phones. A solution that would tap into this audience was also important to us.

These elements became key criteria for decision making: something to provide an ongoing revenue stream; that was digital (ie cashless); and something that could be easily promoted on social media and accessed via mobile phones.

As we researched the market, we were drawn to the idea of Mobile Lotteries, run by Donr. We have a track record of employing other income solutions by Donr, so to see them launching a new solution fitting all of our requirements was a great opportunity not to be missed.

However, we still had to make sure that this was the right horse to back. As with any new fundraising project or technology, we considered three additional elements: the ease of use for us to set up and run; the way supporters would interact and ease of use for them; and how much we could raise and our confidence in terms of the likely return on investment (RoI).

In terms of ease of use for us, like other Donr solutions we have used, it ticks all the boxes. The regulatory and technical work had been carried out within the solution and we only needed a local authority licence, which took a couple of weeks.

For supporters, the process is simple and works by charging the cost of entry to their next mobile phone bill, or by deducting the cost from their current credit. This means they don’t need to have bank details to hand, just their mobile phone number. All they have to do is complete a short form to confirm key information, name, age, number of tickets, country of residence and phone number.

Once that is done, players are entered into the Mobile Lottery and have a chance to win a prize of up to £10,000.

The final question was could we raise enough money and generate healthy RoI.

To set up the Mobile Lottery, we had to pay £40 fee to register with the local authority. There is no set-up for the technology. The shelter receives 51% of the cost of every ticket sold. So, each time a supporter enters our Mobile Lottery, paying £2 a ticket, we receive £1.02. The rest of the money is used to cover lottery running costs, prizes, transaction fees, taxes, licensing fees and administrative costs.

The advantage for us was that it made for a low investment cost and a good return per ticket. We saw this as a valid option and low risk when it comes to launching a new solution for supporters.

We launched our new Mobile Lottery in May – we believe Newcastle Cat and Dog Shelter is the first UK charity to launch a Mobile Lottery!

Our initial goal is simple – to raise as much money as possible! Short term we would love to cover the £46,000 cost of heating our Rehoming and Arrivals centres.

Within the first 6 months we are targeting 1,000 players to join the Mobile Lottery. If we can achieve that, then we will be able to generate a weekly income of £1,020, and a yearly income of £53k. If we do that, Mobile Lotteries will have been a big success for us and will be seen as an excellent and innovative way to generate regular income.