2014 Gold Awards for Fundraising Excellence Social-Media Mastery Winner

By Margaret Battistelli Gardner

Social-Media Mastery
Putting the ‘Fun’ in Social Media Fundraising!
Human Rights Campaign
(Submitted by HRC)

The Numbers
Recipients: 1,355,848 average
Response rate: 0.35 percent over the year
Total cost: $9,846
Income generated: $60,200
Average gift: $12.64
Cost to raise a dollar: $0.16

If any organization’s social-media strategy has reached the mastery level, it’s the Human Rights Campaign. You do remember the HRC profile photos that turned Facebook red in March 2013 when two landmark marriage-equality cases reached the U.S. Supreme Court, don’t you?

In 2013, Facebook and Twitter were an integral part of HRC’s overall, multichannel fundraising program. To strengthen its ability to turn social-media “friends” into donors, the organization last year added two important elements to its social-media strategy.

The first was an emphasis on prospect recruitment by providing thoughtful and unique ways to engage (contacting legislators, for example), which led to prospects sharing their contact information with HRC. Those prospects then went into the mail and email appeal streams and, as of August, had donated $150,000 through HRC’s various fundraising channels.

The second upgrade was a dedicated direct-fundraising campaign strategy. HRC promoted eight fundraising campaigns in Facebook and Twitter (four in conjunction with email campaigns and four stand-alone social-media campaigns).

“Through previous testing, HRC found that social-media fundraising campaigns were most successful when they included a premium and the fundraising ask provided a low-dollar option,” writes Lindsey Twombly, deputy director of online strategy and social media for HRC.

Twombly adds that from those eight campaigns in 2013, more than 4,700 donations were received from HRC’s Facebook and Twitter followers, adding more than $60,000 to HRC’s multichannel fundraising program.

“And the best part?” Twombly says. “More than 60 percent of the donations were received from first-time HRC donors.”