Imagine if there was a way to make young adult cancer suck less?
There is, and it’s all thanks to Stupid Cancer, an organization dedicated to empowering young adults affected by cancer by ending isolation and building community.
With the help of CauseVox, their main fundraising event, CancerCon has become a life-changing experience for more than 6,000 attendees!
About Stupid Cancer
Today, Stupid Cancer uses CauseVox’s peer-to-peer fundraising platform to raise more with less effort. Between the CancerCon and the CancerCon VIP Club fundraising campaigns they’ve run on CauseVox, the foundation has been able to raise more than $65,000 in the last year.
Each year, 77,000 young adults (ages 15-39) are diagnosed with cancer in the United States alone. That’s one young adult every eight minutes.
This neglected group faces age-specific challenges, such as infertility, loss of identity and independence, lack or loss of insurance, increased isolation and stalled career development, all with limited resources.
Stupid Cancer’s mission is to empower young adults affected by cancer by ending isolation and building community, making cancer suck a whole lot less.
Nick Hudson is the Director of Development for Stupid Cancer, the leader in young adult cancer advocacy and community building. His day-to-day duties include managing the organization’s fundraising efforts, including peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns on CauseVox.
The Campaigns
CancerCon Patient Scholarship Fund
CancerCon is Stupid Cancer’s annual 3.5-day gathering where attendees’ lives are transformed by engaging with hundreds of peers who understand what they’re going through. The event brings together young adults who have experienced cancer, are currently in treatment or who are post-treatment.
In order to help participants, their families and caregivers and make the CancerCon experience more inclusive and less cost-prohibitive, Stupid Cancer does a peer-to-peer fundraising called the Patient Scholarship Fund. For every $2,500 raised, one first-time attendee facing financial hardship will receive a grant that fully covers their registration fee, flights, ground transportation and hotel accommodations for CancerCon.
Nick says that every year Stupid Cancer has done ComicCon, the number of attendees keeps growing. “I hate to say this for obvious reasons, but we now have a waiting list for people who want to be able to attend,” he says.
The CancerCon experience includes dozens of informational workshops, educational breakout sessions, group discussions, networking opportunities and social activities. Anyone can donate to the Patient Scholarship Fund and raise money by using the peer-to-peer fundraising tools with CauseVox.
So far, the campaign has raised $11,721.
CancerCon 2019 VIP Club
For dedicated supporters, Stupid Cancer offers a second fundraising event for people who want to raise higher dollar amounts. The CancerCon 2019 VIP Club offers fundraisers and donors incentives for achieving set fundraising levels.
Participants must raise at least $500, which includes free registration to CancerCon and attendance to a VIP ice cream social. Fundraising levels go as high as $5,000, which includes free registration, a Stupid Cancer bag of swag and money toward travel reimbursements. To date, the CancerCon 2019 VIP Club has raised $13,724.
Stupid Cancer Donation Page
Stupid Cancer has raised over $30,000 through their CauseVox donation page this year, which is embedded right on their website.
The CauseVox donation page replaces outdated donation forms and clunky donate buttons so that more donors complete their donation. It’s optimized for any donor’s device, easy to implement on your own website, and designed to increase the number of donations your organization gets.
Nick says it’s tempting to include a ton of back story about your organization and mission on your donation page, but for the donor’s purpose, the simpler the process is, the better.
“For me, it’s all about ease. How easy can you make that process for them to click to donate?” he says.
“The easier you can make the donation page and donate button, the more people will use them. If it’s as simple as possible, it’s going to translate into more dollars.”
Why CauseVox?
For Nick and the Stupid Cancer team, CauseVox was recommended as an online fundraising platform that would work best for their goals. And they ultimately chose CauseVox for these reasons:
CauseVox Is Simple And Easy To Use
Nick says that what generally happens with Stupid Cancer peer-to-peer fundraising is that someone will make a page to fundraise, which then comes to CauseVox. Or they will contact Stupid Cancer and ask how they can fundraise for them. The ease of use and minimal effort is what makes CauseVox such a worthwhile option when it comes to online fundraising platforms.
“We don’t have to do a lot of hand-holding for people who are relatively inexperienced or not an expert with technology because of how intuitive the platform is,” Nick says. “It’s self-explanatory and simple.”
People interested in fundraising don’t have to waste time or effort on clunky fundraising platforms that are hard to figure out or confusing. CauseVox makes it easy to set up their pages quickly and painlessly.
And more time means they can put their effort toward reaching ambitious fundraising goals, not trying to figure out how everything works.
Branded Pages To Help You Raise More With Less Complexity
CancerCon has been a successful event for Stupid Cancer since 2008. The reason for such a successful event?
It’s all about the branding.
And for Nick, the ability to maintain Stupid Cancer’s own branding on fundraising campaigns was a key reason to use CauseVox.
Some online platforms display their own branding, which makes it more about ‘them’ and less about the mission of the organization doing the campaign.
