Kate Ferguson, CMO of the Sydney Children’s Hospital Foundation, discusses the transformative strategies implemented there, focusing on integrated fundraising efforts, emotional storytelling, and innovative partnerships.
She highlights the significant impact of their campaigns, the importance of connecting with donors through authentic narratives, and the future aspirations for pediatric healthcare. Additionally, Kate encourages professionals to consider careers in the non-profit sector, emphasizing the rewarding nature of such work.
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Hhen I came into the organization having not worked in fundraising before, I was like, “What, we still do this?
Transcription:
Anton:
Hi, I am Anton Buchner, business director at TrinityP3 Marketing Management Consultancy. Welcome again to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners.
Today, I’m super excited. I’m speaking with Kate Ferguson, Chief Marketing Officer of the Sydney Children’s Hospitals Foundation.
For those that know – or may not know – they’re one of the largest and most trusted kids’ health charities in Australia, and raise funds to help provide sick kids with access to the best possible healthcare. So, it’ll be a lovely topic to talk about.
Kate joined the foundation just over five years ago after a stellar career in PR, having worked for 17 years with Edelman.
And is helping the Foundation undergo a transformation in building the brand, digital personalization and targeting, the whole approach to appeals, and is also helping drive far greater emotional attachment. So, please welcome, Kate Ferguson.
Kate:
Hi, Anton. Thank you so much for having me. Looking forward to this.
Anton:
You’re welcome. As I said, I’d love to hear more about what you’re doing, but maybe for those that don’t know I mean, our family does donate to the foundation, so that’s a good start, and some of our nearest and dearest friends. But for those that don’t know, could you provide a quick snapshot of who the foundation is.
Kate:
Yeah, well, maybe I’ll also talk to you a little bit how I landed there. As you said, I worked at Edelman for around 18 years. So, had a long agency career. I did 10 years in the New York office, and then I left Edelman Australia as its chief client and operations officer.
But my focus was always on brand and reputation management. So, that meant I did a lot of work with clients who were really committed to driving social and environmentally, I meant by environmental change, like advising on purpose led corporate brand strategy.
So, I was always kind of in that world of having a connection to community and purpose. So, I was really thrilled to join Sydney Children’s Hospitals Foundation as I felt I was able to then really marry that leadership and consulting experienced that I had, but with real meaningful social change making and being able to make a real impact in the community that I live in, and also ultimately help to deliver 120% growth in fundraising in four years.
So, it’s been an amazing period of transformation at the foundation, and I’m just really proud to be a part of that.
Last year we raised over $100 million to support our cause, which is obviously to change the future for sick kids, but for us, kids health will always be an underfunded mission. There’s always more that we can do to help ensure children have access to the best possible healthcare.
So, as an organization, we’re just really ambitious and we’re laser focused on how we can continue to grow so that we can make the most impact through our fundraising. And we see firsthand, in the hospitals the impact of the work that we do. We see the impact it can have on a kid’s life, or even an impact on a clinician and how they’re able to treat their patient. And that really, it just really motivates us.
So, I guess to answer your question, the foundation does have a really broad scope. So, we’re raising critical funds for Sydney’s two children’s hospitals. There’s one at Westmead and one at Randwick.
As well as Kids Research, which is a research institute, pediatric palliative care through Bear Cottage and the new Mounties Care Cottage, which will open in Westmead and also NETS (Newborn & pediatric Emergency Transport Service), which is an amazing service providing specialized emergency transport for newborns and children.
And Philanthropy is really helping support everything from cutting edge clinical trials to advanced cancer treatments, to child life therapists, palliative care, and state of the art technology and equipment.
But yeah, I’ve just loved the challenge of working in fundraising. As a marketer, we have to work to get people to give us money for nothing in return. We’re not selling a product; we don’t have any services. We’re just motivating people to give because of the hope and the optimism we can provide, because you’ve done something really meaningful and impactful and you’ve helped change a kid’s life.
So, as a marketing team, we really welcome that challenge. It pushes us to work hard and think creatively about how we can make that make that impact.
Anton:
Make it happen. Look, there’s no better motivation. I’ve got five children, so touch wood luckily-
Kate:
Hopefully you’ve only had some visits to the emergency room and nothing serious.
