Background
Mind is a leading mental health charity in England and Wales, offering advice, support and legal information to anyone experiencing mental distress. The Do Your Own Thing (DYOT) fundraising initiative is vital to Mind’s income, generating around £3.5m annually, but faced challenges with declining participation and manual processes. By partnering with Euler and using Apteco's tools to their full potential, Mind built a fully automated supporter journey, powered by data insights and dynamic content tailored to supporter scenarios.
The challenge
Emails in the Do Your Own Thing (DYOT) journey were inconsistent, inefficient and resource heavy. Supporters often missed communications or received them late - sometimes receiving a thank-you weeks after their event. Limited team capacity and manual processes meant engagement declined and income conversion weakened, with no resource to follow up properly. Stronger stewardship was needed to turn early interest into lasting commitment essential to encourage fundraising and turn supporter experiences into genuine relationships. Five officers spent hours each week manually pulling CRM data and uploading it into the ESP, yet many supporters slipped through the cracks. Complicating matters further, no stakeholder had a full view of the end-to-end process, including when sign-ups appeared in the CRM.
Watch the full customer story
Watch the video, presented by Haylie Romo, Neda Rahimi and Katherine Schofield, to discover how Mind was able to deliver a fully automated, personalised supporter journey.
The Apteco solution
The first step was to identify the data needed for personalisation. Missing fields such as the event date and created on date were brought into FastStats. Apteco PeopleStage proved the best fit to address Mind’s challenges, particularly the manual processes that missed contacts. Workshops were held to understand how different teams used the data at each stage. The workshops highlighted the complexity of the journey, and the range of stakeholder needs, confirming that the full Apteco solution was the right approach. Mapping was crucial to determine when registration data reached CRM, the supporter touchpoints at each stage, and how to identify these. Mind then translated these criteria into FastStats selections and built complex, personalised journeys with precise supporter touchpoints.
FastStats provided the flexibility to capture multiple supporter scenarios, leading to three main journey ‘strands’ based on the time between registration and event date. The longer strand included newsletters to maintain engagement, while shorter strands focused on core emails such as welcome, good luck, thank you, chasers, and payment prompts. All strands included a post-event chaser email to encourage income conversion, plus a dynamic re-permission email to secure marketing consent for future comms. For those fundraising in memory of a loved one, tailored dynamic content was added for a more personal experience. Crucially, PeopleStage ensured comms were aligned with the supporter’s schedule rather than team capacity. Emails are now triggered by event and booking dates, running daily (including weekends) to deliver timely, relevant communications, something not possible in the manual process. To handle the transition, a separate audience was created for supporters already mid-way through the manual journey. These individuals entered the automated flow at their next relevant touchpoint, based on their event and booking dates. To develop a more personalised DYOT journey, Mind created virtual variables which looked at supporter’s most recent DYOT event registration date, event date and event campaign code and used expressions to work out the time delays across the journey to ensure that people receive the good luck email one day before their event date, the thank you the day after and the chaser 56 days after if they have not paid yet.
Apteco has enabled us to create a comprehensive, automated journey - from creating complex selections, to mapping out key email touchpoints, and establishing a clear reporting infrastructure. This transformation has streamlined our processes, eliminated manual tasks, and significantly enhanced supporter engagement.
Neda Rahimi, Data and Analytics Manager, Mind
Neda Rahimi, Data and Analytics Manager, Mind
The impact on the business
With these improvements, Mind was able to deliver dynamic, event-specific communications, ensuring supporters received timely, relevant emails tailored to their activity and event date. The fully automated daily journey removed manual processes, increasing consistency and reliability in supporter communications. Using communications reporting in PeopleStage and dashboards in Orbit, stakeholders gained clear visibility of supporter progress, email performance, and key metrics such as total emails sent and chaser engagement - insights that were previously difficult to track, fragmented across multiple reports, and time-consuming to compile, making it hard to measure the impact of stewardship on engagement and fundraising.
Automation now saves the team roughly 10 hours of manual work each week
Click-through rates across DYOT emails have risen to 7.2% since shifting to an automated journey
The automated journey maintains a consistently low unsubscribe rate of just 0.42%
The new chaser email is driving more supporters to complete their fundraising - something the previous journey couldn’t deliver
The new supporter journey boosted conversion rates from 28.5% to 39.6% year-on-year
81 additional events have been booked after beginning the new DYOT journey
We have seen first-hand how Apteco has enabled Mind to overcome complex challenges in supporter journeys. By automating communications and unlocking personalisation at scale, Apteco has helped them deliver timely, relevant experiences for supporters. The result is improved engagement, stronger conversion, and greater efficiency within their Do Your Own Thing fundraising initiative.
Katherine Schofield, Analytics and Intelligence Manager, Euler
Katherine Schofield, Analytics and Intelligence Manager, Euler