2014 Gold Awards for Fundraising Excellence Multichannel (Less Than $10 Million) Winners

Multichannel (Less than $10 million)
Secret Guide to Children’s Campaign
The St. Louis Children’s Hospital Foundation
(Submitted by The St. Louis Children’s Hospital Foundation)

The Numbers
Recipients: 115,000
Response rate: 1.47 percent
Total cost: $89,800
Income generated: $103,117.73
Average gift: $77.60
Cost to raise a dollar: $0.87

There were guffaws all around as our judges looked through this submission from the St. Louis Children’s Hospital Foundation. Always a good sign.

Not that humor is necessarily a hallmark of a great campaign, but when done right it can elevate the effort to award-winning status.

Although it is a multichannel campaign using direct mail, email and a social-media element, this submission’s reach alone wasn’t what earned it its honor here. More impressive was how it found numerous ways to present its consistent message. The theme — missives from Josh, a 16-year-old patient at the hospital, offering “insider” information about the facility — stayed consistent throughout the elements of the campaign, but each of the six mailings, one year-end piece, an email and a Facebook page seemed fresh and unique.

Plus the humor didn’t hurt. Josh’s personality and perspective on life are real, his voice is his own, and he was able to paint donors and potential donors a genuine picture of how much their support means to a real patient and his real family.

“Because Josh’s stay in the hospital plus his ongoing treatment have been so extensive and put him in contact with so many facets of the hospital, we focused each mailing around a different area that the foundation wanted to highlight,” explains Angie Winschel, a partner at Almanac, the design and branding firm that worked on the campaign.

Each of the pieces featured casually written side notes from Josh and offered tidbits of advice such as, “Order extra butter at every meal. Save them up for your mashed potatoes,” and, “Meet Toni (one of Josh’s favorite physical therapists). She’ll make ya work!”

Mailings guided recipients to a themed Facebook page to keep the engagement going, and it also worked as a vehicle to engage other potential donors who weren’t on the mailing list.

Sick kids aren’t the easiest topic to joke about, but this campaign succeeds by letting Josh just be a teenager and drive home a point to donors in a way that engages, entertains and educates.

Additional Multichannel (Less than $10 million) Winners
SILVER: International Campaign for Tibet — Match Appeal (Submitted by Schultz & Williams)

The Numbers
Recipients: 346,698
Response rate: 1.43 percent (3.7 percent mail only)
Total cost: $56,985
Income generated: $315,445
Average gift: $64
Cost to raise a dollar: $0.18

When Richard Gere smiles kindly at you from a letter, email, website or anywhere, really, and asks you to give, you give. At least that’s what 1.43 percent of the recipients of this effort on behalf of the International Campaign for Tibet did. And while Gere’s face certainly couldn’t have hurt, it wasn’t exactly that that was the driving force in this campaign’s success. It was his commitment.

Gere is the organization’s board chairman, and messaging for this campaign emphasizes that Gere himself is the person matching the gifts. No nameless, faceless foundation or mystery benefactor — but Richard freakin’ Gere. The campaign elements kept the star at the forefront of the messaging, and recipients received emails from him, followed by reminder emails from the organization’s interim president. It was a simple campaign that took full advantage of its star power, which made an even greater impact because it clearly conveyed Gere’s personal and deep commitment to the cause.

BRONZE: Art Institute of Chicago — 2013 Year-End Appeal (Submitted by The Lukens Co.)

The Numbers
Recipients: 76,611
Response rate: 2.14 percent
Total cost: $84,375
Income generated: $158,895
Average gift: $97.12
Cost to raise a dollar: $0.53

Any membership organization knows how difficult it can be to persuade members to give to an annual fund when they pretty much look at their membership dues as their donations. The Art Institute of Chicago was no exception. So it took a look at what it had been doing — a single-channel, annual year-end campaign — and did it better by turning it into a multichannel campaign (based on what was working in its acquisition and lapsed-donor reinstatement programs). Our judges liked the gumption it took to try a new approach to an old problem but basing it on something that was seeing success for the organization in another capacity.

During November and December 2013, members received two mailings and a series of four emails; the messaging was carried through to a lightbox on the museum’s website. Direct mail and the lightbox directed recipients to an e-commerce page to donate, while emails linked to a similar URL using personalized information that was prepopulated, including the same variable ask amounts that were included in the recipient’s letter. And it all wrapped up with a telemarketing effort to select members in the final days of the year.

Overall, the campaign resulted in $158,895 gross revenue from 1,636 donors with a 53 cents cost to raise a dollar. This is up from the single-channel results from the 2012 year-end annual campaign of $86,227 in gross revenue with a 68 cents cost to raise a dollar. The increase is even more impressive when you consider that there were no changes in the universe pulled for the single or multichannel campaign. The museum established a new control based on the results of the campaign, involving at least the email follow-up series, which has been implemented in all campaigns moving forward.