Anton:
Nothing serious, I’ve been relatively lucky. But yeah, of course families that are dealing with major health crises and challenges with their kids is highly emotional. Did you say a hundred million dollars you’ve raised for the foundation?
Kate:
Yes, we have.
Anton:
What a fantastic number. I always hear some really positive things, but I’m interested when you came into the organization, what were the challenges you saw and what really appealed to make the change? What did you find five years ago?
Kate:
We’ve gone through significant change, as you say, and we’ve made some really big bets and invested to grow. And that includes everything from expanding our team with top talent. We’ve pretty much doubled our headcount to building our brand, modernizing our tech stack. Diving into things like predictive modeling and AI.
And spending to invest and growth is not actually that easy for a charity because you really need to think strategically and carefully about how do you balance directing as much money as you can to the frontline of your cause, while also investing in programs or initiatives that you know will ultimately help you raise more money to have greater impact.
And that’s a big bet and sometimes a risky bet in non-for-profits. And luckily, we have a really excellent executive team and board who’ve been really supportive of our ambitious growth plans.
But I think this all kind of started, our journey, in around 2019 when the foundation was asked to become the exclusive fundraising partner of the newly formed Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network. So, that’s what expanded our beneficiary to include all those entities I just talked about earlier. So, previously we had just raised funds for the hospital at Randwick.
So, that meant that we were able to broaden our impact, expand our donor pool, and it also allowed us to engage with a lot of new audiences across Sydney. And that was an amazing opportunity. But as I came into the foundation, it just created a big hot mess from a branding perspective.
So, when I arrived, I had inherited this fully disconnected brand architecture with brand identities and brand marks for each hospital, each entity, each fundraising event, everything looked different. And up until that point, SCHF had really no brand whatsoever. We didn’t even have a logo. So, I guess that first big bet that I focused on when I got there was to design a brand strategy.
I really started to position the foundation as a credible and impactful organization, which the community could trust to direct donations to the frontline of kids health.
So, we launched a new brand in 2021 with a new narrative, new bold look and feel, new website, a consistent visual identity across all the fundraising events and appeals. And we just started showing up in the market as Sydney Children’s Hospitals Foundation.
We did launch our first ever brand campaign then, which included a TVC and Above The Line campaign. And that was supported by our first ever paid media program. Like most charities, we had previously relied heavily on the very generous pro bono support of our media industry, who really, by the way, just do so much to support the non-for-profit sector so much.
But we did decide to invest in our own paid media so we could really target the audiences we needed to help build our brand, and we had such a big mountain to climb. We did brand tracking research before the campaign launched. And if you want to have a guess, Anton, what you think our unprompted brand awareness was?
Anton:
Low to none.
Kate:
Yes, 0%.
Anton:
And which logo are you’re talking about?
Kate:
That was pretty disheartening for us. But then again, the only way is up. So, in just two years, we have got that number up quite high. It’s up to 11% unprompted, 30% prompted. But importantly, last fiscal year we raised $7 million in what is called unsolicited revenue.
So, it’s donations that came in and they weren’t tied to a specific appeal or campaign or relationship. And we really attribute that revenue to just our strengthened brand presence. But we still have a long way to go. We want to be charity of choice.
Anton:
The journey’s there. And as we all know, the number of charities in around Australia is-
Kate:
60,000.
Anton:
It’s crazy. 60,000. So, yeah, you’re doing a fantastic job. And Kristina Keneally is in the executive.
Kate:
Yes. Exactly. So, we brought in a new board chair in 2022, and we brought in a new CEO in 2022 as well, Kristina Keneally as well as a few other key leadership hires, our new chief philanthropy officer, and obviously myself. So, really got a really strong executive team with that, as I said, ambitious growth agenda.
Anton:
And getting them behind that new brand positioning, was that a relatively straightforward exercise in a sense that you’ve got that tangled sort of mess you said, and was everyone pretty aligned?
Kate:
It wasn’t so hard to convince the executive and the board that we needed to do the brand work. It was a little bit harder to make the case for the investment in the brand campaign, especially the media buy.
As I said, we’d never kind of spent any money like that in this space. But the results obviously are speaking for themselves. And the board is really behind now our brand campaign and our investment in this area. Because what our brand tracking shows is that when people do know us, 40% would name us as their preferred charity, and 60% would put us in their top three charities.
