Chelsea Physic Garden

Building on a 350-year legacy

Since 1673 Chelsea Physic Garden (CPG) has occupied four acres of land in SW3 on the edge of the river Thames. Established by the Apothecaries in order to grow medicinal plants, this extraordinary London garden has had wide reaching impact around the world and we are immensely proud and honoured to be working with CPG. At first, we were brought on board for a fundraising push leading up to the 350-year anniversary, since then we have become involved in a range of diverse marketing projects including the redesign of some of the print collateral, the Annual Review, on and offline fundraising initiatives and the website.

Brand Management, Digital, Print, Visitor Attraction

Visit chelseaphysicgarden.co.uk

A growing relationship

The initial projects we undertook for CPG were all print based but enabled us to inject some new creative marketing ideas into the mix and encourage the wider team to take advantage of our services. The printed die cut Theobroma Cacao, was a popular example of creating awareness of some of the famous plants within the glasshouses and our refreshing layouts for the Annual Review have been equally engaging in promoting the important work of CPG.

Challenging fundraising

Recent work includes ‘the Hothouse Challenge’ a successful fundraising campaign and microsite to raise funds to restore the Victorian Greenhouses. An unconventional, ‘double your donation’ appeal that ran until March 2021. CID were commissioned to create the graphics, design brochures and other print collateral and to design and build a microsite integrated with a Raiser’s Edge fundraising database to support the campaign roll-out.

Quantifying success

The Hothouse Challenge exceeded expectations, in no small part due to the CPG team and CiD’s efforts to effectively target, engage and convert a select audience. Another key contributing factor to the success of the fundraising campaign, was the donor’s power to ‘unlock’ an additional £500,000 matching fund, through the exceptional generosity of a single benefactor. Taglines such as ‘Double your donation, Double the impact’; ‘Raise the temperature! Raise the roof’ were employed across the website, digital media, and the Friends mailing, to reinforce and build on this theme. On-site donor targeting was minimal and almost all the advertising and donor transactions took place online due to lockdown measures coming into force on 5th November 2020 and remaining in place till the end of the campaign.

£82k+

raised specifically through the microsite, representing a 3% conversion rate

621

total donors, including 414 carefully targeted first-time donors

£520k+

raised via the Hothouse Challenge campaign as a whole

Careful Pruning

Following the success of the Hot House Challenge, CiD were commissioned to redesign the CPG website, to streamline the user journey, make user updates easy for the Marketing department to achieve on a day-to-day basis and reduce the annual cost of running the site. Designing ‘mobile-first’ and working closely with key personnel within CPG, CiD restructured the site to improve the visitor journey; refreshed images throughout; styled and integrated a Shopify store and plant database; and implemented an events module to direct purchases through Seetickets.com

Fruitful Endeavours

The results of the website design have been transformative, and we continue to work with Chelsea Physic Garden assisting with updates as well as on and off-line fundraising collateral, signage, and print. We very much look forward to new creative challenges and fund-raising initiatives in 2022 and beyond.