Summary
The Carlisle Family YMCA hosted their first crowdfunding campaign and finished with great results. By utilizing team leaders through individual fundraising pages and securing donations from stakeholders before the campaign kicked off, Cate Mellen and her fundraising teams were able to raise over $96,000.
About the Carlisle Family YMCA
For 156 years the Carlisle Family YMCA has been serving their local community through programs that build a healthy spirit, mind, and body for all. The YMCA is about much more than helping people improve the way they look — the YMCA helps people develop as individuals and human beings.
The Challenge
Every year the Carlisle Family YMCA raises money in an annual campaign. Funds are used to pay for scholarships for many of programs, including swimming lessons, summer camps, and reduced rate memberships for families in need. They aim to never turn anyone away because of the inability to pay.
This YMCA has given away $300,000 in scholarships to the community; part of that is raised during their annual campaign. In addition to wanting to raise money for programming and scholarships through the CauseVox platform, the Board of Directors also wanted to increase awareness of the YMCA’s mission in the community and engage the millennial population.
How CauseVox Helped
CauseVox’s platform was an essential component of the Carlisle Family YMCA’s annual campaign. Crowdfunding with CauseVox was the perfect solution for the Y because peer-to-peer fundraising relies heavily on social sharing, which naturally attracts millennials.
From the start, the Carlisle Family YMCA was thrilled to be able to use their own logo and branding on their campaign website. This CauseVox feature allows donors to feel comfortable that their donation was going directly to the organization and also helps to keep branding consistent.
One great tool utilized by the Carlisle Family YMCA was the CauseVox blog feature. The YMCA’s fundraising team frequently added blogs to their campaign homepage in order to highlight donor stories, client successes, and campaign updates. These stories helped put a face and a name to the YMCA’s mission, helping their audience become increasingly aware of the good work they were accomplishing and quantified the impact of the donations.
The donation tipping feature was also successfully used. A large majority of donors elected to cover the administrative fees in addition to their donation — greatly reducing fundraising costs for the YMCA and allowing them to keep more of what they raised.
The Carlisle Family YMCA was able to incorporate a number of strategies used in previous campaigns into their CauseVox peer-to-peer fundraising campaign. This included allowing the Board of Directors and other stakeholders to set up their individual pages and reach out to friends and family about the campaign. They had 50% of donations pledged before the official online campaign kickoff.
Additionally, they were able to establish team captains and individual fundraising pages, a method they successfully implemented during previous fundraising campaigns and wanted to maintain.
Their Results
For their first CauseVox crowdfunding campaign, the Carlisle Family YMCA received $96,445 in pledges — a $10,000 increase over their 2014 campaign figures!
One of the main goals of using peer-to-peer fundraising, aside from securing pledges for the annual campaign, was increasing the Carlisle Family YMCA’s visibility in the community and especially with the millennial population. This was accomplished by using CauseVox’s personal fundraising pages and sharing through social media.
