Convio Innovator Awards 2011: Best Peer-to-Peer Campaign

“Convio Personal Fundraising helped us to spread the word about our campaign, and allowed UWLC to raise $15,000+ in five 24-hour periods, exceeding our goal by 50%.”
– Valerie Petersen, Marketing Communications Associate

United Way of Lake County (UWLC) aims to prepare children to succeed in a changing world by focusing on education and safe and stable families. In some areas of Lake County, 75% of incoming kindergartners had no knowledge of books. In order to address these literacy issues, UWLC teamed up with a local book bank to create “Page it Forward: Lake County’s Biggest Book Drive”.

The goal of the book drive was to give 100,000 books to low-income children in Lake County via a summer-long celebration of reading. Throughout the summer, UWLC hosted six drop off events where people could donate their new and gently used children’s books.

CHALLENGES:
Given the book drive’s limited timeframe, UWLC wanted to create a sense of urgency around the summer long initiative and provide constituents with a variety of options to contribute in their own, unique way. As a result, UWLC put a contemporary twist on the traditional book drive format by utilizing cutting-edge social media strategies and peer-to-peer fundraising.

INNOVATION:
By texting “PAGE”, individuals could donate $10 (four books) to Page it Forward. Sponsors donated one book per ‘like’ on the Page it Forward Facebook page. The “Catch the Truck” peer-to-peer fundraising campaign through Convio Personal Fundraising had a UWLC employee try to collect $2,000 in donations within a 24-hour period. This campaign ran in parallel to a corporate book drop off event, which aimed to collect 1,000 books. Four additional Personal Fundraising Champions raced in a ‘Virtual 10K’, where their collective goal was $10,000. Each Champion had one 24-hour leg to reach their personal goal before they passed on the baton to the next Champion.

RESULTS:

• Exceeded goal of 100,000 books before the campaign ended.
• Raised $7,000 in 24 hours through one individual’s peer-to-peer fundraising efforts, and $15,000+ overall for Page it Forward.
• Garnered significant media coverage, including print, radio, and Chicago television coverage.
• Boosted direct mail response rates by 117.1% (from 4.94% to 10.72%).
• Established new partnerships with local business and recruited new volunteers and donors.

Exemplifying the effective use of Convio constituent engagement solutions and personifying excellence in multi-channel marketing, CRM and fundraising strategy implementation.

Combining online and offline marketing channels and utilizing cross-functional teams to generate awerness and fundraising results

Achieving online success for fundraising, advocacy or email list growth through a single campaign or program as a whole.

Tapping into the power of constituents to raise funds, drive support, and put a face to your organization with Convio's powerful peer-to-peer fundraising solutions.

Integrating social networks, mobile tools and custom applications with Convio to increase engagement opportunities for supporters

Enjoying the full range of Convio Common Ground™ benefits from integration with third-party applications to successful relationship database consolidation.