When you run your peer-to-peer event on CauseVox, your organization’s personal branding remains front and center so the user feels that all communication is coming directly from you. And helps a potential donor keep the focus on where it needs to be: the mission of the nonprofit.
CauseVox Offers Regular Product Updates And Innovations
Other peer-to-peer platforms can be expensive and contract-bound, but not CauseVox. The affordability that CauseVox offers doesn’t mean a loss of features or upgrades.
In fact, CauseVox has standard features every nonprofit needs and offers regular updates and upgrades at no extra charge.
For Nick, this meant using a custom URL that drove people to a designated page where they could collect even more donations. And optimizing the donate button so that it was seamless and simple. The Stupid Cancer donation page has raised over $30,000 so far.
Because CauseVox is committed to improving the peer-to-peer fundraising experience, you can expect the product upgrades are always going to be relevant to what nonprofits want and need. And when you use CauseVox, you can track your fundraisers, donors, and keep an eye on fundraising progress all from your easy-to-use dashboard. Events can get complicated quickly. With CauseVox, you can run your fundraising event in one place, saving time and effort by tidying up your fundraising.
CauseVox Offers Personalized Support Whenever You Need It
With CauseVox, the seamless interface means Nick and his team can set up the campaign easily without struggling. And can pass along those tips to fundraisers and donors.
“The challenge for us becomes where do you budget your time, and does it make sense to spend it helping donors get set up who may or may not do much fundraising on our behalf. With CauseVox, the easy-to-use platform has been a secret to our success,” Nick added.
And if an organization has questions or needs help, CauseVox is always available to answer their questions. Even if non-profit organizations have ideas for adding more functionality to the platform, CauseVox is committed to improving upon what they’ve already built and making sure fundraisers have the tools they need to succeed.
Nick says sometimes the best ideas come from the donors themselves.
“Too often with smaller nonprofits, we feel like we need to come up with all the ideas and answers. The ideas are coming from supporters, you just need to listen to them,” he says.
Tips From Stupid Cancer
Stay In Touch
How does Stupid Cancer identify people to fundraise for them?
Nick says it’s a “past, present and future” approach of staying in touch.
“The best fundraisers are the ones who have done it in the past for us, so I usually check in to see whether they’d like to be on board again the next year. Organizations can ebb and flow so the next thing to do is approach present donors in your network now to see what ideas they have for taking it to the next level. The future donors are the most challenging. They haven’t given much but have a lot of potential. How do we get them more involved and active?”
Plus, by engaging with your community, you may find what fundraising campaigns work best for your organization.
“I think it’s more about the community first. Don’t rely on an event to bring your community in, rely on your community to dictate what type of event you’re going to do. There are so many opportunities to raise money online just by putting your organization out there,” Nick added.
Optimize Your Tools
Nick says that to really get the most out of your tools, use functions like segmenting to different audiences with your communications and optimizing your fundraising tools to get the most dollars for your campaign.
By segmenting communication to groups of people, you have a better chance of finding active donors who will fundraise on your organization’s behalf. And with CauseVox’s automation tools, you can make distributing the content a lot easier. An automatic welcome email goes to everyone who signs up for the campaign, and campaign updates are easily shared.
In addition, Nick and his team used the CauseVox integration with Zapier, a tool designed to help integrate data across 1500+ platforms.
The great thing about Zapier is it allowed Stupid Cancer to automatically push data into the programs they were already using, like Salesforce, saving them time and making reconciliation of data streamlined and automatic.
Focus On The Story And Be A Champion Of The Mission
Nonprofit storytelling is so important to the success of any fundraising campaign. Having a story to rally your supporters around sets your organization up for success, rather than failure.
“The best and most effective promotional tactics we use are posts that involve patient stories that come from the patients themselves. They’re telling their story in their own words with quotes directly from them. Then we can say ‘here’s how our organization can help them,’” Nick says.
The other thing Nick advises is to be a champion for your organization.
“Show your audience why you believe in the mission and have a specific ask that you’d like them to follow through on,” Nick added.
“By having a specific ask and showing a clear-cut reason why you’re doing this, it puts you in a place to be right alongside your donors rather than just telling them what to do and where to go.”
Learn more about Nick’s fundraising experience by watching our recorded Nonprofit Leader Panel as he chats through insights learned from the CancerCon campaign!
CauseVox Makes Your Fundraising Easier
Just like Stupid Cancer empowers young adults battling cancer to build community and end isolation, CauseVox wants to be on the frontlines with your organization improving lives and making a difference.
We believe in the good you do in the world and want to give you better tools to accomplish it by helping you waste less effort on administration and less time fighting clunky software. And we want to help you save lives along the way.
You can raise more for your peer-to-peer fundraising event with less complexity and frustration. Find out how much you can raise, and how much time you can get back with CauseVox.
- Learn how you can run your Peer-to-Peer Fundraising on CauseVox
- Learn more about using CauseVox for your Donation Page
