How 3 Charities Built the Case for Automating DIY Fundraising
Supporter-led, or DIY, fundraising is a powerful, continuous income stream happening 365 days a year. But while the organic nature of DIY fundraising is great for raising funds, managing it behind the scenes can quickly become overwhelming for charity teams.
In our recent webinar, we sat down with community fundraisers from three organisations — Abbey from King’s College Hospital Charity, Vicki and Caitlin from PAPYRUS, and Emma from Guy’s & St Thomas’ Foundation — to uncover exactly what their DIY programmes looked like before automation, and how they built the internal business case to change things.
The Reality of Manual DIY Management
Before making the switch to GivePanel DIY, all three charities were bogged down by reactive, manual admin.
For Abbey’s two-person team at King’s College Hospital Charity, the process was entirely email-based because they did not have a registration form on their website. A supporter would email in, and the team would aim to reply within 48 hours. They found themselves checking JustGiving every two days just to see if a page had been set up, followed by manual stewardship.
“The biggest pain point for us really was that this could quite often fall by the wayside if the team got really busy, someone was on annual leave, all of that kind of stuff,” Abbey explained. “We know that that first 24 hours once someone signs up… is so important, and we just kind of weren’t hitting that early communication.”
Vicki and Caitlin at PAPYRUS echoed this frustration, noting the endless back-and-forth emails required just to confirm a supporter’s event date or chase them to set up a JustGiving page.
Emma’s team at Guy’s & St Thomas’ Foundation struggled with fragmented data. Without a one-step registration process, they were constantly trying to manually cross-reference the forms arriving in their inbox with the new pages appearing on JustGiving, making it nearly impossible to keep track of who had been contacted and when.
The Breaking Point: Proving It Doesn’t Scale
When the manual workload becomes too much, how do you convince your organisation to invest in a new technology solution?
For PAPYRUS, the answer was taking a frank, data-driven approach to their Senior Leadership Team. They conducted a simple audit, looking back over a single month to see exactly how much manual effort the team was putting in.
“I checked how many emails had been sent from the team, and I was so shocked. It was hundreds and hundreds of physical emails,” they shared. “I went to our senior leadership team with the data… and said, ‘Listen, my team are sending hundreds and hundreds of manual emails. It’s not going to work if we need to do more.'”
Because they proved that their current model was unsustainable for growth, the leadership team understood immediately, and the investment was a “no-brainer” that got signed off straight away.
Emma’s team tracked similar metrics and came to the same conclusion: their manual touchpoints were not scalable, and the volume of admin was preventing them from being strategic. Instead of targeted stewardship, everyone was just getting the same generic comms.
For Abbey, getting leadership on board meant aligning the platform with the charity’s wider objectives. Pitching a cost-effective solution that could immediately ease the manual workload for her small team ultimately proved the platform’s value.
The Takeaway
If your team is constantly jumping between spreadsheets, checking external platforms for pages that have been set up without your knowledge, and sending hundreds of manual follow-ups, your DIY programme cannot grow. By auditing your own manual touchpoints — just as PAPYRUS and Guy’s & St Thomas’ Foundation did — you can build a compelling business case to show your leadership team that automation isn’t just a nice-to-have, but an operational necessity.
To hear directly from Abbey, Vicki, Caitlin, and Emma, watch the full webinar at givepanel.com/diy-fundraising-webinar/. And if your team is at the same tipping point, you can book a 20-minute walkthrough of GivePanel DIY at givepanel.com/demo.