After relying on a collection of fragmented tools for years, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) made the jump to Springboard to power its digital fundraising, advocacy, events, and marketing.
With Springboard, the ASPCA gained a unified digital ecosystem, allowing its team to seamlessly publish creative content, launch and manage campaigns, analyze supporter data, optimize communications, and monitor new marketing channels.
“Once we saw Springboard, we knew Jackson River was the right partner for us.”
AYUMI STUBBS
Senior Director of Digital Marketing, ASPCA
Background
In 2008, the ASPCA felt limited by its all-in-one CRM and CMS. Seeking more control over their digital engagement programs, the ASPCA implemented a series of custom-built software solutions. For the next five years, each key function—advocacy, fundraising, supporter database, email, and peer-to-peer fundraising—was powered by a different platform.
Although all of their tools were powerful independently, cobbling them together required considerable effort and left opportunities untapped. Staff became consumed with troubleshooting integrations and performing manual data manipulation, all while missing their previous multi-channel view of supporter engagement.
The Solution
In 2012, the ASPCA decided it was time to invest in a unified system to become a digital-first organization, offering supporters a consistent experience across channels.
Springboard’s openness, flexibility, and scalability made it the obvious choice. The ASPCA liked that Springboard prioritizes results with creative campaigns and insightful data, as well as its easy customization options.
The ASPCA smartly pursued a phased approach to rolling out its new technology. In 2013, they launched Springboard Fundraising and Marketing functionality, IBM Marketing Cloud for Email, and a brand new ASPCA.org website, built in Drupal by Jackson River.
“It has been great with Springboard because we have—one-by-one—brought all of those worlds back under one umbrella with integrated reporting.”
SAM RICH
Director of Digital Marketing, ASPCA
The ASPCA team then partnered with Jackson River to expand their peer-to-peer fundraising offerings through Springboard, powering both DIY and athletic events. Next, they launched additional Springboard Events functionality for ticketed events, followed by Advocacy in 2016 for federal and state policy campaigns.
How Springboard’s Transformed ASPCA’s Strategy
Form Creation & Testing
To the ASPCA, one of Springboard’s strongest selling points was the ability to create unlimited, fully customizable forms. Springboard allowed them to:
- Experiment with one-step and multi-step forms using an endless array of layouts and form approaches
- Test the performance of special form elements like recent donor and recent advocate lists and creative form goals
- Run list-building campaigns such as pet photo contests and surveys
For example, the ASPCA found through rigorous testing that multi-step forms consistently outperformed single-step forms on larger screens. The organization now uses multi-step forms for most desktop and tablet fundraising but single-step, mobile-responsive forms for smaller screens.
“Overall, we love that we can make a billion forms and make a gajillion customizations per form. The ability to add new fields, access to go into Salesforce and free map a field, those are the kinds of things we’ve never dreamed of being able to do on our own.”
AYUMI STUBBS
Senior Director of Digital Marketing, ASPCA
Coordination
When the ASPCA’s fundraising and advocacy lists lived in separate systems, internal teams struggled to coordinate communications and donation asks. This fragmented approach also made it impossible to gain a holistic view of supporters, preventing the ASPCA from targeting messages based on past interactions.
With comprehensive supporter data in Salesforce, the ASPCA could pursue an integrated fundraising and advocacy strategy. The team tracked supporter engagement and behavioral trends to avoid over-messaging and to target supporters based on past behavior.
“We can now ensure that everything works together in a coordinated way using the same messaging. This has been an effective way to stay on the radar of supporters and engage them, without having them feel inundated with different messages.”
SAM RICH
Director of Digital Marketing, ASPCA
Customizations
With its previous custom-built software, the ASPCA had to allocate extensive budget and staff time to code new functionalities from scratch. This resource drain prevented the team from tailoring campaign assets to their diverse audiences, forcing them to adopt a one-size-fits-all marketing approach.
With Springboard, ASPCA staff now extensively customize their form functionality and database mappings. Personalized donation forms based on supporter profiles and behavioral data have boosted conversion rates and saved time and resources, freeing up time and resources that can now be devoted to new marketing campaigns.
“The freedom to make so many custom forms has enabled us to increase spending on digital acquisition and commercials.”
AYUMI STUBBS
Director of Digital Marketing, ASPCA
In addition, the ASPCA team consistently partners with Jackson River to develop new Springboard features. Some, such as a custom Amazon Payments transaction flow and specific peer-to-peer registration process, are unique to the ASPCA’s strategy. Other features, including the ability to offer multiple ask strings within a single donation form and a recent-donors list component, have since become core features available to all organizations using the platform.
Targeting & Segmentation
The ASPCA’s previous systems lacked sophisticated targeting features. Staff had no choice but to send the same donation appeals and action requests to their whole donor list, rather than tailoring the messaging and approach by audience.
With its new behavioral and interest-based segmentation capabilities, the ASPCA now sends campaigns and messages based on past supporter behavior, including detailed donation history, geolocation, and social share and referral data.
“For example, supporters who take action on an advocacy campaign are assigned interest flags for issues such as farm-animal welfare, which we then use to promote topically-related engagement opportunities.”
SAM RICH
Director of Digital Marketing, ASPCA
By applying marketing automation best practices, the ASPCA now delivers highly personalized email campaigns driven by behavioral triggers. This includes an automated welcome series that engages supporters based on their initial interactions and ongoing activity.
Tracking & Market Source Data
While their previous systems lacked in-depth tracking mechanisms, particularly across channels and systems, the ASPCA can now follow supporter behavior across multiple touchpoints and activities with Springboard.
ASPCA’s marketing strategy relies on market source data for all visitor interactions. For example, the digital team uses market source to track how the placement of a donation ask or website banner impacts donor behavior. This information is then fed into Salesforce and used to optimize the website and engagement forms.
“Tracking that gets picked up by Springboard and put into Salesforce has been a huge benefit. There is market source tracking for everything.”
AYUMI STUBBS
Senior Director of Digital Marketing, ASPCA
Additionally, based on comprehensive email marketing reporting, the ASPCA is making significant improvements to its overarching email strategy, consolidating multiple stand-alone emails into holistic campaigns with a coordinated, time-sensitive narrative arc and supporting asks.
Performance
Before implementing Springboard, the ASPCA’s fragmented software had repeated performance issues, including consecutive days of fundraising downtime and delayed email sends during time-sensitive year-end fundraising.
Since moving to Springboard, performance has been reliable and predictable. The infrastructure successfully scales to handle spikes in transaction volume associated with record giving and action windows, such as Giving Tuesday and the last week of the year. With a platform they can trust backing them, ASPCA staff are able to focus on constituents and ensure advertising dollars are always put to good use.
“We no longer have to worry about the back-end, hosting, and everything else that happens behind the scenes, because we just know that it’s being taken care of by people we trust.”
AYUMI STUBBS
Senior Director of Digital Marketing, ASPCA
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