As the Customer Success Lead at CauseVox, I get to have a front row seat to some incredible campaigns. One of the things I love most about my job is that I get to hear the ins and outs of these campaigns and how they’re making a difference in a vast array of issues.
I had the privilege of hopping on a call with Michelle Hoeft, the Program Director at BeLoved Atlanta to learn more about a nonprofit crowdfunding campaign that’s raising funds to help women seeking freedom from sex trafficking. I was blown away by the impact they’re making in Atlanta, and how they’re setting an example for other organizations.
BeLoved Atlanta
- Staff size: 3 full time, one part-time
- Duration of Campaign: 2 ½ months
- Funds Raised: $181,016
Here’s what Michelle had to say about how BeLoved Atlanta used CauseVox to help them achieve their campaign goals.
“Find out how @belovedatlanta used peer-to-peer fundraising through @CauseVox to engage their community.” tweet this
What is your campaign on CauseVox all about? What are you trying to fund specifically?
Beloved Atlanta has a long-term residential home and program for women seeking freedom from commercial sexual exploitation.
We currently rent a home and have the capacity to serve 4 women. It is our hope to expand our program to serve 6-8 women which means we have to buy a new house.
While we typically have a year-end campaign where we aim to raise $60,000 to cover budget costs, this year it’s our hope to expand our program to serve 6-8 women which means we have to buy a new house.
So, our campaign I launched with CauseVox is funding the purchase of this new home, along with the increase in operational costs to expand our program, and so we set our fundraising goal at $200,000.
Right now, we’re at 90% of our goal, so thus far we have raised enough money to buy/renovate a home!
What have you learned about the crowdfunding experience so far?
It’s amazing the impact that can be made when you have a clear platform to promote an issue to your community. I think in our previous fundraising efforts, we did do a lot of work. But what was different this time is that the support of community really got behind our campaign.
We’ve tried every platform out there and we hadn’t really fallen in love with any of them because we weren’t able to customize it to our needs, and we often ran into high transaction fees.
We knew we wanted to find a new crowdfunding platform that gave us more capability and was within our price range, and after talking with our friends at Care For Aids, they said they loved CauseVox so we thought we’d give it a try!
One of the things we were really excited to use is Stripe for donation processing because of the simplicity and seamlessness! Donors were really easily able to make donations to the campaign without getting confused.
I think one of the biggest surprises for us was how accessible the CauseVox team was when we emailed any questions we had. Not only were they responsive, but also quick and helpful.
Any tips do you have for other campaign organizers/fundraisers?
Our #1 tip is to utilize your “fundraiser pages” more and explain those early in your campaign, as they are great tools for your community to become personally engaged in your campaign.
How did you promote the campaign?
While most of our campaign promotion was online, we did have an event one evening at a local brewery to launch a campaign. That was the first time we introduced the CauseVox campaign to our community, and it got us off to a great start!
After that we did a weekly newsletter over email and we did a lot of social media promotion, especially on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
We loved getting to update our community through the blog! We never had the capability to do a blog on the campaign site before, so we’d get comments about the different posts, I think they enjoyed seeing the community’s reaction. We actually started a video blog as well, which I don’t know if it was super effective, but our team had fun with it.
What were some of CauseVox’s features that you felt most helped your campaign?
We love the simplicity of CauseVox. Setting up the campaign site was simple and easy to do, and it didn’t take a ton of time from our team.
I think one of our favorite features is the personal fundraising pages- for our community to have the ability to set up their own pages to fundraise on our behalf was a big help!
We’ve really loved working with CauseVox and all the support they’ve offered us.
