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The Challenge
As a non-profit charity, Kids Help Phone relies heavily on events to help raise funds to cover its operating costs. In 2020, the organization held a national fundraising event, Never Dance Alone-a-thon powered by BMO. To incentivize individual participants and teams for reaching specific fundraising milestones, Kids Help Phone rewarded their efforts with a gift card.
When staff were in the office pre-COVID, fulfillment was done manually and mailed out, which was laborious and time-consuming. But with the onset of the pandemic and the Kids Help Phone team working remotely from home, this manual process was no longer possible and they needed to find a new and more efficient way to manage their incentive fulfillment program.
The requirements for Kids Help Phone’s new fulfillment program were extensive. The team needed a fully digital platform that would integrate with their existing fundraising and incentive models, both of which were relatively complex. The solution needed to have the most up-to-date and robust data protection systems in place, and would need to pass a data protection review with their organization’s privacy and risk committee.
Most importantly, Kids Help Phone wanted a premium online experience for their participants that was seamless, easy-to-use and provided a fast and simple way for them to redeem their offers.
The Solution
Kids Help Phone was looking for a partner, not just a software provider. They knew this solution would be a significant, long-term investment that would become an integral part of their organization’s incentive program.
Thankfully, Gratiflow checked every box. During the onboarding process, we mapped out their needs from both a participant and user perspective and provided a launch timeline with milestones for both our deliverables and the clients.
We provided training on the software, so the team could learn how to use it themselves to review campaign performance, pull reports and update participant data. They were also assigned a dedicated project manager who would be their single point of contact for the campaign.
The time from sign up to launch of the first offer was just four months, incredibly fast for a large charity with a number of stakeholders and an extensive sign-off process.
The Results
The first Gratiflow incentive fulfillment campaign for Kids Help Phone launched in 2020 and was a resounding success.
The digital platform gave the Kids Help Phone team the ability to review and analyze the performance of their gift card campaign – something that had never been possible before. They could review delivery rates, redemption rates and quickly respond to customer service requests by making updates directly within the dashboard.
They almost entirely eliminated their shipping costs, which were considerable given the team were mailing out gift cards across the country. It also drastically reduced the manual steps they had to take to get a gift card in a participant’s hands and cut down the time to deliver these incentives in half.
The feedback from participants has been overwhelmingly positive – they preferred getting a gift card to their inbox versus receiving it through the mail. They also said the ease of using the platform made it incredibly easy to redeem their offer.
The campaign was so successful that Kids Help Phone rolled out another campaign internally to reward their volunteers with a Boston Pizza gift card as part of Volunteer Appreciation Week.
Finally, one of the unique options the Gratiflow platform offers participants is the ability to donate back their gift card as a donation. For Kids Help Phone’s first campaign, they had an incredible $8,000 returned to them in donations.
“The entire process with Gratiflow is pain-free, and they are incredibly easy to work with. They’re super responsive, always innovating and are completely trustworthy. I’ll never go back to manual incentive fulfillment, and I know we’ll be working with Gratiflow for years to come.”
– Megan Philpot, Development Officer, Events at Kids Help Phone