A 12-month roadmap the Chron's & Colitis team could get behind
THE CONTEXT
Crohn's & Colitis UK is the UK's leading charity for people affected by Crohn's and Colitis. In 2023 they asked us to assess their digital fundraising programme and shape a clear, practical direction for income growth — a roadmap for diversifying income generation across digital channels.
THE CHALLENGE
With a successful membership programme and virtual event function already driving fundraising at scale, the real challenge wasn't channel optimisation. It was diversifying a concentrated income base inside an organisation that prioritised awareness over income generation, and where individual giving had no real seat at the table. No mean feat, given the scale of their programme and the speed with which a plan was needed.
WHAT WE DID
We focused on three things: protect income that's at risk, make supporter journeys audience-first, and get the organisation comfortable with fundraising. We ran a rapid digital fundraising audit: conducting a paid media audit and stakeholder interviews. More than 50 growth actions were ultimately recommended, to be taken over a 12M period, with key recommendations including:
an overhaul of their Search structure, representing £40K+ additional income potential for the same spend — alongside a scaled virtual event approach on Meta, to grow their already heavily-positive outcomes
an email re-engagement series, with £40K annual potential in their Membership audiences alone and as much as £1M across products
a gradual tiered membership product, representing £30K+ additional annual income, and webform test and learn approach to increase conversion
That keeps essentially all your approved language — the only edits are relocating the "wish-list" sentence up and stitching the "three things" line cleanly into the front of What we did.
STRATEGIC APPROACH
The starting point was that the ceiling on growth wasn't channel performance — it was internal alignment. So the work had to make the case for fundraising as much as optimise it. Rather than a wish-list, we sequenced the work into what would protect and grow income fastest — and framed it so that individual giving had a clear, defensible seat at the table. An RFM-based segmentation model gave the plan its backbone, focusing effort on the highest-value audiences most at risk of lapsing, and every recommendation was tied to a clear income rationale — so the roadmap could withstand internal negotiation and be owned by teams, rather than stall in it.
OUTPUTS & DELIVERABLES
A technical SEO audit with a prioritised short, medium- and long-term action plan.
A keyword opportunity model covering ~1,000 search terms across priority markets.
Intent and affinity scoring to separate core, adjacent and lower-priority opportunities.
A prioritised content and growth roadmap, market by market.
Clear recommendations on where SEO should be supported by Paid Search, and where additional content creation was required to acquire organic traffic.
THE RESULT
The roadmap was received positively across teams and moved straight into delivery, with internal working groups forming to act on it — the clearest signal that the plan had earned the buy-in it was designed for.