“Around the world and around the corner, slavery still exists.”
The headline on Allies Against Slavery’s website quickly shatters any notion that slavery is irrelevant in this day and age.
With an estimated 21 million to 30 million men, women and children enslaved today, that means there are more slaves now than during all the years of the entire transatlantic slave trade combined.
What’s even more hard hitting for some is the idea that human trafficking isn’t just overseas, it’s alive and well in the United States, with 86% of large counties reporting it’s a significant problem. Additionally, 83% of victims within the United States are US citizens.
While these many survivors may be easily overlooked by the average individual, Allies Against Slavery offers to shine a light on the issue. Located in Austin, Texas, Allies Against Slavery works to build slave-free cities – places where traffickers cannot exploit the vulnerable and where survivors have access to all they need to fully heal.
With their recent CauseVox campaign, Allies Against Slavery raised nearly $30,000 to help further their efforts. Torey Tipton, the Associate Director of Key Relationships and Impact for Allies Against Slavery, shares first hand about planning and executing the successful campaign.
What is your CauseVox campaign all about?
Our CauseVox campaign’s goal was twofold.
First, we wanted to change the narrative around survivors of human trafficking. Allies has a fundamental belief in the inherent value and dignity of the trafficking survivors we serve. Too often, we feel, survivors are painted as broken and helpless individuals that need somebody to rescue them.
We wanted to paint a different picture – one that focused on a survivor’s capacity to become a leader in their own community.
As we said on our campaign page, “Survivor Leadership is central to our Slave-Free City model for creating systemic change to end human trafficking because Survivor Leaders are experts in their own experience and offer powerful insights into how we can disrupt exploitation.” We truly believe that.
Our second goal was to raise funds necessary to continue the work of Survivor Support program. Through a combined approach of meeting tangible needs, one-on-one mentorship, as well as providing the space for survivors to gather and encourage one another, Our SFC Survivor Support program creates a community of “survivor leaders.”
We have already seen extremely exciting and positive results from the work of this program and are thrilled that the funds raising during our CauseVox campaign will enable to continue this important work.
What have you learned about the crowdfunding experience so far?
We have learned a lot so far! Primarily and perhaps unsurprisingly, people give to causes that move and connect with them. Thus, we made sure our content was curated with that in mind.
We took a look at Causevox’s resources and learned a lot about being intentional about our campaigns, and it made a huge difference when we went to promote the campaign to our audience.
While we’ve done campaigns in the past, this time around we were more thoughtful about the content and created a fundraising campaign for specific program, with a very specific ask and theme.
The donation tiers feature was key to our campaign, as we used them to outline clear levels associated with the impact of each donation. This really helped donors see exactly what kind of impact they were making with each donation.
What was your fundraising strategy?
Allies Against Slavery has a unique approach to fundraising as we center our efforts around cultivating long-term relationships with individuals and organizations who truly believe in and are committed to our mission.
Therefore, we thought we would make use of peer-to-peer fundraising for this campaign. We engaged a few members of our staff and some strong supporters to create personal fundraising pages under the campaign.
When you ask people to fundraise for you, it can feel like there’s a big burden for the individuals to create the content to promote the campaign, and we wanted to lift that burden.
Therefore, we gave every fundraiser instructions and provided a toolkit with examples of social media posts, so they were equipped to fundraise on our behalf, and let them know they could use any of our content or social media posts to promote their page as well.
We also started off our campaign by setting a realistic goal, so our fundraisers (and ourselves) were able to better strategize as to how we could reach that goal and feel better when we hit milestones!
How did you promote your campaign?
We used email, social media, and content engage our audience in our campaign.
We only sent out 3 emails total, as we didn’t want to spam our audience. We simply sent out 2 emails to remind people about the campaign, and we sent an email from our CEO email at end of the month to promote donations in the last few days of the campaign.
We used Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to diversify the posts and best reach our audience.
We really wanted to frame our social media strategy as a helpful tool to provide more information about human trafficking and the cause to our audience, and therefore it involved mostly educational posts, mixed in with a few calls to action. Not every post had a direct ask, but everything linked back to the campaign.
Additionally, we used a video at the top of our campaign site. In the digital age, the power of a video to engage your audience can’t be measured, it really helps people place some context around the work that we do.
Do you have any tips for other campaign organizers?
It is incredibly important to ensure individuals make and have ownership over their own fundraising pages – people are more likely to support a person with whom they are directly connected.
We also made sure to create content that is easily sharable as to not increase the burden of individuals to curate their own content which we heard was very helpful.
What drew you to CauseVox?
We were drawn to CauseVox a few years ago and have been using it ever since for our fundraising campaigns. We find it is easy to use and adapt to our customization needs.
The best feature, in our opinion, is the ability and ease of creating individual fundraising profiles. It removes barriers for people to be actively involved in our fundraising efforts.