So, if we can get out there and make sure people know who we are and what we do, it really does then lead to acquisition and revenue.
Anton:
Fantastic. Now, you touched on, we might delve a little bit deeper here, some digital transformation. You talked about predictive modeling and segmentation, and that’s music to my ears. So, what was the space you found, and how have you evolved in that space?
Kate:
Yeah, so our investment in technology is definitely one of the big bets as well. We’ve invested a lot in capability with our staff. So, we built a quite large data team now, and we had begun a digital transformation.
So, we built a data lake. We’ve upgraded our CRM and our marketing automation platforms, and we’re leveraging some predictive modeling tools, some gen AI tools.
Really, at the moment, we’ve been laying all the foundations. So, some of it is that unsexy stuff, but you really need to do like establishing governance and data policies and refining data segmentation models, cleaning the data, implementing test and learn frameworks and kind of recommending new processes across the organization.
But we’ve been really focused lately on deep segmentation analysis, a lot of message and content testing that gives us sharper insights into donor motivations.
We have a lot of tools that are helping us, I say with predictive modeling. So, we can look in our database and see who is a good target, who’s a good target for a direct mail pack, who’s a good target for a gift and Will, based on that modeling. And that’s been really helpful.
But the next phase where we’re focused right now is how we can ultimately build an AI powered automated marketing engine that uses those predictive models and really micro segmenting our data so that we can deliver hyper-personalized communications scale, obviously, which is the dream for everybody.
But we’ve been really looking at the retail sector here a lot, and a lot about loyalty programs and how we could use technology to better deliver more tailored experiences that keep our supporters engaged and coming back.
And I was lucky to recently bring on our new director of data and technology, his name’s Mark Hong. And he spent most of his career at Woolworths, building their data science function and building all their kind of hyper-personalized marketing programs. He was at eBay and some other retailers we’re working with an agency Gravitas who work with Myer on their loyalty program.
So, we’re looking at how we can create that kind of premium experience for donors at all giving levels, but also ensuring that the data’s helping us focus our internal resources on the right areas so that we are supporting high value donors. We can predict donors that might be giving at a lower level now that could give it higher levels, or we’re really focused on donors, for example, that are lapsing.
And all of this has really been in support of what was my really big bet, which was on retention of donors, which I can talk about as well.
Anton:
Yeah. We might dive in there because I think there’s a good insight there. A lot of non-for-profits don’t think like commercial or retailers in that sense, when in reality can take similar thinking, it doesn’t have to be gratuitous of course.
But the idea of tenure, the idea of value, the idea of frequency, the idea of what is your emotional attachment to that brand or why people keep giving? All those same triggers need to build out. So, if you’re building that into a loyalty approach and a retention program, that’s fantastic to hear.
Kate:
Yeah, exactly. I would love to talk about that. And I think because of our broad scope as well there’s so much opportunity from a content perspective so we can understand, did you give because your child was at Westmead? Are you particularly interested in cancer care? How do we understand those motivations for our donors so we can kind of deliver that right content that’s going to get them to give again.
But yeah, one of my big programs and focuses at the moment, we call it internally our donor connected framework. And it’s really designed to address donor retention. Through all of our great work in the brand side, our acquisition programs have been highly successful. We’re bringing in 20 – 25,000 new donors each year, but then our data quickly revealed a challenge, which was that only about 35% of the donors would then go on to give a second gift.
So, we recognize that to sustain that growth, we really needed to shift from just doing brand and acquisition, but then really focus on how we’re building deeper and more lasting connections with our donors.
So, I did a few things, I actually established a dedicated donor experience team within marketing. So, they’re tasked with really enhancing every donor interaction and their task with that retention number, getting that up. And historically the fundraising model was kind of product or channel led, which means teams only really engage with donors based on their internal goals, often in silos.
So, for example, we might have a regular giving donor that gives to us monthly, but then they would never be invited to attend a community event or participate in City to Surf because they were seen as a regular giving donor and then there kind of wasn’t that opportunity to move them around, or align with their interests.
So, our goal now is to really move from that product centric to being donor centric and leverage all the data and insights to be able to personalize each donor’s journey as much as we can.
