Tell us a little bit about who you are.
I’m a St. Paul, Minnesota transplant who moved to NYC six years ago, and I am trying to make a life out of making a difference for people who are written off by the world…by changing the world.
Why are you fundraising for Champion Access?
Because my seed funders, Andy Stern and John Rigos, have been putting lots of pressure on me to raise money for the last year and I didn’t want to lose their support. And, the other more serious part to why I’m fundraising is that I’ve been waiting to ask friends and family to ask their friends and family to donate. I wanted to make sure that Champion Access had reached a certain level of maturity so that our supporters will feel confident that their donation is going towards something very specific as part of a larger, very important cause. Which leads to the third part of my response, which is that we needed to raise this money to be able to implement two more training programs before the end of the year. Our success in this campaign makes that possible.
What methods did you use to get people to come to your page?
Gentle, slightly humorous yet direct, persistence… meaning that when my team and I didn’t see the results from our initial email asks, we followed up with something like, “We’ve been having some minor technical difficulties with our donate button, which is probably why you haven’t made that $10 – $50 donation. I’m happy to say that all has been resolved. We need your support in the final X days left of our campaign. Thanks.” I have to credit Andy Stern for that approach. He’s very good.
What has been the most difficult part of fundraising?
Initially it was motivating my team to join me in the campaign by creating their pages… but that was a very minor hurdle and once a few people got on board and a few donations were made, we were good to go.
Any tips you’d like to share with other fundraisers?
What worked for me was keeping it simple, competitive, fun and perhaps most importantly, tying our end fundraising goal to something very tangible. The money we raised is going to participant stipends – we pay our participants to go through Champion Access because we realize they can’t afford to take the time off from their jobs otherwise. And logistically, I think that creating templates for everyone to use on their own campaign pages so they don’t have to come up with content on their own (unless they want to) was key in making the process for others to fundraise easy. I did implement an incentive that for every $275 a person raises, they get a raffle ticket to win a magnum of champagne. I’m not sure this was necessary, but I wanted to do it anyways.
