The Client
America's Second Harvest of Wisconsin (SHOW), a member of Feeding America, is a food bank with warehouses in Milwaukee and the Fox Valley. Distributing more than 13 million pounds of food a year to more than 1,100 pantries, meal programs and other agencies, they nourish over 235,000 people in the eastern half of Wisconsin.

The Problem
SHOW needed to grow their list of email addresses to reach a wider audience with their message. They also needed to engage current subscribers in a way that would drive them to forward a call-to-action to friends and family who'd agree that no one should go hungry in America today.

How We Solved It
In consultation with Convio's Go! Program team, SHOW decided to leverage current events. They composed a letter that the Go! team posted online on the heels of President Obama's inauguration. The letter educated the public with trends and statistics (such as "13 million children are at high risk of inadequate nutrition due to poverty"), and the embedded form allowed signers to incorporate their own personal comments on the subject of hunger in America. SHOW sent a series of emails to their list, requesting that recipients sign the letter for delivery to President Obama. To appeal to a diverse audience, SHOW varied the subject lines, text, and photos in the email series, and also reflected the cross-section of people who depend on the food bank, day in and day out. People who took action and signed the letter during the campaign received an alternate version of the follow-up email, asking them specifically to help spread the word about the campaign.

The Outcome
While this campaign doubled SHOW's housefile, it also delivered much more. For thousands of members of the public, the contents of the campaign put a current face on hunger. It also placed hunger on their mind-map of policy priorities at a time when many issues were vying for their attention. Additionally, the significant list growth helped contribute a fresh new cohort of prospective donors that SHOW could leverage during subsequent Go! Program fundraising activities.

Convio products used: eCards, Email Marketing, FormBuilder