Turning Fundraising on Its Head

As the world becomes more digital every day, online fundraising continues to grow in importance and volume. But it's unrealistic to expect donors to give online if you don't engage them first. That's the name of the game in e-philanthropy: engagement.

In FundRaising Success' fourth and final (for 2011) installment of successful case studies from the past year-plus, we take a look at how two organizations improved their e-philanthropy in different ways: The Hope Institute for Children and Families and the Be the Match Foundation.

For the Hope Institute, a whole new online strategy was devised to grow its supporter base and drive traffic to its redesigned website, while the Be the Match Foundation embarked on an ongoing, online peer-to-peer fundraising program to empower its constituents on its behalf.

The Hope 
Institute 
for Children and Families

Two years ago, the Hope Institute for Children and Families — a nonprofit that provides educational, residential and health services to children with multiple developmental disabilities including autism — had very little direction online. So the Springfield, Ill.-based organization brought in online marketing and communications expert Jarid Brown to help correct that.

Brown was hired as director of online interaction and tasked with devising an online communications and fundraising strategy for the organization.

"When I came on board [23] months ago, Hope was in a position where it really had no clear direction online," Brown says. "There was no e-mail marketing strategy. The website was old. The content and language needed some work. There was no online donation button — very fledgling. We were starting from scratch."

Goals

The first step in implementing a cohesive, comprehensive online strategy is to map out the organization's goals. Considering how far behind the Hope Institute was, Brown laid out ambitious yet realistic goals. A website redesign was at the forefront of the conversation. The Hope Institute needed a more user-friendly site that would direct donors and supporters where to go to find pertinent information, 
ways to get involved and how to donate.

It also needed to get its e-mail marketing efforts off the ground to increase both its e-mail database and its monthly e-newsletters subscribers. To coincide with that, Hope began focusing on social media as well — particularly Facebook, Twitter and YouTube — to gain a larger following online.

At the same time, Brown sat down with Direct-Response Director Lynn Storey to work on an integrated strategy. They wanted to ensure that Hope had the same messaging and branding online as it did in the mail in order to keep things consistent. That way, no matter how someone came in contact with the Hope Institute, he or she would get the same message.

Ultimately, the goal was to drive everyone to the new website, where constituents could learn more about the organization, get more involved and donate — ideally on a daily basis.

"I want, ultimately, everyone going to our website every day," Brown says. "It's not going to happen, because obviously I can't expect people to check our website every day. But that's the mentality I have because we know the longer they stay on our website, the more familiar with us they become and the more of a relationship we can build with them."

Website redesign

The backbone of any online strategy is the website, so Brown knew his first task was to get Hope's homepage up to date. The old site wasn't very dynamic, with clunky links and little in the way of engagement. So Brown wiped the website clean and transformed it into a more marketing-driven site with dynamic content, directive links, a Donate Now button and a design that encourages navigation.

Now the first thing you see when you go to TheHopeInstitute.us is a scrolling image of one of the organization's "stories of hope," detailing the stories of children the institute serves. Right away, it brings visitors in with the emotional images and prompts to "click on the story of hope." Immediately to the right of that are four sections visitors can click on: "Stories of Hope," "Donate Now," "Find Support" and "Special Events."

From there, Hope now uses several website design best practices, with a search bar and telephone number in the upper-right corner; headers including "About Us," "Programs," "About Autism," "Ways to Help," "In the News" and "Contact Us"; as well as more navigation features below and in the footer, including an e-mail newsletter sign-up and other ways to take action to support the institute's mission.

The layout is clean, easy to navigate and sticky, with each subsequent page providing plenty of detail and engaging stories. Social-media badges are also prevalent throughout the website, making it easy for supporters to follow the Hope Institute on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

E-mail marketing

One of the best ways to drive traffic to the new, shiny website is through e-mail. When Brown joined the Hope Institute, the organization had begun looking for an e-mail marketing tool to help propel its e-mail strategy. In February 2010, Hope selected Constant Contact, using its e-mail and events marketing tools.

At the center of Hope's e-mail strategy is its Hopeful Futures monthly e-mail newsletter, which launched a year ago. Once a month, subscribers receive the newsletter in their inboxes detailing a story of one of the children the Hope Institute serves. This "Hopeful Futures" story is the main message of the newsletter, detailing where the child is from, the troubles and struggles that his or her family had before finding the Hope Institute, and where the child is today.

