4 ways a third-party team can revolutionise your charity response handling

Whatever your charity’s funding initiatives, you will need to have a response handling process in place.

Whether you’ve launched a weekly lottery or a one-off raffle, kick-started a cash appeal, are operating a regular giving programme or running any other kind of individual giving programme to receive donations for your charity, response handing is an absolute necessity.

While many charities choose to manage their response handling in-house, others decide to team up with third-party specialists such as Woods Valldata due to their: 

• Accuracy – Respecting and valuing the importance of data, and ensuring this is used in the right way. 
• Speed – Enhancing supporter experiences and ensuring donations for the cause are banked as soon as possible. 
• Visibility offering – Providing charities with full visibility of live donor responses, processing and data.  
• Clear communications – More specifically, providing a collaborative working relationship where they are contactable as and when needed. 
• Cost efficiency – Providing a partnership that helps to drive down unnecessary costs whilst increasing ROI. 

As a result, these charities have a powerful means of support in place that allows them to focus more time and energy on their income generation. 

However, what they also often find is that their response handling is transformed in a way that provides them with even greater benefits than they originally anticipated! 

Read on to discover what these are...

Here are four ways a third-party team will revolutionise your response handling:

1. They will significantly speed up the process

Thanks to technology, people now expect responses to their queries or actions faster than ever before – but with other duties and tasks to complete, this can be especially tricky for your team to keep on top of. 

A third-party agency, on the other hand, will be taking on responses as their main duty, meaning that these will be processed quickly and efficiently.  

They'll also take into consideration your charity's specific requirements to ensure that they implement truly personalised supporter responses, consequently helping to build strong donor/charity relationships. 

At Woods Valldata for example, our SmartThank^(TM) is able to automatically identify which of your supporters should receive which response based on the criteria agreed by your organisation. It then automatically sends the correct response to that individual supporter. 

As a result of these quick, authentic and accurate responses, you’ll be enhancing the overall donor experience and strengthening their relationship with your charity. They will therefore be more likely to continue participating or participate in your initiatives again in the future.

2. They will minimise the likelihood of errors occurring

If your campaign becomes more popular than anticipated, this can increase pressure on your team to manage responses in a timely manner. Unfortunately, this level of pressure can often lead to mistakes – for example, sending the wrong reply to the wrong donor. 

This can not only be a deterrent for your donors but also put you at risk of breaking data compliance legislation.  

As your third-party team will be focusing on your response handling specifically, this means there is a significantly lower risk of these kinds of human errors being made. They will also have strict data security measures in place.  

For example, Woods Valldata resides in state-of-the-art facilities which keep our client’s data and donations secure. We're also able to upscale quickly to accommodate your campaign response levels keeping outgoing supporter communications timely without any delay to banking donations received. 

Sometimes it's hard to predict the response to a campaign and having a partner on hand that can flex on demand means your supporter experience is not affected when you're more successful than anticipated.  This is something Crisis found when they launched their Ration Pack Challenge.

3. They'll have the best technology to hand

Much of your response handling processes will involve some form of technology. The set-up, training and maintenance required here can be complex, costly and time-consuming – and that’s if all runs smoothly and there are no technical issues.

Third-party agencies, like Woods Valldata, will have all this in hand already, using the latest and most effective technologies available. As a result, you’ll find yourself once again with more time and budget to pour back into your fundraising initiatives!

4. They’ll provide you with only the very best support

Acting as an extension of your team, your chosen partner will be able to advise on the most recent best practices and enable you to improve your approach.

They’ll additionally ensure that they manage your responses with the same approach, care and attention as you do, acting as an extension of your charity in the eyes of your supporters. Woods Valldata even have a dedicated supporter services team to help manage enquiries and response queries to supporters on your behalf!

This way, you can remain confident that your charity’s values and ethos are being prioritised throughout, and that you are providing your supporters with a truly seamless experience.

As a result, your response handling won’t simply be a tick-box exercise, but become a whole new avenue to connect with and nurture your donor base! 

The above approach is exactly how our team at Woods Valldata will work with you as part of our response handling offering.

We provide a seamless partnership that will give you everything you need to analyse the performance of your campaign, taking your unique KPI measures and requirements to effectively manage: 

• post sortation, opening, processing and scanning 
• banking one-off payments and direct debits,  
• bespoke individual thanking 
• automatically triggered print and email communications 
• non-standard mail and in-bound call enquiries
• Plus more. 

In fact, the expertise and care we provide and the partnership approach we take has made Woods Valldata one of the most trusted agencies by some of the UK’s biggest and most progressive charities! You can see this for yourself in our case studies below: 

• Médecins Sans Frontières: The personal touch making the difference for MSF UK supporters 
• Ethiopiaid: Smooth and efficient on-boarding in just 3 weeks 
• PETA: Digitising archive records for ease and speed of access 
• Royal British Legion: Charity response handling where timing and accuracy are vital

If you’d like to learn more or you’d like to team up with Woods Valldata to make the most of our renowned response handling services, contact our team today for a free consultation.