The Challenge
In recent years foodbanks have become a common phenomenon in towns and cities across the UK as poverty becomes a sad part of everyday life. Many are locally run and managed some by churches, some by charities, some by local authorities. And many are affiliated with one of the two largest coordinating agencies for foodbanks The Trussell Trust and FareShare.
Foodbanks are supported in two ways: by direct donations in the form of cash – normally online – and by gifts-in-kind where shoppers add items to their own purchases and then place them in large baskets located after the tills or give them direct to volunteer collection teams.
Demand on UK foodbanks, and worldwide, has grown significantly – and in parallel the need for funds and donations in kind. The =mc consulting decisionscience team was asked by the UK’s largest coordination agency, The Trussell Trust, to help them explore how to raise more funds using decision science techniques. And in parallel we worked with several local foodbanks to identify how to increase food donations.
How we helped
The fundraising element involved exploring how to make the issue of food poverty more salient for individuals, and helping them to understand that cash was the most ‘fungible’ – easily convertible – form of support. With foundations and corporations there was a stronger emphasis on using stories and statistics more powerfully to cut through the very many appeals they have to deal with.
With the food bank guidelines we studied how providing shoppers with shopping lists, or having individuals prompting them in the queue, or even the ability to buy a £10 or £15 package would make the cognitive load much less. One foodbank bank simply asked shoppers to remember three items to buy – and then changed the three items every hour.
Longer term we are talking to one of the major supermarket chains about how they might redesign the current collection boxes to make them more attractive and engaging.
- With the Trussell Trust team we offered a training programme for the fundraising and communications teams and follow up support in behavioural science and how it could impact on all their fundraising – online, DM, HNWI, corporate and foundations
- We also ran a research project on local food banks – and put together guidelines exploring how they might encourage shoppers to give more, and more of the right kinds of things
The Impact
The impact on fundraising was clear with improved messaging going out from the fundraising team to a variety of donors and across a number of channels. Overall income for the Trust is up perhaps as much as 100% in 2020 – though clearly this cannot be attributed to our work. The good news is people, including the people who run businesses and foundations are fundamentally philanthropic.
The impact on direct shopper donations has been small scale so far though there is an ongoing programme of experiments to explore what produces maximum impact – but in one local experiment donations over one day across three local supermarkets in one small 17,000 person town went up from 2,000 items to 4,500.
Next Steps?
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Clare Segal, Director
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