Friday, September 22, 2006

Case Study in Online Event Fundraising

Last year, The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society raised almost $40 million using online fundraising/personal pages to support several different campaigns and events. While the vast majority of those dollars raised came through our Team In Training program, we also offered online fundraising for other programs delivered by nationally and at the chapter/local level ranging from Light The Night a national walk, all the way to The Big Climb - a special event in Seattle. We even opened up selling tickets online for various local events (galas, golf and other special one-off events).

In order to facilitate this success, it was very important to build upon our past experience of what works and what doesn't work in online event fundraising and to provide chapters with as much flexibility and training as possible.

We've provided that flexibility and training in two ways - through the online fundraising tools themselves, and through a collaborative wiki.

Online Fundraising Tools

While not perfect, our online fundraising tools, provided by Active.com are very streamlined and simple. While some of our more advanced fundraisers tend to want more features, we've coached ourselves and chapters to think "less is more" when it comes to online fundraising.

Very simply, the mantra is:
  1. Register!
  2. Send emails!
Photo galleries, blogs, feeds, tags and more are probably on their way - but for now, the results speak for themselves - we've seen some events raise as much as 60% of their TOTAL funds online! Keeping online fundraising tools simple and clean works.

eMarketing Wiki

wiki

Our wiki, accessible via our internal network only (see screenshot) was designed to provide our chapters with a way to collaborate with us, and to get access to to best practices. In addition, we provide a series of self-service training tools along with monthly phone based training sessions that are topical and campaign specific in nature (E-Mail marketing 101 for example).

The wiki provides not only tips and tricks, but tutorials built in captivate that show users how to use emarketing templates for web content, email marketing and provides information about how to structure their local marketing efforts on a campaign by campaign basis.

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