Hi, my name's Professor Paul Baines, Professor of Political Marketing at Cranfield School of Management...
...and also co-author of the Third Edition of "Marketing" by Oxford University Press.
In this next feature, we speak to Zina Giles, Legacy Officer at Cobalt..
...about how she's gone about developing a suitable channel structure...
...in order to best serve and communicate with customers.
We're a regional medical charity and we're based in Cheltenham.
We were established back in 1964 by a group of consultants...
...who were treating cancer patients in the area...
...and they had to send them down to Bristol at the time, some 70 miles down the road...
...so they wanted their own Cobalt unit for treatment here in Cheltenham, and so that's how it began.
We provide advanced diagnostic imaging equipment, MRI and PET CT scanning.
We've got the static scanners here at the Cobalt Imaging Centre in Cheltenham...
...we've also got five mobile units that travel round and about, up and down the UK.
We invest in the very best that we can and up-to-date technology...
...so that that can help us to diagnose cancers but other life limiting conditions as well...
...like dementia.
We also run education courses here for the medical profession...
...so they can get their hands onto our equipment which benefits them.
We've...
...got this equipment that we really like to share and I know it's cheesy but we...
...know that what we've got here can make a difference to people...
...and we know that it does because our patients tell us that in our feedback that we get from them.
It's really a difficult model to market -
...we're constantly working on it and how we can explain who we are...
...there are so many strands to the work that we do but we get so confused with other charities...
...even with the NHS, so we have to work hard at letting people know that we are...
...very different from lots of other medical charities, especially those...
...locally around here, and we have to try to explain hard how we work with the NHS but we are not part of it.
And our marketing is really sort of split into two halves, so currently on the clinical side...
...I've heard it said Cobalt is the best kept secret...
...but we're working on that, to share it.
We market the clinical facilities that we've got here in Cheltenham...
...and the mobile imaging that we have as well, to medical professionals obviously...
...to hospitals and to consultants and our mobile units can travel...
...anywhere in the UK.
...up north, I'll just make a note of them:
Stourbridge, Nottingham and Huddersfield...
...Ormskirk, Preston and Haywards Heath and Chelmsford, Stanmore.
We've go into Pontypridd down south, to Plymouth, we're in Bristol...
...just across the road in Gloucester and...
...Long Larton as well, we go out to.
And we market our fundraising primarily to our local area...
...Gloucestershire and Herefordshire and Worcestershire...
...which is where we sort of base most of that side of things.
We are talking to individuals...
...and also to organisations out there and companies too...
...but we recognise really that our patients, over the years and still the case now...
...they're going to be our best supporters really - patients and their, their family.
Primarily the people that buy in our service...
...the mobile scanners that we take out to NHS hospitals, to private hospitals...
...we also have our fee paying private patients...
...who come to us through their companies or just privately paying themselves.
We run education courses here which provide income...
...and also from our fundraising...
...which is out in the community...
...people doing their own fundraising, making donations and also legacy gifts...
...which accounts for a lot of our income from that area.
Well we'd always benefited from legacies, even though we've been going for nearly 50 years now...
...we'd always benefited from legacies.
But in about 2010, when I started working on this area...
...I recognised that there was nothing happening, there was no strategy for legacy...
...there was no means for people to leave a legacy gift, we weren't talking about it at all...
...and I recognised that if this continued with an ageing supporter base...
...coupled with those things as well, we could be in big trouble.
It did account for about a third of our voluntary income so it really needed to be addressed.
Well first off, I did quite a lot of research into which charities were doing will weeks...
...will fortnights, whatever they were...
...and looking more especially at the smaller charities - the regionals.
I went along on a course and saw a really inspirational lady there from a regional charity up north...
...who gave me the idea that "yep, this is definitely something we could do"...
...and a way that I felt I could work so I got in touch with a local solicitor here...
...had an appointment, chatted it through with them.
...how do you get a solicitor to say "yes", you know, "I'll, I'll do that for nothing"?
But chatting through with her, it all became absolutely clear...
...because they get a legacy bank of people as they call it, hopefully...
...they might be named executor which will then in a few years...
...obviously they will get income from that, they might get repeat business in other areas of their work...
...as well as being keen to support a local charity.