But yes, we are doing a lot of work to identify what loyalty means for us. And as you just said, it’s not just about the donor that gives us a million dollars, but if you’ve been giving us $5 a month for 10 years, you’re just as valuable to us as someone that gave a million dollars.
Anton:
Yeah, exactly. And you’re emotionally attached for the different reasons, as you said. Some of which I’m sure can be common, the idea of giving and the idea of supporting kids’ health. But yeah, others coming in for those reasons. I go back to our family and our neighbor as well, who give for very different reasons. So, if you’re tracking that and can then start to customize and tailor by stories, by relevance, then all those buzzwords are being implemented. Fantastic.
Kate:
That’s the goal. Yeah, that’s the goal.
Anton:
But I heard you say something, direct mail, some people listening to this might not have known what a direct mail piece is.
Kate:
Oh, I know. And when I came into the organization having not worked in fundraising before, I was like, “What, we still do this?” But it is a mail pack that you send out to donors and they’re kind of standardized. They’ve got a really specific way about them.
So, there’s a letter, there’s obviously a mail back pack, there’s sometimes collateral, but basically, it’s just a written donation ask. But it is surprisingly still extremely successful. And we do raise a lot of money through the direct mail channel still.
I think about two years ago we reached a tipping point where we started raising more from digital than mail. But it’s still a really important fundraising channel. It’s going to be a bit threatened now that cheques are being phased out especially older people would send back their mail pack with their cheque.
Anton:
Yeah, that’s a classic. But again, that’s a segment, isn’t it? Certain segments, love still direct mail, and I always reference my dear old parents who love to hold something and love to see it. Maybe the QR code is helping them engage digitally.
Kate:
Yes. We do, do a QR code now instead of just having to mail it back. It’s much easier for us to process as well.
Anton:
Yeah. But again, looking at those segments and looking from a retail perspective, an ROI perspective and saying, “Well, the cost to serve against that segment is still ROI positive if the numbers are coming through.
Kate:
But here is where predictive modeling helped because we used a model to help better predict who would respond to the direct mail. And that did help us reduce costs. So, we weren’t sending out mail to people who the data showed would not respond. So, that was a helpful use of predictive modeling there.
Anton:
What is the insight? Can you share the gold? Was there something that popped up as a specific trigger, or was it more a number of attributes?
Kate:
Yeah, it was just a number of attributes.
Anton:
But again, it’s doing that analytics to say, “Yeah, let’s work out from a channel preference perspective what’s going to drive the greatest return.”
Kate:
That’s right.
Anton:
Excellent. Now, I’ve seen quite a bit of work. So, you’ve had the Movement of Many out there in the marketplace a few years ago. I’ve seen that you’ve done some work with Vivid and just been named – is it Vivid sponsor or not-for-profit sponsor.
Kate:
Charity partner.
Anton:
Charity partner. And the Dream Scene. So, you must have a good PR machine out there, because I’m starting to see the name everywhere.
What are you doing in terms of other activations? You talked about donor appeals, you’ve talked about a broader calendar of activity.
Kate:
I think one of the first things I did do when I joined the foundation was to build a new campaign strategy to first of all, drive just more impactful storytelling. So, we’re out in the market with kind of the same message at the same time, but most importantly internally to streamline our fundraising and marketing calendar to really ensure greater ROI.
So, as I said, when we expanded and took on that extra fundraising remit, we also took on all these extra events, appeals campaigns, and there was just so many things all the time. There was basically an appeal running every quarter.
And so, what we wanted to do was instead focus on two new appeals and then focus on those high value events such as our Gold Dinner gala. So, historically we had run separate fundraising events for the different hospitals. So, Randwick had its legacy gold telethon, and the Children’s hospital at Westmead had the Bandage Bear appeal.
But what the research showed when I joined was that when people understood that we fundraised for both hospitals under one kind of more united effort, there was a notable increase in our reputation score and an uplift in likelihood to donate.
So, that insight really guided a strategic decision to transition to a more integrated fundraising and model. So, we would combine efforts into two major appeals rather than have specific appeals for each organization.
So, we have the Christmas Appeal now and our Sydney Sick Kids Appeal, which is at tax time. And then we can better communicate through those, that collective impact of supporting children’s health rather than kind of just a specific hospital.