"The very first thing that recipients see is that story of hope," Brown says. "We typically put about the first half of the story inside the e-newsletter as a teaser and then provide a link to the rest of the story on our website. Everything is designed to get them to come back to the website."

The story of hope is the engagement mechanism that gets people to open the newsletter. Inside the story is a small solicitation to donate, but the main goal is to get recipients to click through to the website, where they can find out more and, of course, donate.

However, the e-newsletter does have a "give a gift of hope" section directly below the story that links to its donation payment-processing page. Depending on the month, the message slightly varies — for instance, in April, the institute ran a matching-gift campaign, so that was highlighted in the "give a gift of hope" section.

There are also typically four to six other smaller articles about events that happened across Hope Institute programs, upcoming events, articles from the blog and other relevant information.

"We typically try to mix it up where there's a couple of different smaller stories," Brown says. "For instance, in June there was a story about our graduation ceremony at our learning center, and then there was a short piece about the Toyota 100 Cars for Good contest that was coming up. [The Hope Institute received a Toyota van.] And there were two short pieces for 5Ks that other organizations are doing on our behalf, so we want to help promote those."

The newsletter goes out to approximately 3,800 subscribers and continues to grow. The key to staying on schedule, Brown says, is in the planning. Hope plans out the content for the entire year one year ahead of time, so everyone in the organization knows exactly what story is going to be featured in the December issue, for instance, at the beginning of the year. And the e-newsletter schedule is integrated with the direct-mail program.

"Every month our direct-mail program sends out anywhere from 30,000 to 250,000 appeals nationwide. That appeal every month 
features a certain child that's receiving services through us. That same appeal is what becomes our story of hope online for that month," Brown says. "When you go to our website, the first pictures that you see that month are of that child that's featured in our direct-mail appeal and in our e-newsletter. So everything works together."

Brown says he is very metrics-driven, so Hope tracks every e-mail campaign it sends to identify which communications and links drive traffic and which do not, including every click. Everything is tested and taken into consideration, from the placement in the e-mail to what stories tend to get more clicks, which get fewer clicks, what date and time the e-mail was sent, who's clicking through, who's sharing links, etc.

Social media

Coinciding with the Hope Institute's e-mail strategy is its social-media initiatives. Brown knows that the more visibility the organization has online, the more effective all the channels become. Thus, social media provides a great opportunity for Hope to spread its word and draw more people to its website and join the e-mail list.

But Brown didn't want Hope to just have a foot in a bunch of different doors — he wanted to focus on the big three: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. So Hope developed a digital-media strategy and launched an integrated social-media platform. The development and communications departments worked closely in developing the strategy with the goal of increasing awareness, increasing funding, establishing a new and innovative way to engage internal and external audiences, and laying the groundwork for more intimate, genuine relationships with potential donors.

"Rather than us moving across multiple social-media platforms and trying to do a little bit in a lot of places, we decided to focus on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube," Brown says.

But he knows that social media really isn't the place to raise funds; it's a relationship-building arena that gets supporters through the door in order to cultivate them into donors.

"We are not openly soliciting our social-media following. We don't want to put anyone in a position where the first contact that they have with us is us asking them to give us money," Brown says. "We understand that social media's primary use is to build a relationship. So all the content that we post across our Facebook page, Twitter, YouTube is all designed to foster that relationship.

"We understand that the more they view our Facebook page, the more that they share our content, the more that they click on our links and go back to our website and see the stories of the children that we serve — eventually they will become the event attendees or they will donate to us. It is a lengthy process. We understand that, and we're committed to a lengthy process," he adds.

The Hope Institute approaches each social network in slightly different ways, tailoring to the audiences. Any video about the Hope Institute goes up on YouTube, and the organization will do interviews, training presentations and event videos to post there.

On Facebook, the institute posts relevant content daily, but it also runs certain promotions dedicated to Facebook. For instance, in February, the organization had a fan drive in which a donor offered to donate a dollar for each new Facebook fan that joined that month. That helped drive an extra thousand fans over a three-week period, Brown says. Hope also has incorporated surveys and polls to drive Facebook fans to the website, have them complete the surveys and then share that activity with their friends.

