It’s quite a powerful combination when personal passion intersects with fundraising, as in the case of MMORE. In March, Sarah Kauffman-Fink set an ambitious fundraising goal to move a research study to the clinic so myeloma patients could have access to this new treatment as soon as possible.
Let’s hear more from Sarah now.
Do you have a personal passion for ending myeloma?
I do. The organization was started by my parents after I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 2005 when I was twenty-two. At the time the survival rate was two to four years but because of research and new treatments, it’s now four to ten years. I have been in remission for 9.5 years and life goes on for me, but I’ve become passionate about finding a cure.
What is MMORE’s story?
Multiple Myeloma Opportunities for Research and Education is a grassroots nonprofit for fundraising and education events. We raise money for multiple myeloma, also known as blood cancer. Since 2008 we’ve raised over $2.4 million for research. Most of the money has been raised through our four annual live events but this year we decided to do something different by using CauseVox.
What was the aim of your fundraising campaign?
March is Multiple Myeloma awareness month so we thought we’d try to run a campaign in March to get funding for a specific research project with great potential. Researchers think this project is very promising so we wanted to help speed up the process of bringing it to the lab for clinical trials. Normally these researchers wait until funds from large grants come in to move forward to clinical trials, but by bridging the funding gap with this campaign they will be able to start now!
Why CauseVox?
Not having done this before I was googling advice on how to do crowdfunding, and it kept leading me back to CauseVox’s materials. I really appreciated all the information I could download before the campaign too. We chose CauseVox because it has a really nice looking interface with a frontend and backend that’s easy to use.
What was your fundraising approach?
- We wanted to expand our reach. We didn’t really want to hit up the same contacts so we had a huge event in February to find new supporters, which brought in most of the funds, around $60,000. Half of our supporters for this online campaign had never heard of our organization so we’re happy our promotional efforts paid off to some extent.
- We planned to clarify our message in a concise way. We hoped people would come to the site, understand what it’s about, and be able to know what they’re giving to. CauseVox’s blog really helped me understand what we needed to tell an impactful story in a concise and powerful way.
- Promote the campaign across networks. I contacted online bloggers in the myeloma sphere, myeloma support groups around the country, online networking sites, and podcasting blogging sites. If I did it again I would spend more time trying to line up two or three online newspapers to do a mini-story right as the campaign started.
What have you learned about your audience by doing this fundraiser?
People like videos. Next time we will really harness the power of video. I thought we needed professional videos, but one of the doctors made a home video saying, “Hey I’m one of the researchers behind this campaign” followed by what the research is, what can it do, and what they need to make it happen. In the first forty-eight hours it had over 600 views. Next time we will definitely encourage fundraisers to make a one-minute video of why it’s important to them.
What did you wish you’d known before doing this campaign?
I wish I’d known how to train and engage the four older people we had helping with the campaign. All four of those people are computer savvy, but they didn’t understand what crowdfunding means so we had to really walk them through it. They thought it was too hard, and maybe they couldn’t do it. I recognized how some of them have fear around the intersection of money and the Internet (online fundraising!). Next time I will look for a resource to educate older people.
Sarah continues to increase awareness and advocate for new research for multiple-myeloma so thousands of people’s lives can be changed as a result, just as hers has been so deeply impacted.