And that strategy has been quite transformational for us. Our Sydney Sick Kids Appeal in the first year in 2020, raised about $4 million, $4.3 million, and within two years had grown to $12 million, then $15 million.
And the Sydney Sick Kids Appeal, it raised $3.5 million in its first year, but the next year raised $20.8 million. And we’ve maintained that level of success. So, even with the cost of living crunch this year, we still hit $20 million.
So, as you said, we’ve just kicked off Sydney’s Sick Kids Appeal for 2025, and we do have a lot going on. But our strategy really for appeals is just to make everything in our toolkit work really hard for us all at once.
So, for example, we’ve got a phenomenal partnership with the Sydney Swans. How do we leverage that during an appeal to amplify our presence in markets? We have players visiting the hospitals, they visit our brand activations. We’ve got custom content with the Swans. It’s going out on Swans’ social channels. We’ve got players saying thank you in our post donation thank you videos. And as you say we pitched to be the charity partner for Vivid this year.
It’s really a great timing for us because our appeals just launched, obviously. So, we have an activation, as you said, Dream Scene, which is part of the festival. And we are using that as an opportunity then to invite our ambassadors down to create content.
We have Emma Watkins, our ambassador, Emma Memma, for those of you who have young kids, Emma Memma will do an event this week with patient families and patient ambassadors. We’re hosting an event with select donors. Back to that loyalty program principles, how can we create some unique experiences for our high value donors?
And importantly, we have a data capture mechanism as part of the activation too. So, we can take all these potential new leads on a brand journey with us and share those stories of hope and impact so that people can see what we’re doing at the foundation.
Anton:
Wow. You’re not living a quiet life, are you?
Kate:
No. Everything is happening right now. We also have our annual Gold dinner, which is actually next week. Now that event is at the pinnacle of the philanthropic event calendar. Last year at Gold dinner, we raised $33 million, which actually apparently set a world record, raised more than the Met Gala. That is a really big night for us.
Anton:
Well done, well done.
Kate:
Thank you. Thank you. It’s a big effort, but it’s a great opportunity for us to really showcase that transformative power of philanthropy on pediatric healthcare. And obviously there’s all the fashion and the glamor and the celebrities too, which get us lots of publicity and media attention. But that $33 million last year helped us finish off our commitment for the redevelopment projects at the two hospitals.
So, there are brand new buildings going up at both Randwick and Westmead. So, we’ll have brand new children’s hospitals this year.
Anton:
Wow. So, what has driven the success, is it the, as you’ve said, the galvanizing of the brand, the coming together, unifying the story, that idea of doing less, but doing it bigger. What do you think’s been the real nub of success?
Kate:
I do think that that branding part is such a big part of it. As I said, everything was just disparate before, and if you went to our Bear Affair Gala, you wouldn’t know that that was part of the Sydney Children’s Hospital Foundation. So, connecting everything up to our cause and our mission, I think has really helped.
It’s hard, as you say, it’s a competitive landscape. There’s a lot of people vying for that donation dollar. I haven’t though, interestingly, we haven’t ever seen a decline in our giving based on – what we went through COVID, and then we’re going through a cost-of-living-crunch – and people still give, people are still giving. And it’s amazing.
Sometimes we see the gift sizes declining a little bit, but people are still giving. And that’s just really heartwarming.
Anton:
That’s lovely human nature, isn’t it? I mean, we’ve seen from everything from floods now that’s currently up in Taree how community mucks in and helps out. And I think with children, you’re always going to have an emotional heartstring. But it’s wonderful to hear that success.
Standing out in the market for me listening to you talk and I was happy just to let you go, the emotional attachment seems to be a really big one for you. You seem to have almost cracked or continue focusing on trying to crack that emotional connection because as soon as you’ve got emotional connection to anything versus functional, as most marketers know, you’ve got people more invested. Would you say that’s been a big area?
Kate:
Absolutely. We’ve been really focused on how we can tell the most authentic and heartwarming stories that we can. We’ve built an in-house content team that do amazing work. And look, one thing we are not short on at the foundation is a good story.
