Playful Fundraising

As the fundraising landscape continues to evolve and more nonprofits pop up seemingly every day, building and growing a donor file can be a tricky proposition. And we all know that growing your donor file is critical for sustaining your organization.

Donors are hit from all sides with mailings and messages from this organization and that, asking them to make gifts and provide their contact information. It's information overload, which makes it easy for donors to tune it all out.

That's the conundrum that KaBOOM! found itself in. The organization dedicated to saving play for America's children by building playgrounds and playspaces in communities throughout the nation needed to find a way to grow and manage its donor base and empower communities to build their own playgrounds. But instead of purchasing lists and sending out communications to potential donors who may or may not have any desire to support KaBOOM!, the organization sought an innovative way to reach a new audience.

Enter Groupon Grassroots and KaBOOM!'s donor relationship management database partner, Salsa Labs.

Leveraging connections

As fate would have it, in the summer of 2011 a KaBOOM! staffer met a Groupon Grassroots (then branded the G-Team) staffer at a conference in New Orleans and got to talking, says Anna Morozovsky, senior manager of individual giving and major gifts at KaBOOM!. When the staffer returned, she connected the Groupon folks with Morozovsky and the two organizations began discussing Groupon's year-end Grouponicus campaign.

Groupon Grassroots is daily deals site Groupon's social-action brand with a mission to activate citizenship and foster neighborhood advancement through Groupon. The goal is to provide Groupon customers with a simple way to support local causes. It does that by promoting a collection of local campaigns — usually around 15 — each week on Groupon, says Patty Huber Morrisey, manager of Groupon Grassroots, providing a new segment for the organizations featured.

"We're using the platform in the same way Groupon uses the platform to help small businesses connect with new customers," Morrisey adds. "By offering discounts these businesses can attract new customers. So instead of the incentive being a discount for causes, it's a guaranteed impact in the community."

During the final week of the year, Groupon Grassroots promotes six national campaigns for its Grouponicus holiday season promotion.

By leveraging the relationship it began building in June 2011, KaBOOM! submitted an application to be featured during Grouponicus in August and was approved in October.

"KaBOOM!'s been on our radar for a while. They seemed like a really great fit: big national organization, have a really strong, engaged supporter base that they could leverage to expand their reach through Groupon, and then the compelling local impact of building playgrounds," Morrisey says.

By November, the two sides hammered out all the campaign details. That included KaBOOM! securing a matching gift from corporate partner Foresters, which has donated $7 million to KaBOOM! since 2006. Foresters, a membership-based insurance provider, agreed to match up to $20,000 for the campaign, providing a nice incentive to Groupon users.

It also included a specific goal, stating, "If G-Team Members Donate $2,000, Then KaBOOM! Can Begin Building New Playgrounds for Underserved Children."

The campaign

Once everything was put into place, all that was left was the execution. So in the final week of the year, the KaBOOM! Groupon campaign went live. The main call-out had "Today's Featured Campaign" with the brief description: "Help create a safe environment for youth to play; donate today to KaBOOM! so it can build brand-new playgrounds. Learn more."

Once donors clicked through, the Groupon Grassroots landing page had an image of a KaBOOM! crew at work along with a price tag that read "from $10," showing that a $10 donation has a $20 value — or a 50 percent discount. It also laid out how many Groupons were bought and a call to action to buy it for a friend.

There was also a section called, "In a Nutshell," with a brief description about how playgrounds grant children opportunities for fun, exercise and more, making the case to give to KaBOOM!, and a fine-print section detailing how 100 percent of the donations go to KaBOOM! and are matched by Foresters.

Scrolling down, there was even more description about the KaBOOM! campaign, as well as a link to the website and links to stories on KaBOOM!. Here are excerpts of some of the text:

"The first 50 G-Team members who donate $25 to today's campaign will receive a copy of a book by Darell Hammond, the organization's founder, called KaBOOM!: How One Man Built a Movement to Save Play, upon redemption of this Groupon. Additionally, all Groupon redeemers will be invited to suggest a neighborhood in need of a playground, as well as receive an excerpt from Go Out and Play!, a KaBOOM! book that focuses on fun outdoor games.

"… KaBOOM! aims to raise $70,000 to construct expansive new playspaces in underserved communities, including playgrounds, basketball courts, murals, and community gardens. The organization requires $2,000 to begin adding elements that include swings ($10), basketball hoops ($25), a mural ($10 for 3 gallons of paint), and plants ($25 for five) to a playspace.

