Development and Delivery of an Alumni & Supporter Engagement Campaign - AWARD

The University of Southampton requires the immediate services of a multi-faceted agency to work with us to deliver our first ever alumni and supporter engagement campaign. This will include elements of strategy, communications planning, journey planning, cross-channel copywriting, creative design, and support with data analytics and success measurement.

ODAR recognises that our current 'one size fits all' approach to supporter engagement is no longer effective in engaging our donors, friends and alumni, and we know we need to take a much more audience and data-led approach to our activity. Engagement activity, such as events, volunteering opportunities and nearly all communication is currently carried out in isolation across the University, which is resulting in low engagement rates and inefficiencies in working practices. Despite routinely segmenting our alumni for Regular Giving campaigns, and for fundraising asks, we do not segment for any other 'engagement' activity, such as newsletters or any other communication.

We therefore have an ambition to improve the way we speak to our 200,000+ alumni and supporters across 180+ countries, by putting our audience first, and giving them more control over how they engage with us, by encouraging them to share with us their interests, preferences and motivations. We also want to make more of the information we already hold for them on our database, Raiser's Edge, in order to provide a much more tailored experience. This work will require significant stakeholder buy-in and support, as engaging with our alumni in a more personalised, targeted way is a substantial culture change for the University. We will require support with gaining buy-in from relevant stakeholders, and recognising the ambitions of the various different functions and departments affected. We are ideally looking for an agency with experience of change management, and an understanding of some of the challenges that are presented when moving from one way of working to another.

We have been working with two agencies this year on two significant pieces of work which have acted as a pre-cursor to the engagement campaign:

We are currently working with a consultant on an insights piece, looking at what data we currently hold on our database, and mapping out what individual 'personas' may have received from us in the last 18 months. This piece of work also includes some user journey mapping, and understanding the objectives and outcomes of the wider campaign.

We are also working with a design agency on building a new 'personalised content hub (PCH)'; a new platform hosted in the Cloud which will eventually host all of our content, rather than it being displayed on a huge number of different external facing sites and platforms. The PCH is currently in build, and we are working closely with both the design agency and the consultant mentioned above to ensure we are designing something accessible, engaging ...