Making every sign-off count for Make-A-Wish UK

Make-A-Wish Foundation is a charity founded in 1986 that provides the opportunity for children (aged 3-17 years old) with life-limiting or life-threatening conditions to choose and plan a special experience.

The not-for-profit organization is currently based in Reading, England and has granted over 15,000 wishes as of summer 2021. Make-A-Wish comprises of full-time staff and volunteers.

Solving industry-specific challenges

Oli Wilson, Technology Manager at Make-A-Wish UK, had worked with Exclaimer in a previous role. So, when the charity’s IT team faced several industry-specific challenges regarding their corporate email signatures, he knew exactly who to reach out to.

The first of these challenges was adherence to compliance standards – including displaying the latest accurate charity information complete with a comprehensive legal disclaimer.

It was also important that every email sent from Make-A-Wish UK included the latest brand messaging, and that all marketing communications were consistent across senders. And this wasn’t simply a case of including brand logos in signatures as Oli explained:

“Our marketing campaigns change regularly and our email signature templates would often include updates that deviated from our brand standard.

“It made sense to choose Exclaimer as a method of centrally managing our signatures, as we could solve all these challenges in one go.”

However, another unique challenge facing Make-A-Wish UK was that their team comprised of both full-time and volunteer staff. It was critical that no key marketing messaging was ever lost, but this was frequently occurring when volunteers used their personalized emails or simply did not have access to the organization’s approved email signature template.

Introducing Exclaimer allowed Make-A-Wish UK’s IT team to centrally manage email signatures organization-wide. This ensured that all email communications would always include a consistent signature template, regardless of who the sender and the device is.

Marketing and IT working together

A key consideration for Make-A-Wish’s IT team when choosing an email signature management solution was for it to be intuitive and accessible. This meant the product needed to be simple enough to use that updating email signatures could be done by more than just one team.

The goal therefore was for the marketing team to look after brand content and messaging updates while the IT team managed the solution server-side.

Oli continued:

“Exclaimer is so quick and easy to use. Our marketing team can log in, make any updates, and roll them out instantly for all internal and external email communications. This is key in an industry like ours where actively promoting the right messages means so much. Plus, from my perspective in the IT team, the solution was so easy to configure and is effortless to manage.

"In fact, the benefits of using Exclaimer go well beyond just ease of use. As organization-wide email signatures can be managed centrally via a single solution – and updated in seconds – the Make-A-Wish UK team can save time by investing in it elsewhere.

“Our marketing and communications team save so much time by updating signatures without having to send templates out to our users. This not only naturally improves brand consistency and accuracy in messaging, but also frees up both the marketing and IT teams to focus on core business tasks integral to Make-A-Wish UK. This is especially important as we have so many volunteers giving up their free time to help us out.”

Customer satisfaction from day one

The relationship between Exclaimer and Make-A-Wish UK has been strong from the start. While Oli was already familiar with the benefits of using its email signature solutions, the Exclaimer team went above and beyond by hosting an onboarding session to run through the process of integrating Exclaimer with Make-A-Wish UK’s Office 365 (Microsoft 365) environment.

Oli concluded:

“Implementation was easy. I jumped on a session with our Exclaimer account manager and a member of their technical team who guided me through the setup process. The session was booked and hosted quickly too, meaning we were up and running and reaping the rewards of Exclaimer straight away.

"Centrally managing email signatures can seem like a novelty until you implement it. It quickly becomes a game-changer for managing brand consistency and external messaging, which is so important for organizations like Make-A-Wish UK. An email signature solution should be a key tool for compliance, marketing, and communications within any company.

“Exclaimer has been and continues to be easy to work with. It is very supportive of the work we do as a not-for-profit organization and I would strongly recommend using Exclaimer to centrally control your email signatures.”