Our Clients

International Fund for Animal Welfare

The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), www.ifaw.org, is a $100-million animal-welfare organization working in 17 countries on the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and North America, and representing an online community of over 500,000 active advocates and donors.

Common Knowledge has worked with IFAW for more than two years, assisting them with worldwide online strategy, fundraising and advocacy campaigns, email list building, audience assessment, business intelligence (analytics and reporting), Web site development, and Web 2.0 strategy and campaigns. Common Knowledge also assists with the consolidation of best practices across the IFAW international network of web sites and online communities.

The home page of IFAW’s Stop the Seal Hunt Web 2.0 microsite.

PROJECT: Stop the Seal Hunt Campaign

An innovative list building, fundraising and advocacy campaign site with strong community building focus and Web 2.0 overlay

The Spring 2007 Seal Hunt Campaign demonstrates our strong work around advocacy, fundraising, and list-building working with IFAW. The campaign, running from January to May 2007, targeted the Canadian Seal Hunt with an international advocacy appeal to stop the slaughter of Harp seals for their coats. The Internet program for this campaign focused first-time visitors, and returning advocates, donors and e-subscribers on an innovative Web 2.0 campaign site: www.stopthesealhunt.com.

This site integrates a strong e-advocacy action, online giving section, and features a ground-breaking community photo montage that displays photos, and presents text and digital-audio testimonials from more than 100,000 campaign supporters from 27 countries around the world. The digital photos, uploaded by supporters, were assembled into a massive montage that demonstrated the broad international community support. A zoom feature expanded individual supporter profiles and their testimonials.

A particularly inventive element of the campaign allowed e-supporters to call a toll-free telephone number to leave a 2-minute testimonial describing why they were opposed to the Seal Hunt. These calls were automatically digitized and linked to the supporter profiles. Visitors were able to listen to the passionate testimonials via a one-click flash-based audio player link on the site.
Read the case study here.

Welcome message in the RDC stream.

PROJECT: Rapid Donor Cultivation

Common Knowledge introduces a new concept in online fundraising – targeted, automated cultivation of new e-subscribers over the first 45 days from opt-in. The program results in 15% increase in average gift size, and an 83% increase in donor conversion.

The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) agreed to explore an innovative concept with Common Knowledge – Rapid Donor Cultivation (RDC) program. The initial motivation for RDC came from best practices in the e-tailing/catalog industry. There, online customer affinity is typically highest for the first 30 days after the customer opt-in to a catalog list. During this ‘honeymoon’ period, the customer typically has a strong and favorable opinion of the company, and a stronger propensity to engage and buy from the company. Online, this high-affinity phase is characterized by new subscribers demonstrating higher email open rates, higher click rates, and higher conversion rates. For IFAW, we projected realizing gains in both fundraising and cultivation including:

Elapsed time to first gift
Size of the first gift
Reduced cost of fundraising
Churn (Unsubscribes and hard bounces) reduction
Increased affinity for the organization and brand

Ultimately, the goal of the RDC program is to optimize IFAW’s email list acquisition investment and produce a reliable, cost-effective revenue stream from individual giving.
Read the case study here.