Winners of the 2014 Gold Awards for Fundraising Excellence

By Margaret Battistelli Gardner

In three short months, the Red Equal Sign and campaign around the marriage-equality cases added more than 300,000 new followers to HRC’s Facebook page and 26,000 new followers to its Twitter page; smashed previous one-day Web traffic records for HRC.org four times over; added 100,000 new email addresses to HRC’s online activist files; added 150,000 signatures to its Majority Opinion e-letter, resulting in $42,000 in post-action donations; fulfilled 63,000 requests for free HRC logo stickers, with more than 50 percent of those requests coming from people who had never engaged with HRC in the past (after requesting a sticker, those people were presented with an opportunity to donate to HRC — that page saw a 1.74 percent response rate, with more than 80 percent of those donations coming from first-time HRC donors); saw 40,000 smartphones download HRC’s Red Logo iPhone and Droid apps, with more than 25 percent of the users providing new email addresses. In addition, the Equality-Gram mail piece exceeded it goal fourfold.