Sept/Oct 2009

ThinkCure! Hits One ‘Out of the Park’ with Convio Tools

by Maureen Wallbeoff, Vice President, Firefly Partners

ThinkCure! is a community-based nonprofit that raises funds to accelerate collaborative research to cure cancers. Their vision is to bring Southern Californians together to work toward a common cause to cure children and adults with cancer. ThinkCure! was endowed as a gift to Los Angeles from the McCourt Family and the Los Angeles Dodgers, and they celebrate their heritage and roots in sport through developing active events and ways for their community to get involved in a cause we can all believe in — curing cancer in our lifetime.

A New Approach for an Existing Fundraising Event
In early 2009, ThinkCure! worked with Firefly Partners (an authorized Convio Solutions Provider) to assist them with a full website redesign and the set up of a new email welcome series for new supporters. The new site is bright, engaging and served as the perfect vehicle to promote the ThinkCure! Second annual Radio Telewebethon. Held over a weekend, Dodger fans can give via text, online, phone or in person at the stadium. ThinkCure!’s first fundraising event was the historic exhibition game at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, March 29, 2008, which set a Guinness World Record with 115,300 fans as the Dodgers played the Boston Red Sox in a 50th anniversary return to their original LA home. That event raised $1 million, a total matched by the McCourt Family.

How it Worked
For the 2009 Radio Telewebethon, ThinkCure! wanted to use their Convio-hosted website and online fundraising tools to create a virtual space for donor recognition throughout the weekend event. Firefly Partners worked with ThinkCure! to develop, test and launch an interface that used the Convio Constituent360™ database to capture online donations made via the Convio online donations tools. The donor names and donation amounts were automatically imported into a custom database. Volunteers manually entered gifts made via phone, text and in-person into the custom database, and all donor names were displayed in real time on a scroll with a campaign progress thermometer on the ThinkCure! website. Using the flexible, stable and robust Convio platform as both back-end database and front-end promotional display made this project come together in record time — the project went from concept to launch in only 3 weeks.

Hitting it Out of the Park
The staff at ThinkCure! got the results they were hoping for. Despite the harsh economic factors that are slowing online fundraising for nonprofits of all types, ThinkCure!’s Radio Telewebethon was a smash success. The first day raised more than $160,446, just shy of the 2008 two-day total of $166,485, and had passed the 2008 total by 11:20 a.m. on the second day. The Radio Telewebethon exceeded its total goal of $200,000 about eight hours before the close of the event on Sunday evening. The campaign is still live, and has raised 120 percent of its goal to date.

When asked to sign off on the Firefly project, ThinkCure! replied, “Officially complete and went off without a hitch — everyone (including the Dodgers) loved it!”