Why did you feel that CrowdRise was a good fit for your online peer-to-peer fundraising?

Transcription

1 Case Study There are thousands of charities on CrowdRise. This case study highlights Travis and his inspirational event Crossing for a Cure. Travis was a first-time CrowdRise user and totally crushed his campaign goals. We hope that his experience will be eye-opening for you as you begin your journey into the online giving space.

2 Hey Travis. Thanks for being so open to chatting with us. You had phenomenal results with your first campaign and we d love to take what you learned and leverage that to help other first timers. Let s jump right in. Why did you feel that CrowdRise was a good fit for your online peer-to-peer fundraising? We felt that CrowdRise was a great fit because it provided the necessary tools for our event participants to easily share their journey and keep their donors up to date with their progress. Just for a little background, were you raising money for a specific project or was your goal to generate extra annual funds for your cause? The goal was to raise money for a new annual event we created to generate fundraising for our non-profit. Campaign length can vary. How long did you run your campaign for? The Crossing for a Cure campaign was 6 months long.

3 That s typically towards the long end, but time frames can vary from org to org and from event to event. A lot of planning can go into a new campaign. How many days/weeks of preparation did you have before you launched your campaign? We spent a couple months preparing the website, collateral marketing materials, and developing our communication strategy before we launched the event and opened registration. This upcoming year, we will open the registration much sooner. Sounds like you put a lot of thought and prep into your event and really did your homework. It for sure paid off. Messaging can truly make or break a campaign. What was your main avenue for outreach? Social, , face-to-face, direct mail? The main avenues for our outreach were through direct face-to-face community engagement, and social media. Good to know. We typically see work best, but you know your community and supporters and what they react to. How often did you reach out? The communication for the fundraising event was active on a daily basis, with multiple postings on Facebook and Instagram. As a part of our content strategy, we hosted a Facebook Live show called the Countdown to the Crossing once a week in the evening, and pre-promoted that show through our Facebook pages. We also sent out a weekly update to the participants.

4 Laying out a messaging strategy prior to launch can be super helpful and keep you on track. Did you have a messaging schedule planned before your event? Because this was a building year for our foundation and this event, we didn t start with a structured messaging schedule, however, as things ramped up, it became clear what type of content was getting the most engagement, and how best to distribute it. For next year, we will have a much more polished communications and content strategy in place to roll out. This will also help quantify the outcomes for our sponsors. How many addresses are in your database? Did you reach out to them all? One of the most incredible outcomes from using CrowdRise, is that we had over 800 individual donations throughout the campaign, and we were able to capture their information to communicate and establish ongoing relationships in the community. We used Constant Contact s to deliver necessary information about the event.

5 That s a ton of new donor information that can really be utilized in future campaigns. Segmenting your list allows you to target the right people with the right message. Did you segment your lists in any particular way? Only based on participants, donors, and sponsors. Let s turn our focus towards the impact. As I already mentioned, you crushed your campaign goal. What was your original campaign goal and how much did you end up raising? Our original goal was to raise $50,000, and we ultimately blew that out of the water by raising over $130,000. Wow. That s incredible. Congrats again, Travis. Using the fundraising minimum feature definitely helped, but most participants went above and beyond. CrowdRise offers a ton of awesome functionality for both you, as the organizer, and your participants. What did you find the most helpful in your campaign? Many of our event participants used the CrowdRise update feature on their pages to keep their supporters informed about their training and progress. This update feature proved very effective for communication and repeat donations.

6 Great to hear that your fundraisers were using the campaign update tool. We ve seen a ton of success with that across the platform, with donors coming back to the campaign and donating multiple times. We know that trying something new can have it s up and downs. What did you learn during your first CrowdRise campaign? We learned some valuable lessons from this campaign, including the power of crowd-sourced fundraising and how to better engage participants in the event and community. Did you access CrowdRise reporting or use our analytics to manage your campaign? Yes, we used reporting on analytics from both CrowdRise and external sources.

7 Well Travis, this has been incredibly helpful and hopefully other Starter charities will be able to learn from your experience. Are there any other comments or feedback you d like to share? In regards to utilizing the CrowdRise platform, I was truly impressed with the client service and responsiveness of David, our CrowdRise associate. When we needed help, he was always there with a reassuring answer, and his help was instrumental in getting this project off the ground and empowering it to become a great success. This made the entire effort of producing a major fundraising event much more smooth and enjoyable. Appreciate the kinds words Travis. This is great information and we will be sharing this with the hopes that your success story can help others like you. The Team can t wait to get going on the 2018 event. It s gonna be great. If you want to check out Travis event click Here.