Declines calling is a simple and cost-effective way to retain a healthy portion of your donors whose payment details have declined or expired — but even after a few cycles, there are still going to be a considerable portion of supporters that you didn’t get to reach. The standard practice is to attempt to call the supporter a few times, perhaps send an email or an SMS blast and then terminate the gift with the aim of re-acquiring it in the future via a reactivation campaign. The team at Cornucopia have sought to improve this model and enable you to provide self-service capabilities to your supporters to improve your supporter retention rates. 

Introducing the Declines Microsite — Cornucopia’s proprietary declines management form, purpose made for the NFP market. The self-server form is utilised to update contact details, set contact preferences, and collect an arrears gift. It is designed to be highly customisable, easy to set up and already compatible with most common payment gateways for tokenisation. 

Whilst the Declines Microsite was in production, we were left with one challenge — how do we serve the Declines Microsite form to supporters in a way that is genuine, personable, and effective?

Cornucopia partnered with the team at Conversr to develop and deploy one of the most complex AI SMS conversations in the Australian market. Where the Conversr AI SMS really adds value is the ability to serve custom follow-up messages when a supporter clicks the link and abandons the Declines Microsite form, or if they successfully update their payment details. 

Declines Microsite was successfully deployed in Q3 2021 with one of our key charity partners, Save the Children Australia and nine months later, it has become a staple to their declines management activities. The Declines Microsite was embedded into the declines calling program with Cornucopia and allowed their supporters to self-update their payment and contact details, request a call or escalate directly to the supporter services team. The platform automatically flags wrong numbers and opt-outs. Since deploying the Declines Microsite in conjunction with the calling program, total conversion rates have improved by 16% and were delivered at a 20% lower CPA compared to the standalone calling campaign. That’s a serious improvement. 

The Declines Microsite has now officially launched to the wider market, and we invite the NFP community to let us bring you on the journey and show you how we can help you retain more donors, at a lower cost while still respecting the contact preferences of your donors. We truly believe that this will become the gold standard within industry for declines management. 

If you want to hear more about how the Declines Microsite can benefit your declines management program, please drop us a line at AccountManagement@cornucopia.com.au  

Nico Confaloniere-Smith is Ex-Operations Manager at Cornucopia (Now with ACF). Liam Malcolm is Head of Operations at Cornucopia.