For kids across the world, playing sports is a rite of passage. But unfortunately, many children aren’t able to enjoy this privilege.
The Volo City Kids Foundation aims to change that by working to ensure all kids have access to free and safe play.
Volo City Director of Fundraising and Community Outreach Floyd Jones developed tactical digital campaigning and partnership strategies and used CauseVox to raise more with less effort by executing a fundraising plan and raising funds through more than 11 campaigns that raised $330,000 in the past few years.
With a significantly larger budget, the Volo City Kids Foundation has been able to expand programs, acquire additional resources, and help more young people benefit from the power of playing together.
About Volo City Kids Foundation
In 2015, Giovanni Marcantoni, CEO of the for-profit sports league Volo City, posed a question, “What if every child had access to free and safe play?”
This idea inspired him to team up with Councilman Brandon Scott to form the Volo City Kids Foundation.
Their mission: to bring kids together regardless of barriers such as age, gender, or athletic ability to participate in youth sports programs to increase their activity level and improve their quality of life.
Councilman Scott had a major impact in removing financial barriers, as well — making the programs free for kids by allocating 30% of the fees paid by every adult player from their for-profit programs.
Their 2-person team worked diligently to fund the non-profit, but the road wasn’t easy.
Raising More With Less Effort With Peer-to-Peer Fundraising On CauseVox
Before 2017, Volo City Kids Foundation relied mostly on the money Volo City set aside to fund its programs, which left them with limited resources.
When Floyd was hired on and found CauseVox, he knew it was going to be a gamechanger. “With such a small fundraising team — we needed all the support we could get.”
“Our fundraising is rather diverse…we touch events, we have corporate sponsorships, we have service work, but our peer-to-peer [fundraising] has been the key that’s been exponential in helping us grow,” explained Floyd.
What Floyd learned is that he already had a large supportive network of potential donors — he just needed to learn how to reach them in the most effective way.
“Don’t build your development program around what you think is necessarily right, build your development program around the people who are supporting you,” explained Floyd.
To date, Floyd has activated 428 personal fundraisers from 11 peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns with CauseVox to raise funds for Volo City Kids Foundation.
His wide use of the platform and variety of peer-to-peer fundraisers have significantly contributed to Floyd’s fundraising success. Aside from their main donation page, he runs a range of campaigns including an annual spring Kids Week peer-to-peer campaign, a #GivingTuesday/Year End peer-to-peer campaign, a marathon peer-to-peer campaign, fall fundraising initiatives, and Board campaigns.
One of the top things Floyd notes is that CauseVox makes it so easy to set up, both as an admin and as a fundraiser. With personal and team pages you can templatize in just two minutes, personalizable unlimited text, photos and videos to share your personal story, and a self-service dashboard for fundraisers to update pages, see donors, and share progress, CauseVox has everything you need to bump up your fundraising game. Learn how to launch your next peer-to-peer fundraising campaign.
Volo City Converts More Donors Through CauseVox Donation Pages
Aside from peer-to-peer fundraising, Floyd also set out to improve their donation experience on their website.
To help raise more online, Floyd looked for a solution that would be a great experience that donors would love — which he knew meant providing giving technology that would be both easy and convenient for donors.
Floyd not only needed mobile-optimization so it’s easy for a donor to give on any device, but he also wanted mobile giving options on the donation form. That way, donors don’t even have to take out their credit card.
And CauseVox was just the right fit. Using CauseVox Donation Pages, Floyd set up a donation page for Volo City Kids Foundation that’s designed to help them convert more donors, making it easy for their donors to give on any device.
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CauseVox Sets Volo City Up For Success with the Right Support
When asked what made Floyd choose CauseVox, he said “For me, it’s the people. We didn’t have much of a budget to get started, and I had to plead with my Executive Director and promise it was going to work. Now that we’re bigger, I still want CauseVox. Your tech team is on it, and I feel like [my Dedicated Success Manager] is my friend. The platform is great, and the people are even better. It’s like the cherry on top.”
Floyd came to Volo City Kids Foundation with a wealth of experience from previous work, but additional support and feedback helped the organization achieve that higher level of success.
“I don’t know if we would have been able to be as successful if it wasn’t for the Customer Success team. There aren’t enough words to describe how amazingly supportive they were and continue to be…At every juncture of the journey- they were there to provide us with critical feedback on how we were utilizing the platform and to provide us with insight that we may have missed. They were always available to answer any questions that we had and even after the campaign they sent us a card to congratulate us! What a great company to work with – I recommend CauseVox to every organization.”
Volo City Kids Foundation Fundraising Tips
Use the Power of Social Media
Because the majority of the people in the Volo City network were young athletes or athletic supporters, the best place to raise funds is by sharing fundraising pages social media.
CauseVox makes it easy to share your fundraiser to social media accounts, right from your campaign website.
All your supporters have to do is click the share button and select the platform. They’ll be taken to their account page to write a message about your cause and post.
Make a Non-Profit Fundraising Toolkit
CauseVox also helped Floyd educate his donors on the most important points about his campaign and empower them to quickly and easily craft messages to support the cause with a non-profit fundraising toolkit.
Floyd’s toolkit included everything from sample emails to send to friends and fellow organizations to pre-written social media messages, to images and hashtags to share on big fundraising days of action like #GivingTuesday.
With CauseVox, Floyd can send out automatic welcome emails with the toolkit attached so that supporters can immediately start contributing to the cause. Learn how to create a new subscriber’s welcome email.
Floyd stated, “We started our first ever campaign for #GivingTuesday (this is years ago now), and we ended up doing really well. And the reason why is that we made it easy and we empowered people. People generally want to do good, and fundraising gives them the opportunity to do that. And so now you have all the resources through CauseVox, through a toolkit, and through social media to help them do good.”
Don’t know where to start on your own fundraising toolkit? We’ve got the guide for you.
Make a Personal Impact
A best practice that Floyd learned along the way is that people especially want to do good when they feel like they’re making a personal impact.
“We serve 10,000 kids across the country…so when someone signs up to fundraise for us, we give them a child…and you make it personal. We give them that child’s first name, their age, where they’re playing, we tell them what that child’s favorite sport is…make the program as personal as possible so that people actually have an understanding as to why they’re getting involved.”
Another personal touch Floyd found success with was getting donors to participate in the campaign in their own unique way. For example, for one day of action, Volo City Kids Foundation had supporters change their profile picture to an image of them as a child playing sports. This action gained a lot of attention because it’s a fun thing for your social followers to see and a conversation starter to get new people engaged with the organization. “Anything you can really think of to get some ‘viral-ness’ going — definitely do it.”
Raise More Money With Less Effort on CauseVox
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