As a Customer Service Advocate at CauseVox, I have the opportunity to work alongside nonprofit fundraisers who are working in the trenches. It’s truly a privilege to assist organizations that are doing amazing things every day. Hearing their stories about not only how but why they’re fundraising, makes being a resource to fundraisers all the more meaningful.
So when I saw how North Texas Food Bank ran their holiday giving guide and raised over $50,000 to provide food to the hungry, I had to reach out to hear more about their organization and learn more about their strategy!
Anna Kurian was gracious to hop on a call with me and let me pick her brain about their Holiday campaign.
Let’s hear straight from Anna about how they were able to raise enough to provide over 150,000 meals to their community!
Campaign Length: 50 days
Funds Raised: >$50,000
Meals Provided: >150,000
Who are you and what do you do?
My name is Anna Kurian and I manage communications for the North Texas Food Bank. The NTFB is a hunger relief organization that serves 13 counties.
We provide food to more than 200 Partner Agencies as well as more than 1000 feeding programs across our service territory. Each day the NTFB provides access to more than 170,000 meals for hungry North Texans.
What is your CauseVox campaign all about? What are you trying to fund specifically?
We ran a holiday campaign called the NTFB Holiday Giving Guide. Our supporters were encouraged to fund a cause that was important to them. These included:
- Child Hunger– support our backpack program Food 4 Kids which provides a weekend backpack for chronically hungry children each Friday during the school year.
- Senior Hunger– support the Nourishing Neighbors program- seniors and disabled persons receive a grocery delivery biweekly via a volunteer
- Feed Families-make a $30 dollar donation and you will provide a holiday meal complete with all of the trimmings for a family of 4
- Fund Nutrition education– Your donations will help us provide nutrition education, including helpful information about food safety and how to prepare nutritious meals to clients in need
What have you learned about the crowdfunding or the fundraising experience so far?
What was most exciting about this fundraising experience was that it is incredibly social. We were excited to add videos to our CauseVox campaigns so that we could give potential supporters a better idea about our mission and the programs that their funding would help sustain and expand.
We featured these campaigns and the videos prominently on North Texas Food Bank’s social media pages during the holiday season, and encouraged our supporters to do the same.
How was this year’s Giving Guide different from previous ones?
In past years, we did a Holiday Giving Guide where we had different items people could purchase in honor of friends or family. This year, we wanted to do something different and just request donations and highlight some of our programs.
Especially during the holiday season, people are more inclined to donate. So we decided to go with 4 different campaigns to attract different audiences. We knew people have a heart for funding seniors and children, and then we also provided the option to fund a family.
With CauseVox, we were able to insert a video on each of the campaigns that showed what these programs were all about, and we really hadn’t done anything like that before. CauseVox really helped us tell our story through video.
We were surprised to find that we raised more funds with a donation based campaign instead of an items based campaign-people just have a heart to give.
How did you promote your campaign?
We saw that social media and eblast would really boost donations (52,000 people support NTFB) so we sent out 3 emails about the different causes they could fund and we’d see a big jump in donations directly after each one.
We also created a digital press kit that we sent local new stations which included 4 videos on what donors could fund and how they could give. Unfortunately didn’t get a lot of coverage, but we did try and do some outreach around then.
We also used encouraged sharing as a way to give during the holidays, because it was easy to turn $1 into $2 by inspiring someone else to contribute. CauseVox is a bustling social media platform- it was easy for supporters to share right from the campaign site!
We made use of widgets to connect our CauseVox campaign to our NTFB site, and donors didn’t even know they were donating through another platform. We also used the custom domain, so donors that visited the CauseVox campaign still seemed to be donating on a part of our site as well.
Any tips do you have for other campaign organizers/fundraisers?
Be creative as you decide the layout for your CauseVox campaigns. Use plenty of photos and video if possible. Be sure to include your fundraising goal so that your supporters can clearly see that they are moving the needle towards helping fund your campaign.
What drew you to CauseVox? What have you liked using the best so far?
We didn’t want a boring or static page and we wanted to add visual elements to help us tell our story and encourage our supporters to get involved. Choosing CauseVox was an easy decision because it allowed for the most customization of our pages.
It was a really great to be able to customize our CauseVox campaign to coincide with our branding and overall it was a really good experience.
