Easyfundraising streamlines content and ad management across 8 channels with Contentstack

With Easyfundraising, customers can shop online with their favorite retailers and generate cashback donations for charities, good causes, or groups they choose to support. Each purchase generates a commission split 50/50 between the charity of the shopper’s choice and the business. Each purchase generates a commission split 50/50 between the charity of the shopper’s choice and the business. Easyfundraising also generates revenue from advertising retailer offers and promotions in emails and on their website and mobile app.

As a wholly online business, Easyfundraising has multiple crucial digital channels which all act as touchpoints for their visitors. As well as their website, easyfundraising.org.uk, the business has iOS and Android mobile apps and five browser extensions, and communicates with customers via email and social media. Before moving to a headless CMS, Easyfundraising was outsourcing app and browser extension development, and was unable to keep all of these channels up to date with accurate content. “Either we had no way to manage content on these channels, or we simply didn’t have the time to maintain them as for every channel we would have to replicate the workload,” Alan Foster, Head of Product, Easyfundraising, said. “I remember when anyone wanted to change something on the website, I would think ‘Get in the queue!'"

In many cases, content had been hard coded, and it could take weeks or even months to achieve even minor updates. Developers were spending as much as 50% of their time managing content. At the same time, there was no flexibility to create innovative campaigns, limiting revenue opportunities. Easyfundraising saw an opportunity to update its CMS and adopt a more scalable and future-proof solution for advertising management and content management. 

After a thorough research process, Easyfundraising chose Contentstack for its integration capabilities, and the ability to ensure content-first design. “We felt we could tell our teams they could focus on the work and the outcome they wanted — making sure an article was getting the best results, and not worry about how it would look or feel, or about breaking things,” Foster said. “Contentstack provided us with the ability to put content quickly in-app or on a browser extension, and gave us a lot of flexibility over how we made that happen. Other solutions required a very sophisticated integration process, but with Contentstack the documentation was really strong, and it just worked, allowing us to consolidate our content across all eight channels.” 

Very quickly, Easyfundraising saw the value of moving to Contentstack, and today it is heavily integrated into the everyday work of product managers, engineers and creative users across multiple teams from Customer Experience and Discovery to Marketing. Contentstack is used for content management across all touchpoints, including for merchandising via browser extensions, editor picks in-app for specific retailers, and for advertiser tenancy. “Contentstack builds the ad placement and stores the content, and we use an integration to serve this content automatically to web or app, or anywhere it needs to go,” Sam Higgins, Head of Digital Performance, Easyfundraising, said. “It really drives automation and efficiency throughout our team.” 

A flexible headless CMS has also changed the way that stories are pushed to the development team. Instead of needing to define exactly what content teams wanted down to the smallest punctuation mark, teams can now go live with multiple variants for specific segments or cohorts — all without the need to lean on developers at all. 

Adopting Contentstack means ensuring the consistency of visual language and template design is no longer the responsibility of content managers, freeing up these internal teams to focus on the content, and automating as much as possible. “We needed a way to give a relatively junior member of staff the ability to publish quickly, or we can miss out on advertising sales that could be thousands of pounds,” Alex Heasley, Chief Customer Officer, Easyfundraising, said. “Instead of waiting weeks or months to update content, it can now be updated whenever it’s relevant or needed, which is constantly throughout the day.”

In terms of customer experience, adopting Contentstack has allowed Easyfundraising to design more engaging campaigns, expanding beyond simple reminders to shop via the service. New interactive campaigns provide customers with content to share with their networks, and gives visitors a reason to keep coming back, growing loyalty for Easyfundraising over time.

Over the Christmas period, Easyfundraising ran a flagship advent calendar campaign which attracted 450,000 visits over the holiday season, delivering more than 100,000 clickouts to retailers. In February, a similar ‘Love Letters’ campaign to coincide with Valentine's Day was also a huge success. “We generated the whole campaign through Contentstack, and people were coming every single day,” Higgins said. “These campaigns wouldn’t have been doable without our headless CMS in place, which allowed us to offer a really interactive and creative UI, with full control over the content aspect.” 

Easyfundraising has seen a lot of tangible efficiencies from adopting Contentstack, with decreased error rates since automating delivery, and a 60% time savings. “Teams can fail fast, try things and change content as they need to, and all without a heavy reliance on developer effort — which was a real problem on our previous systems” Foster said. 

Key wins for Easyfundraising with Contentstack include: 

• Reduced developer reliance: Before Contentstack, developers may have spent as much as 50% of their time managing content, and now teams are empowered to self-serve. 

• Continuous content updates: Making changes to content previously took weeks or months to enact. Today, content is updated whenever necessary — multiple times each day. 

• A boost to customer engagement: All channels are now updated automatically with accurate and relevant content, including interactive campaigns that drive traffic and clickout rates. 

• Increased ad inventory fill rate by 17% YoY for ad placements served through automated delivery leveraging Contentstack.