The Life Flight Trust is a charity that provides air services to anyone that needs urgent medical help. The planes, helicopters and emergency services are kept running through regular donations, with 85% of their donation revenue coming from individual donors.

Life Flight came to Diagram with a question: how can we use digital to solidify our donation revenue to ensure we have reliable cash flow? The focus was on retention rather than acquisition: how do we make existing donors happier?

At first glance, it appeared that most of Life Flight’s donors were quite similar. They shared similar age, location and gender demographics. However, through research, workshops with Life Flight’s team, and by surveying and interviewing regular donors, we found that there were significant differences in how people thought about Life Flight.

We uncovered and validated three different types of relationships that donors had with Life Flight. The first was one of direct gratitude (you saved my life, or the life of someone I know), the second was based on the concept of insurance (if something goes wrong, I want to know you’ll be there to rescue me), and the third was rooted in doing the right thing for the community (I’m glad people like Life Flight make the world a better place).

These different relationships were captured in ‘personas’ – quick cards to help Life Flight think about who they were communicating with. Instead of communicating to everyone in the same way, Life Flight could communicate in quite different ways based on the persona they were targeting. For example, talking about the equipment required to provide air ambulance services appealed to the ‘insurance’ persona. Conversely, asking people to remember how it felt to be flown was appropriate for the ‘grateful’ persona.

Life Flight found that the personas could be used across the organisation and applied to all of their communication channels, not just their website. In terms of the original business objective, the first time Life Flight applied the personas to a donation appeal, they hit their revenue goal in half the usual time.