Unified communications cut donor churn by 33%

7.8%

increase in donor retention

33.3%

decrease in churn rate

4%

conversion rate on cart abandonment flow

Challenge

UN agency needed to streamline omnichannel communications and boost donor retention

For 70 years, UNICEF has protected and promoted children’s rights in more than 190 countries.

Donors are key to the UN agency’s mission to deliver change for children.

But, in recent years, UNICEF saw a decrease in donor retention and an increase in churn for first-time donors.

There was a clear need to streamline and optimize donor communications to improve engagement, reduce churn, and help convert every conversation into a donation. But several things were making this a challenge:

  • Siloed data and channels: UNICEF used SMS, email, telemarking, and WhatsApp as its key customer communication channels. But each channel was managed through a different platform, making it difficult to deliver a consistent donor experience.
  • Lack of performance metrics: With each channel being run through a separate platform, it was difficult to know which performed better.
  • Difficult to transfer data into the CRM: Lacked the tools to consolidate donors’ insight from multiple sources.
  • No email validation: This meant high delivery rates, but many donors were not receiving retention content.

To inspire donors to take action, UNICEF needed to revamp the way it engaged its donor community and offer meaningful communications to influence change.

UNICEF needed to embrace innovative technology and respond to shifts in their donors’ digital habits. This meant adopting a digital-first omnichannel approach that enabled the UNICEF team to:

  • Reach out to donors on the channels they prefer
  • Engage donors with personalized content
  • Optimize the donor journey
  • Automize communications through simple workflows
  • Provide always-on support

Solution

Omnichannel customer engagement solution enables meaningful connections with donors

To solve the challenge of streamlining donor communications and reducing churn, UNICEF needed a unified omnichannel solution that would be easy to integrate and provide the necessary support.

Infobip provided UNICEF with an integrated solution of:

  • Moments: our omnichannel customer engagement hub to help with segmentation, analytics, and event-triggered messaging.
  • Answers: our chatbot-building platform to ensure always-on support.
  • Conversations: our cloud contact center solution for live agents to assist with real-time information to donors who call their toll-free number and inquiries on WhatsApp and SMS.
  • Omnichannel communications: providing a channel mix of Email, SMS, WhatsApp Business Platform, and Voice from a single platform.
  • Email validation: to ensure their database was checked, cleaned, and up to date.

UNICEF already had a huge amount of customer data, including customers’ preferences and preferred communication channels.

Our data platform People CDP helped bring all this data into one central location to build segments and relevant customer journeys, and to optimize campaigns.

With the power of segmentation, UNICEF is now able to segment its donors based on data, behavior, preferences, analytics, and stage of the journey.

To personalize messages and ensure they’re sent at the right time, UNICEF was now able to set up communication flows for each stage of the customer journey triggered by donor behavior, such as:

The addition of WhatsApp Business API to the channel mix meant UNICEF could engage with donors on their favorite channel.

Our omnichannel capabilities ensured messages were delivered on the donor’s channel of choice, with a failover in place.

  • Existing donors: The main channel is Email with WhatsApp as a failover – enabling chatbot assistance and agent takeover for complex queries.
  • Potential donors: A mix of Email, WhatsApp, and SMS during certain intervals with call-to-action along with a Lead Scoring System to track donor behavior.

Result

7.8% increase in donor retention rate, 33.3% decrease in churn rate, and 4% conversion rate on cart abandonment flow

This donor-centric approach allowed UNICEF to engage with donors in an intelligent and data-driven manner, resulting in:

  • Being able to manage multiple communication channels over the same interface
  • Using data and insights to segment and personalize campaigns for each donor profile
  • Improving customer experience and lead generation
  • Omnichannel communication powered by automation

The combination of omnichannel communication and Conversations helped UNICEF engage with donors in a meaningful way, and after the adoption of Moments and Answers, it helped even more to increase total results. What’s more, these integrated solutions helped the UN agency to cut the cost of sending the same message over different channels.

Infobip’s holistic communication solutions empowered UNICEF to create data-driven engagement strategies across their channel mix and optimize the donor customer journey. And in the process take donors on a discovery journey that helps them understand the challenges children face and offers them opportunities to engage with UNICEF.

Infobip provided the best value for money and offered the array of solutions we were looking for, as well as a set of tools to implement as our operations expanded. With Infobip, agile service and support are guaranteed. Throughout the implementation process, they were very proactive and always available. Such care in customer service is something that stands out.

Paula Costa

Marketing and Partnerships