The Challenge

The National Trust’s gifting offer already generated over £20 million per year, yet it lacked coherence, strategic direction and cross-organisational alignment. Products were fragmented across multiple platforms, marketing was inconsistent, and most gifts were unintentionally skewed toward existing members and heartland audiences.

The Trust recognised a major opportunity to grow this income stream by reaching underserved audiences, such as city dwellers, young people, and non-members, while also making gifting a more powerful way to connect people with nature, heritage and the organisation’s mission.

The challenge was to develop a long-term gifting strategy that would enable sustainable growth, eliminate duplication, improve the user experience, and position gifting as a strategic driver of income and impact.

Good Innovation was brought in to lead the development of this strategy facilitating a collaborative process to align teams, surface opportunities, and co-create a bold vision and roadmap for the future of gifting at the Trust.

The Solution 

We worked closely with the National Trust to design and deliver an ambitious gifting portfolio strategy, creating clarity, cohesion and a future-focused plan. This work unfolded across a series of insight-led workshops, strategy design sprints, and collaborative planning sessions with stakeholders across the organisation.

Our approach focused on four strategic themes, each grounded in insight and co-created with National Trust teams:

• Insight-led Infrastructure & Journey: Unifying fragmented gifting systems across retail, fundraising and membership into a seamless, insight-rich platform.

• Marketing to Fuel Growth: Developing a single brand narrative for gifting and launching targeted marketing pilots to engage underserved audiences.

• Supercharge & Consolidate Products: Streamlining overlapping products, refreshing high-performing offers, and improving UX.

• New Product Development: Embedding gifting into innovation processes to create a rolling pipeline of new, mission-aligned, audience-centred products.

We supported National Trust to define a clear vision, “Gifts that matter”, framing gifting not just as a revenue stream but as a gateway to the mission. We also co-developed guiding principles (e.g. audience-led, seamless, experiential) to steer future decision-making and product development.

The resulting strategy includes:

• A phased three-year roadmap to 2028

• Clear roles for governance (via a cross-functional Gifting Steering Group)

• Prioritised workstreams

• Pilots and investment cases

• Success metrics to track income, audience reach, and product performance

The Impact

The strategy marked a step-change in how the National Trust approaches gifting, from siloed offers to a unified, audience-led portfolio with long-term growth potential.

Key outcomes include:

• A strategic roadmap to grow gifting income from £20m to £30m+ by 2028

• Clear prioritisation of high-impact opportunities, sequenced over three years

• Internal alignment across directorates, with shared ownership of the gifting strategy

• A new governance model to ensure joined-up decision-making

• Identification of new audience segments and gaps in the current portfolio

• Early marketing pilots, product refreshes, and infrastructure changes underway
  

  The strategy has positioned the National Trust to unlock gifting’s full potential financially and for their mission by turning everyday purchases into moments of joy, connection, and legacy for people and the planet.