Mencap provides support for people with a learning disability to live their lives to the full. To ensure that people with a learning disability are not left behind at any stage of their life, Mencap campaign for a fairer society and work with families and partners to build inclusive communities through personalised services such as supported living, employment help and family advice.
The charity has been going strong for 80 years, and it recently transformed its regular giving fundraising capabilities by switching to GoCardless for Direct Debit collections.
“Most of our work takes place in the community in partnership with local authorities,” explained Mills Dyer, CRM Implementation Lead, Mencap. “Between the cost of living pressure on individual givers and local government funding challenges, growing our regular giving donations has become key to sustaining the support we provide, and GoCardless is vital to this effort.”
Legacy systems meant manual effort
Before GoCardless, processing regular giving donations required considerable manual effort for Mencap. The problem was a set of legacy systems that, simply put, meant it took a lot of people a lot of time to do something that should be straightforward.
“Payment runs involved taking the payment files out of one system, uploading them into another, then getting internal approvals to finally process them,” said Mikki. “We then had to do the reverse to reconcile everything once collected, and it was similarly tricky to update or amend Direct Debits.”
Over the last three years Mencap has gone through a digital transformation project, creating better journeys for supporters and gaining more insights into the people that donate to Mencap. “We know we need to grow regular giving, because it helps us plan expenditure more accurately and these donors typically give more than one-off donors,” said Mills. “But we couldn’t do that previously. Disconnected systems made it harder to track performance of fundraising campaigns, and therefore harder to make strategic fundraising decisions.”
Collecting regular payments now takes one hour, not eight
Things couldn’t be more different for Mencap now. A three-way integration between GoCardless, FinDock and Salesforce means that when donors sign up online for monthly donations, the relevant data is synchronised in real-time across all three systems. That enables the automatic scheduling, collection and reconciliation of regular donations.
Direct Debit runs that used to take one person eight hours, three times a month, now take just one hour each and our payment failure rate is just 0.3%
Mikki added: “Collecting Direct Debits through a single system and process means that, instead of two or three people managing payments, it takes the equivalent of a quarter of a person. The team now has a lot more time to focus on the supporter experience, which will help us drive additional fundraising.”
Fundraising teams can think bigger, and act smarter
The new system now means that Mencap can start to make tailored and innovative supporter journeys in ways they couldn’t before that will help to maximise their fundraising potential.
Our Individual Giving team can also now see which campaigns are most successful and test messages with different audiences, that increases our capacity to grow the regular giving portion of our income.
Getting data to the teams who need it is also quicker and easier thanks to the new systems’ self-service capabilities.
"With GoCardless and Salesforce's reporting functionality, teams now have real time information about regular giving donations," said Mills. “Insights like this will help us to optimise our donation pages to make them more effective and more accessible.”
“GoCardless has got our back”
The native integration between GoCardless, FinDock and Salesforce meant it took just a few minutes to add GoCardless to Mencap’s wider tech stack.
“My boss was impressed that we got it up and running so quickly, but really it’s a simple OAuth integration,” said Mills. “Any Salesforce admin could do it and it only took half an hour to set up and start running tests. Going fully live was a bit more involved, of course, but proactive project management from GoCardless kept us on track.”
Since then, the ongoing support that Mencap gets from its GoCardless Customer Success Manager has been nothing short of exceptional.
“I can’t sing their praises highly enough,” said Mikki. “We have regular check-in calls and, if we have questions or ideas in between, they get back to us quickly. That’s always welcome if there are supporters waiting on us for answers. We know they’ve got our back.”
Future-ready fundraising
The Mencap team now has confidence that it can rise to the challenge of continuing the charity’s decades of good work. “Regular giving is important because it’s reliable income that we can plan against,” said Mills.
We know that with GoCardless we have the technical stack to cope with the growth we want to achieve.
Mikki agrees: “It feels like a genuine partnership with GoCardless. They’re fully invested in our success, which is going to be helpful as we look to scale our fundraising capabilities too, so we can provide even more support for people with learning disabilities.”