Everybody who goes through the doors of the hospital has an amazing story to share. Sometimes the wonderful, hopeful stories of it’s been an amazing journey to healing, but there are also stories which are tragic. Children do die, this is it.
I think it’s one in every five-child diagnosed with cancer still do pass away. And what goes on at places like Bear Cottage, which is the palliative care and also rehabilitation and, sorry, respite.
So, even if even if you are not in palliative care, a lot of families spend time at Bear Cottage just for support. It’s almost like a vacation and a timeout where they have doctors and nurses and carers who can look after their sick child. It’s not in that hospital environment, and they can kind of relax and have some quality time with their families.
All of this just creates, as you say, amazing stories to tell. So, that has been something we’ve really leaned on hard.
Anton:
Fantastic. Yeah. I used to live in, down in Manly, so not far from Bear Cottage, so know it well. You talked about the internal team with content and stories. And you have then external agencies and a PR agency, I think Porter Novelli.
Kate:
We do.
Anton:
How do you share that process in how stories get created internally versus getting the publicity promoted externally? Do you juggle in a special way.
Kate:
Yeah, with our PR agency Porter Novelli, we are much more focused on corporate PR. So, how do we tell the stories of our leadership, our innovation, the success the foundation is having, the impact the foundation is having. But we really try to keep that more patient focused storytelling in-house. And I would also add that we work very closely with our partners at the Sydney Children’s Hospital Network to be able to facilitate and create those stories.
So, we do try and keep that in-house just so we can be as thoughtful and respectful of that patient family’s journey.
Anton:
Yeah. I think you in particular, it makes a huge amount of sense. I mean, as TrinityP3, we see a lot of different combinations. Some clients outsource it all. Some have set up in-house studios, some have external agencies setting up an internal system for them. So, there are all sorts of combinations.
But I think when you see great storytelling and great opportunities to tell stories that are heartfelt, like yours definitely is. And I’ve worked around sick kids before, so that makes a lot of sense to have the teams in house with empathy and with understanding the values that you are driven by and then gathering all those stories.
I want to touch on one more thing. We skipped over it, but you said you pitched for Vivid this year.
Kate:
Yes, we did.
Anton:
Do you know why you won or how you got appointed?
Kate:
Oh well, because we’re so wonderful.
Anton:
Amazing. I didn’t want to put the words in your mouth.
Kate:
I think this year the theme of Vivid was around dreams. And I think that it was quite a natural fit for us to make that connection in with that theme.
So, at our dream scene activation basically we’ve asked patients in the hospital to draw pictures of their dreams and we kind of upload them into the activation. So, when you go down there and see them, you can see all of the dreams of these sick kids up on the screen. And it’s quite an interactive exhibition, so you can draw your own images and upload them in.
But so, I think there was a really nice connection to our cause. Obviously Vivid is also Sydney based, and we are a Sydney-focused charity, obviously with the two local children’s hospitals. So, it was a natural fit that way.
We also have a really successful partnership with the City of Sydney, where we partner with them on their Christmas activations, mainly the Christmas concerts that they do all around the city. And we’ve seen really excellent results from that partnership as well. Especially, for example, people recalling that we are the charity partner of the event, which is actually usually quite a hard metric to hit.
So, I have set up a brand engagement team. So, we do have a team that’s focused on our brand partnerships, whether that’s with organizations like the Sydney Swans or doing the kind of pitches, as we said, for Vivid, for any brand partnership really.
Anton:
Five years and you’ve transformed the whole mishmash of logos and mishmash of non-for-profits and done a fantastic job by the sound of it. And on the pathway, as you said, obviously there’s more to do. What’s next on the horizon? Can you share?
Kate:
We are really working closely with the Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network on what are the big bets. If you could – because we are raising a lot of money now – we can think bigger than before. So, it’s not just that we can help buy this piece of equipment or just fill the funding gaps from government. But we have the power now through the amount of philanthropy that we’re raising to have quite a transformative impact on kids’ health.
So, we’re having great discussions now with the Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network with the Government. What could you do? What would we do if philanthropy could really come to the table with this amount of money to make a truly impactful change in pediatric healthcare? Can we cure cancer? Could we build a new facility that could do X, Y and Z? Could we look for a new way of diagnosing rare diseases quicker?