So then understanding it, I was able to go out there and encourage...
...solicitors, meet with them, tell them about us...
...encourage them too to come on board...
...so that I could start a 'make a will month' we decided on.
The first year we decided that Gloucestershire was probably...
...you know... take a small bite first and check it out...
...and I decided that if we were going to promote this, I wanted to have a...
...a solicitor in most of the big towns in the county...
...of Gloucestershire so that if someone were to say "yes, I'd like to do that"...
...they had somewhere relatively close that they could make an appointment with.
So that involved a lot of research into which solicitors do...
...that type of work, finding the right person to get in touch with, making the ask...
...could I go and see them to talk about the charity and plans and then...
...you know, reeling them into say "yes, we'll do it" until I finally had...
...coverage across the county, that I felt I needed.
...in quite a small way. We do find that the majority of our supporters are probably...
...Gloucestershire based...
...and because we are a small regional charity, people haven't heard of us...
...although we lend support into their county area...
...it's not a name that they've heard of, so that can be a bit difficult to get solicitors to agree.
I think for the person wanting to have an opportunity to make a will...
...without paying the solicitor but donating to a charity, they don't...
...perhaps care which charity it might be but it...
...you know it's chicken and egg, you need the solicitor before you can get the people.
I keep in touch with them, I give them feedback on how it's gone.
We advertise in the papers when we have our will month which is each April...
...so January I start to advertise...
...so I can keep in touch with them as we're going over the months - not too often because you don't want...
...we appreciate what they're doing, we're putting our back into it...
...the number of enquiries we've had from their area so who they might...
...potentially have numbers-wise coming through wanting appointments.
Then when it's finished, feedback to them how much we've raised in donations...
...how many appointments each has seen so a little bit of...
..."oh I can feel better than them because we've seen more"...
...how many people have left us legacy gifts...
...several people do tell you, many won't...
...and really don't want to but I can feed all of that back, which I think really is good then for...
...relationship keeping and building.
It's always difficult to get other people as keen and enthusiastic as you are.
I can have all these wonderful bright ideas about what we should do...
...for instance perhaps email footers at different times of the year, not just at this focus of time...
...just to prod people's thoughts...
...and wouldn't it be great if everybody in the charity were to have this on their email...
...or indeed on the bottom of a letter, as a footer.
Getting people, you know, your colleagues at work...
...to understand the importance and how if they know about it...
...they can just be aware that if there's an opportunity...
...if it should come up in conversation...
...they have the understanding how we could perhaps help or would benefit...
...this person and you know, vice versa.
And when they're out there talking to people in other areas, whether it's community fundraising for instance...
...in presentations, to be able to talk about it...
...those that you meet as our supporters talk about it perhaps if you can, be aware of it.
Well, you can measure it, I like to measure it by...
...the number of enquiries that we have each year for starters...
...because I do think that if you make an enquiry...
...you may well go onto see your own solicitor...
...you may not want to be part of what's going on with us.
I also measure it by the number of solicitors that I've managed to speak to...
...to form a relationship with.
We like to invite them as well as I've said, so that they can see what it is that we do here...
...and network a little with one another while they're here...
...so I measure successes by the number of...
...solicitors who come through on those occasions as well...
...and it's not just all about the end result of the legacy...
Well I think we need to be very brave...
...but I think that our supporters have been past patients or families of...
...and I think that they are our very best likelihood of legacy gifts for the future...
...having benefited from the work that we do here.
We do have resistance to this and huge sensitivity.
We see some very ill patients come through here, of course...
...but I really want to be able to take our message to our patients...
...in as sensitive a fashion as I can. I know there is a lot of worry...
...from management as to how we might do that, we do see some very sick patients...
...and the last thing you want to do is to ... upset them, worry them.
But there are ways of doing it and we can work at that.
We are inviting people to get in touch and become a friend of Cobalt...
...and once we have encouraged them into this Friends of Cobalt...
...obviously in time they will get soft messages of legacy gifts.
...so also encouraging patients to share their story which will help us...
...in so many ways.
It's also another way of getting to patients...
...meeting with them, gaining their confidence...
...that we can get the message across to our patient base...
...that we need their support...
...and they might like to consider doing that by way of a legacy gift.