The Client
Feeding America (formerly named America's Second Harvest) feeds America's hungry through a nationwide network of Member food banks and engages our country in the fight to end hunger. It is the nation's largest charitable domestic hunger-relief organization, with a network of more
than 200 Member food banks and food-rescue organizations serving all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. The organization supports approximately 50,000 local charitable agencies operating more than 90,000 programs including food pantries, soup kitchens, emergency shelters, after-school programs, and Kids Cafes. In 2006, the Network provided emergency food assistance to more than 25 million low-income hungry people in the United States, over 9 million of which were children.

The Problem
After the overwhelming response online to Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma, Feeding America realized that the organization needed to increase its investment in the Internet as it became clear that it was a major channel for the organization to achieve its mission. Feeding America needed to give people an easy way to donate and have the back-end support to conduct strategic email communications.

How We Solved It
Convio’s single integrated platform allows Feeding America to practice true CRM by driving constituents through a pathway based on their stage of engagement with the organization. With this decision, the organization has increased its capacity to find new prospects and build deeper relationships with their existing donors. Feeding American can now easily and quickly send out donor cultivation communications, build and modify online donation forms, and effectively segment, test and measure results, enabling the organization to customize online information, gift levels and specific campaigns to individual donor preferences. Whenever there is a lack of staff or time available, Feeding America turns to Convio Interactive Specialists to get specific online campaigns off the ground. Gifts donated offline and online are tracking using Convio DataSync, which exchanges and synchronizes data from Convio online database to Feeding America's offline database. By partnering with Convio Client Success Services, Feeding America was able to plan and launch “Fill America’s Fridge,” an engaging interactive email campaign to increase per person giving and create and execute a strategy involving corporate partnerships online.

The Outcome
This creative online fundraising campaign included a series of three email appeals and a specially designed landing page with a virtual refrigerator that “filled up” based on the size of the donor’s gift. The landing page indicated how many meals the donation would provide, and included a link to a donation form that was pre-populated with the pledge amount. Those individuals who went to the landing page first donated more per person than those who went straight to the donation form. Providing supporters a visual representation of their giving was so popular that other nonprofit organizations have since used a similar strategy. From the first annual “Fill America’s Fridge” campaign, Feeding America raised $40,000 in online donations, in addition to funds received through a corporate partner match with Rent-A-Center. Within two years, Feeding America increased online donations by 40% and grew its email list by 10%. 

Convio products used: DataSync, Email Marketing, Fundraising