The Twitter strategy is a little more marketing-driven. It's not a place to bring in money, but what Brown discovered very quickly was that there was a large number of parents and community members within the autism community who use Twitter.

"[Twitter] has become a very powerful tool as far as building support within the autism community and especially with parents who have children who have autism," Brown says. "We've been able to reach out to them through Twitter and really been able to build a strong base of support so that when we have things that we would like actively shared, they are more than glad to share that information."

The Hope Institute has found that combining social media with e-mail marketing is really strong for charitable giving contests as well. In spring 2010, the organization decided to enter select charitable giving contests for two reasons: 1. to bring in some money; 2. to build its social-media following and bring more supporters into the fold.

Soon after the social-media strategy was implemented, the institute was presented with a high-profile opportunity to test it: the Pepsi Refresh Challenge. In 2010, Pepsi ran a contest to have the public vote on nonprofits to receive grants via a social-media campaign. Organizations across the country competed for grants ranging from $5,000 to $250,000 via online voting, with the top 10 vote getters in each category receiving 
grants.

"I wanted people to vote for us online. I wanted to bring home the grant money," Brown says. "But as importantly, a) I wanted to give people an outlet to help without giving direct monetary contributions, and b) I wanted them to begin to follow us so they could share that with all of their friends — and that would help me build a relationship with more people.

"Charitable giving contests are one thing that we use to help not only bring in additional money online, but also to help build our fan base online, to help build our number of e-mail subscribers," he adds.

Brown says the Hope Institute is very selective in the contests that it participates in. This year, it ran a similar campaign for the Toyota 100 Cars for Good program.

But the main goal with social media, just as with the e-mail marketing, is to cultivate a relationship and continually drive people back to the website, which Brown has found naturally leads people to attend events and begin to donate.

Results

Since embarking on a revamped online strategy, the Hope Institute has increased its e-philanthropy numbers across the board.

Its e-mail newsletter has an average open rate of approximately 30 percent and an average clickthrough rate of 18 percent, though the numbers vary per e-mail — and in the past three months, the clickthrough rate has jumped to 34 percent.

The social-media numbers have followed suit. When Brown joined Hope, its YouTube page had a total of 3,000 views. As of mid-October, that number has skyrocketed to more than 117,000 total views, and on a monthly basis, Hope gets anywhere from 7,000 to 9,000 views on its YouTube channel, according to Brown. The Hope Institute Facebook page went from right around 200 fans to more than 2,400 at press time, while the autism program's Facebook page went from about 200 fans to more than 2,400 as well. And the Twitter following has gone from a couple of dozen to nearly 1,900 for the organization, while the autism program's Twitter following went from about three dozen to more than 2,600.

Thanks in part to its e-mail marketing and social-media growth, 
the Hope Institute also was successful in both the Pepsi Refresh and Toyota 100 Cars for Good contests. In May 2010, the Autism Program of Illinois won a $25,000 grant, 
and in June 2010 the Noll Dental Clinic won a $50,000 grant as part of the Pepsi Refresh Challenge. This year, Toyota awarded the Hope Institute a van as part of its contest.

Further, event attendance has grown by nearly 20 percent thanks to these efforts. Now, including event registrations, 15 percent of the Hope Institute's overall donations are collected online.

And it's all due to this revamped online strategy, which started with the website redesign. In just six months after the redesign in October 2010, page views went from 4,000 average views per month to 35,000 average views per month, an increase of 750 percent — proving that the goal of driving people to the site is paying off.

"Everything that we do online is designed to drive traffic back to the website. We're promoting the same story within Facebook and Twitter. We're promoting the same story on our website. We're promoting the same story on our blog, on our e-mail marketing and, of course, in our direct-mail campaign. So no matter how someone views us that month, the first thing they see is that same story. Everything is designed to work together," Brown says.

"By us being very selective in our appeals, by us focusing upon our children and leading supporters back to the website to where they have multiple opportunities to give money, it's led to that natural progression," he adds.

Over the next year, Brown says the organization hopes to begin integrating QR codes into all of its direct-mail pieces to make it even easier for people to get to the website.

