We caught up with Garth Stirling, Chief Growth Officer at ntegrity, a full-service agency for not-for-profits, to discuss how their teams use research to help their clients raise more funds.
“We’ve been working with Glow for nearly six years now and we’ve conducted well over 50 projects, ranging from market insight to understanding consumer behaviour to concept testing and market sizing.”
THE CHALLENGE
Getting to the ‘why’ quickly
In the not-for-profit sector, understanding public sentiment and motivation is critical to driving behaviour change, optimising campaign performance, and helping organisations raise funds to meet rising demand for their services. That’s where the team at ntegrity — a specialist digital agency for charities and social impact organisations — turns to Glow.
“Data and consumer research help us understand and size opportunities for charities to grow. It helps charities to understand the demand from audiences and to decrease risk. Charities are very risk-averse. So, any quantitative evidence that shows that a new approach or innovation that they might be investing in will be positively received is really welcome.”
THE SOLUTION
1. Understanding market dynamics
The ntegrity team uses Glow to run a twice-yearly Donor Sentiment Tracker that interrogates attitudes to and behaviour around donating.
“Nobody gets up in the morning and thinks I’m going to give to a charity. It’s really driven by communications and marketing, so understanding motivation, understanding timing, understanding changing sentiment is really important. Data and consumer research help us to uncover and demystify some of those motivations.”
These studies broadly align with two key giving seasons, one end of the financial year and one at Christmas. The research provides valuable input into client’s campaign strategies by revealing a broad range of attitudinal and behavioural data such as donor segments, issue-specific drivers and barriers, preferred communication and donation channels, content type appeal, communication preferences and more.
The data helps ntegrity adjust campaign structure, channel mix and messaging and helps clients design optimal donor experiences.
One example of this impact in action was in the lead-up to the 2023 Christmas holiday season, when cost-of-living pressures were increasing demand for charity services whilst tightening donor wallets.
“We saw a rise in giving sentiment towards homelessness that was much higher than the previous year. This gave us the confidence to recommend to Salvos that they increase their Christmas media spend, which they did and achieved record Christmas donation revenue.”
The insights derived from the data helped ntegrity create a campaign for The Salvation Army that generated record revenue, allowing them to support more people at a time when help was most needed.
In addition to campaign planning, the Donor Sentiment data is also used for ntegrity’s own marketing. The agency recently increased the sample size for these studies to 1,000 respondents, enabling them to do greater levels of segmentation to uncover new insights.
“Off the back of this, we’re able to not just input into our strategies and the projects we work on with our clients, but we’re able to produce a broader range of marketing assets as an agency, from playbooks and user guides to a range of content marketing pieces on social media and webinars. These inform the sector as a whole about overall trends because giving trends change from year to year and season to season.”
2. Tackling big issues with data-driven thought leadership
ntegrity also uses Glow to fuel conversations around sector issues. Their work investigating charity overheads, a long-standing barrier to giving, challenged sector assumptions and reframed public discourse.
All research consistently shows that Australians want charities to minimise overhead—the operational costs of running an organisation. This drives many charities into what’s known as the charity starvation cycle. To align with what they believe is the donor’s motivation for contributing to a charity with low overhead costs, they cut these expenses. However, this often renders the charity less effective and efficient. Consequently, this leads to lower revenue as they conduct fewer activities, which then prompts further cuts to overhead costs, and so on.
ntegrity conducted research categorising charity overheads into areas such as training and risk management. By analysing the public perception of these components, they found that Australians actually value charities investing in these areas, recognising their significance in safeguarding donor contributions.
These insights formed the basis for a playbook shared across the sector, shaping how charities communicate their operational costs.
3. Pre-testing communications to ensure effectiveness
From understanding motivations to testing propositions and refining messages, ntegrity has built a streamlined and repeatable insight engine using Glow. This reduces risk and instills confidence in clients to invest.
The key to these use cases is speed and ease of use. Glow’s real-time data visualisation enables ntegrity to see results live as respondents answer questions.
“We use the data visualisation that is incredibly powerful and gives us insights much quicker than any other platform that we use.”
The ability to set up quick filters is the top feature ntegrity uses to quickly find insights. For example, they often compare traditional donors aged 65 and over versus next-generation donors aged 35 to 65.
“The ability to set up that filter quickly and easily within the platform and then compare the results allows us to see the differences between these key audiences to inform recommendations to our clients.”
THE OUTCOME
Over 50 successful studies powering better work
Since adopting Glow, ntegrity has conducted over 50 research projects spanning market insights, consumer profiling, and concept and ad testing. These projects have led to optimised messaging and more effective channel strategies for their clients.
Glow has become ntegrity’s go-to platform because of its unique mix of speed, simplicity and insight power.
“We use Glow because they offer fantastic customer support. They’re very hands-on, helping us get up to speed, checking our setups and making sure that we’re getting the most out of the platform. Secondly, we love the ability to access (respondent) panels to get results with a quick turnaround. Agency life is fast-paced, and we don’t often have days or weeks to put together proposals or strategy pieces, so Glow gives us really quick answers.”
The tangible benefits of using Glow include improved business outcomes and a significant enhancement in ntegrity’s thought leadership within the industry. Their clients have experienced notable increases in funds raised during key periods, although specific figures remain proprietary.
The partnership with Glow has empowered ntegrity to better serve their clients and solidify its position as a leader in the NFP market.
Why other agencies should take note
“I’d recommend using Glow because nothing speaks louder than your customers or your consumers. Having quantitative data from them to back up your recommendations is invaluable. It saves time and cuts through the myths and discussions, and it decreases risk for both you and your clients.”
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