"Join G-Team and donate $10 or $25 to help KaBOOM! construct a new playground for children in an underserved community. If G-Team members raise $2,000, then KaBOOM! can begin installing activity-starters such as swings, basketball hoops, and a mural. Each additional donation will provide more equipment for the playspace. Foresters will match all donations up to $20,000."

Groupon Grassroots also provided KaBOOM! with tools and a simple call to action to have supporters invite five to 10 of their friends to participate in the campaign, a great way to ignite peer-to-peer fundraising.

To get the word out beyond the feature on Groupon, KaBOOM! marketed the campaign itself to its own supporters and donors.

"When we were featured the last week of the year, we did your basic Facebook posts and Twitter tweets, and we also sent out a dedicated e-mail to our list with our year-end solicitation e-mails already scheduled, adding information about the Groupon campaign as it was happening," Morozovsky says. "We saw it had a huge impact. Not only did we get a bunch of new donors from Groupon, but we had a lot of our current supporters who had not yet become donors but decided to donate through us through Groupon."

Results

This being the first time KaBOOM! had really gone out to donors beyond its own housefile, no one quite knew what to expect. It proved to be a wild success. Overall, 740 Groupons were sold to 646 users, with 256 of them redeeming the Groupon — a 40 percent response rate and well above the average Groupon campaign — raising $11,500 from Groupon subscribers. With the match from Foresters, the campaign raised more than $23,000. Of the 646 donors who contributed, 74 percent were brand-new supporters while 26 percent were already on the housefile, yet only 4 percent of them had been prior donors.

Thanks to the automated thank-yous Salsa Labs set up for KaBOOM!, Groupon customers received a thank-you once they purchased the KaBOOM! Groupon, which was key to the high redemption rate. It also had the call to action to redeem the Groupon.

"[Donors] were sent a message as soon as they had purchased a Groupon just to say thank you very much," says Amanda Foster, account manager at Salsa. "There are auto-triggers in Salsa that after someone makes a donation or completes an advocacy action or anything like that, it can automatically say thank you for supporting our organization."

That was key in getting these new donors onto the file. While the donations were sent to KaBOOM! upon purchase, the names and e-mail addresses were only collected when Groupon donors actually redeemed the Groupon and filled out their contact information.

Another big part of the success was including its own file in the campaign, Morozovsky says. There was internal debate about whether or not to include the KaBOOM! housefile for fear it may cannibalize the all-important year-end giving season. But ultimately, KaBOOM! decided to include its own file, which helped convert more donors.

However, the work wasn't done there. Beyond just raising the funds and adding donors to the file, KaBOOM! really wanted to keep these new donors engaged and active. So they were immediately funneled into the KaBOOM! housefile, receiving newsletters and regular communications, including event invites and solicitations, and directly telling donors what playgrounds or playground elements their donations helped build.

"[KaBOOM!] created a genuine incentive to give," Morrisey says. "Donors, especially people who are donating at the small levels, the micro-donations level, they don't want all the free stuff — a T-shirt or some piece of swag. It almost feels like it's wiping out their donation. What people want to know is what happened with the money. And that's what KaBOOM! was doing, building an authentic connection that's going to have lasing power."

It's proven to be hugely successful, already showing signs of that lasting power. More than 130 of these new donors have become active subscribers for KaBOOM!, and these new donors have better open and clickthrough rates on e-mail communications than the supporters that were already on KaBOOM!'s housefile.

"Because they self-selected KaBOOM! and learned a lot of information through the Groupon site, people went in knowing more about us and what we did rather than just a blind third-party charity fundraiser," Morozovsky says. "That amount of information people already had once they decided to make a donation through Groupon was really great and helpful.

"Anytime you don't have to pay for names, it's always a good thing, and if those names have already donated to you before you even get them — [as they did in this campaign] — that's even better than a prequalified lead. That's about as good as you can get," she adds.

The campaign was such a success that Groupon Grassroots and KaBOOM! are at it again this year for the Groupon Grassroots Big Give campaign, continuing the partnership.

This time around, Morozovsky is hoping to engage new donors even more, ramping up a little more communications in January and planning to implement a welcome series as opposed to just lumping the new donors into the newsletter lists and online communications.

"I really enjoyed this opportunity, and you learn from every campaign," Morozovsky says. "Obviously everyone involved thought it was a success so I'm looking forward to putting all those lessons learned last year into practice this year."

Of course, none of this would have worked had KaBOOM! and Groupon Grassroots not been the right fit.

"KaBOOM! and Groupon are just a really good match," Foster says. "When people go on Groupon, they're always looking for fun stuff, and KaBOOM!, it's playgrounds — you don't get much more fun than that."

Images courtesy of KaBOOM! and Groupon Grassroots.