"The real key for us is that we've been able to take all of the different parts of all the different digital marketing tools that we have and make them all work together — versus always trying something new, always following the hottest trend and never getting anywhere with them," Brown says. "We've figured out what we do well, and we focus upon what we do well."

Team Be 
the Match

Every day, thousands of people are in need of bone marrow and umbilical cord blood transplants. The Be the Match Foundation is dedicated to raising the funds needed to help all patients get the transplants they need, working with the National Marrow Donor Program to recruit donors for the Be the Match registry. It has recruiters all over the nation soliciting 
volunteers to donate bone 
marrow, blood and funds.

Always looking for simple, effective ways to fundraise, Be the Match thought a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign could give the development department a boost. So the foundation developed Team Be the Match, an online peer-to-peer initiative developed to capitalize on the large community of folks affected by those in need of transplants.

"We wanted to give our account executives a really simple and easy tool using the best practices of peer-to-peer fundraising to engage patient family groups, sponsor groups, community organizations to not only get people to join the registry, but to donate funds," says Amy Nelson, former director of public engagement and giving at the Be the Match Foundation. Nelson recently left the foundation and is development engagement officer at nonprofit CaringBridge.

Building the platform

Once Be the Match came up with the peer-to-peer concept, it needed a platform to execute it. Nelson says the organization worked closely with its network of recruiters out on the front lines in developing the campaign, getting feedback and doing training on how the technology works.

The foundation built the Team Be the Match website on the Convio peer-to-peer platform in February 2010. On the site, potential fundraisers can search for a team by location and elect to set up their own personal fundraising pages. It provides plenty of information on Team Be the Match, what it's all about, how to join and who it helps, as well as ways to contribute.

"We took the team model and adapted it a little bit," Nelson says. "Our account executives serve as the team captains, and they're the ones that kind of oversee all of the people that join their team and invite people to join their team. Then friends and family groups join under our account executives."

The goal was to put the power in the hands of those recruiters out there every day, and leverage their networks.

No timeline

What makes Team Be the Match so unique is that it doesn't come with the typical deadline of most other peer-to-peer campaigns. Normally, peer-to-peer campaigns revolve around some type of event. Once the event is over, so is the campaign. Not so with Team Be the Match.

Recruiting bone marrow and umbilical cord blood donors is an ongoing, never-ending effort. Thus, Team Be the Match isn't raising any specific amount of money in any specific amount of time. It continues to solicit funds and support to build up the registry and help as many people in need of transplants as it can.

As you can imagine, that has resulted in some hurdles with engagement.

"Unlike a race or a walk — there's a start and end to those type of events — Team Be the Match lives on," Nelson says. "So how do you take people once their initial action with us is done and get them to become lifetime volunteer members?"

One way is to create a strategy using e-mail techniques to give people different ideas of how to use their personal fundraising pages. For instance, Team Be the Match messages go out encouraging fundraisers to promote making a gift to the Team Be the Match page in lieu of a present for Christmas or sending an e-card or Valentine's Day card asking for a donation. And the organization looks for new ways to engage team members all the time.

Results

Even with some long-tail concerns, Team Be the Match surpassed all expectations in its first year. While no goals were set in stone, Nelson says the organization hoped to have 100 pages set up and raise $100,000 in the first year.

The campaign blew right through that, with nearly 500 pages set up and more than $250,000 raised in less than 12 months.

"Peer-to-peer fundraising really is a great way to encourage people to donate to a charity," Nelson says. "The passion that the community volunteers have around the mission — a lot of this is patient- and family-focused — the community really comes together to rally around the patients and the families in search of transplants."

The Be the Match Foundation received a Convio Innovator Award for Team Be the Match in 2010, and it's excited what the future of the campaign holds.

"Every year thousands and thousands of people are added to the registry, and the organization is working with people all across the country," Nelson says. "… The peer-to-peer model is powerful, empowering volunteers and community members to share the message and story for you so people are more likely to donate. When they do see an online ask or get an e-mail or see a Team Be the Match page, they are committed to making a donation."

Moving forward, Be the Match wants to improve upon making the technology even more user-friendly. A common hurdle is still a fear of online fundraising, though that fear is subsiding. The more people trust e-philanthropy, the greater potential Team Be the Match holds. FS