Dear Colleagues and Friends,
As we head into 2019 and I look back over the last year, it’s hard to believe we have come such a long way in such a short time. Last Christmas we were still very much a fledgling business: we were 5 months into Purity and whilst we had hit the ground running, we were still feeling our way a little.
Now as we head into the new year it feels like we are truly established in the sector: we have gone from 3 clients at our inception to 17 as at writing this and have added some amazing new causes to our portfolio. Our achievements as a relatively new business are huge and I want to thank every one of the team for their amazing contribution to this success. Our focus continues to be keeping our fundraisers at the core of our approach and ensuring the supporter is respected in every single call we make. Congratulations to all our amazing fundraisers for their superb calling quality in 2018 and a special mention to our award winners Margaret, Linda, Rob, Marianne, Gordon and Luke.
In terms of the type of campaigns we are running 2018 has seen the split of business move from predominantly donor development to over 50% of our turnover now being acquisition calling, and this side of the business is continuing to develop with more and more interesting digital campaigns integrated with Telephone fundraising. The results on these types of campaigns are just getting better and better as we continue to refine how we work and improve wherever possible. Our largest campaign has delivered over 7,000 new donors this year, whilst our best performing acquisition delivered over 20% conversion. Donor development continues to be a success with clients increasing the volumes of work they are passing to us (and considering new and innovative ways to communicate with donors), as again, our results continue to improve and improve.
Quality wise, our complaint level has remained at 0.0001% of turnover which is a figure we are immensely proud of. We have invested in our Fundraising Management team and Georgina recently joined as a new Fundraising Manager and at the same time promoted Tom to head of Phone room which is a role focused on strategy and overall monitoring of the calling floor. Both these appointments are well deserved and means we finish 2018 with a really strong Fundraising Management team. This, along with our newly introduced training and mentoring programme has meant we can be confident that our call quality remains at the highest level. To strengthen further this year we introduced 4 fundraising mentor/coaches; Margaret, David, Adrian and Charles: these are senior fundraisers who also coach and mentor newer fundraisers and this has been hugely successful, and they really help back support our full-time coaches Tania and Heather.
I am particularly proud of the team for winning every tender and pitch process we applied for this year. All are respected household names and I believe we were successful due to our transparent and honest approach along with the fantastic results we’ve been achieving. We are looking to work with clients who share our ethics and core values, and all tenders were approached with authenticity around our approach and how we look to build long term partnerships with clients – we are excited to be working with these clients in 2019 as well as several other new clients due to start in the first quarter of the year. An increasing client portfolio has obviously meant that we have needed to increase the client services team and we were delighted when Ellie joined the team this year as an account exec but moving quickly into the account management role – she is a huge asset to the team and we will be adding another client exec to the team in the first quarter of 2019.
Finally, as anyone who knows me knows; creating and maintaining a positive, transparent culture around core values and excellence is what I am most passionate about; and I am delighted that as we have grown this culture is so deeply embedded in the agency that it continues to build, and the whole team should be immensely proud of the way they respect and live by these values on a daily basis.
I would like to thank all our charity partners for supporting us in 2018, it has been an absolute pleasure working with you all. Thank you to all our business partners and finally a huge thank the whole Purity team for being such an awesome team providing an amazing service to the charity sector:- since we started trading you have raised over £6million for our amazing clients – be very proud as you enjoy the Christmas break and I look forward to seeing what 2019 bring us all.
Much love,
Helen