So, having really exciting conversations about how we could have a really transformative impact. And that’s been really exciting. But we’re obviously also looking at refreshing our brand campaigns, but for me, we’re very focused on that donor connected framework and really bedding in that loyalty work.
Anton:
So, to that point, how do you share the impact back to donors?
Kate:
There’s a few ways we do that. We do have an impact team at the foundation, and we are finalizing a much more robust social impact measurement framework than we’ve previously had, which is exciting. Well, we do a lot. We share an annual impact report. We share a lot of impact stories. And we find that to be the most relevant and useful.
So, it’s always better to show the impact we’ve had based on a use case. So, you know an actual patient’s experience through the hospital. But we are trying to be a little bit more robust and rigorous with the way we capture data so we can quantify a little bit more philanthropy’s impact on kids’ health. So, that is coming as well.
Anton:
It’s almost the business of brand acquisition and retention as you’ve said. And once you get to those numbers back to the start, a hundred million plus, I assume it’s a bigger number for next year. So, I won’t put you to it unless you can tell me the number, but it’ll go up.
Kate:
Hopefully. We work on a fiscal year, so we’ve got one month left and we’re tracking well to our goals, but because this tax period is our biggest time, so pretty much I think it’s something like half of our revenue comes in the last two months of the year. It’s a very stressful time in the business to make sure.
Anton:
Well, I know it is because I’m starting to receive direct mail packs from others.
Kate:
Oh, good. It is the time.
Anton:
None of which were very compelling, I must say. So, I can tell that your work is much more engaging. Sounds like a nice career opportunity for people too. Sounds like you’re hiring, sounds like you’re structuring. Are you looking for people to get involved or how can people get involved from a career perspective?
Kate:
Look, I know a lot of people in our industry, and often I speak to people who are looking for something more purposeful in their life, something more impactful for their work to have a bit more meaning. Especially if you’ve been whether selling soap or selling fried chicken or whatever it might be. I’ve done those things in my career. I understand.
But it’s such a rewarding career change and for me, it hasn’t meant any sacrifice in my career development. I am leading a large team. I have 50 people in the marketing team. I’m still managing a big budget. I’m challenging myself and the team to innovate and lead and data and AI. We get to still be really creative, maybe even more so as we’ve been talking about, because storytelling is so critical to success.
So, it’s really the best of both worlds really. So, I really do encourage people to consider moving into the not-for-profit sector if they are looking for something more purposeful, it’s really best of both worlds.
Or if it’s too much to want to make the change into the sector. You could also consider joining the board of a nonprofit and sharing your brand and marketing and digital expertise as a board director.
I’m on the board of amazing small charity Hospitals United for Sick Kids, which is a really unique profit-for-purpose business model where we partner with corporates to sell products where a percentage of the profits are directed to the local children’s hospitals in the state that they’re sold in.
So, it allows for that national reach with local impact, and that’s proven really effective. In fact, our partnership with Coles has recently got recognized with the Global Grand Effie for marketing effectiveness. So, like the top Effie globally the top for sustained success. So, that was pretty good.
But I think the expertise that we have as marketers is really valuable on boards as well. So, that’s another thing you could consider if you want to have a bit of exposure to this purpose world.
Anton:
There you go. Well, if anyone listening is driven by purpose and has a mover and shaker boss, then yeah please reach out. And we’ll turn this into a full promotion, but if anyone wants to get involved from donations and support, how can they help go to the website, I assume?
Kate:
Oh, sure. Thank you. That’s great. If you do want to help change the future of sick kids and you want to support us, you can donate through our website, which is schf.org.au. You can also obviously follow us on social; you can volunteer with us, or be part of our appeals and activations. And yes, if you want to learn more about a career switch into the purpose sector, you can reach out to me through LinkedIn.
Anton:
Directly. Awesome. Look, Kate, thanks very much for your time and sharing so much of the world that you’ve helped change and the impact that you’re making. I really enjoyed having a chat with you.
Kate:
Oh, thank you so much. I appreciate you having me on.
Anton:
Thanks again. If you’ve enjoyed this episode of the Managing Marketing Podcast, then please either like review and share it to help spread the words of wisdom. Thanks again, Kate.
Kate:
Thank you.
Anton:
Bye for now.
