Winners of the 2014 Gold Awards for Fundraising Excellence

By Margaret Battistelli Gardner

The Numbers
Recipients: 99,114
Response rate: 1.82 percent
Total cost: $67,031
Income generated: $130,391
Average gift: $72.04
Cost to raise a dollar: $0.51

It all started with a simple red equal sign. Well, sort of. HRC’s historic overtaking of Facebook and Twitter with a red-tinted version of its iconic blue-and-yellow logo actually started with an email when, in March 2013, two landmark marriage-equality cases reached the United States Supreme Court. The email educated the organization’s more than 1.5 million members and supporters about the cases. Then on the first day of oral arguments, HRC posted the specially hued logo and asked others to adopt it on their social-media pages. By June 2013, HRC had provided innovative apps for mobile, Facebook, Twitter and HRC.org, and the red logo was everywhere. Following up, the organization mailed an Equality-Gram fundraising appeal, asking for a special donation to continue its mission.