Raisegiving’s fundraising platform powers successful campaign
Summary
CMCH is an innovative Jewish school serving elementary through middle school children located in the heart of Atlanta, GA. Fundraising is crucial to the school, accounting for 28% of the annual operating budget in 2021.
Rabbi Yale New, the Director of Development, used the Team Fundraising Pages and Matching Grants modules within the Raisegiving platform to reach a record donation level. Combining these modules did two things for the campaign:
1. It energized the parents of students to actively support the campaign beyond their own donations. Each Team had its own page and dollar goal, which equipped them to become ambassadors for the school and its fundraising efforts. An additional benefit is the Team Fundraising Pages are always active, enabling donors to contribute at any time, before, during and after the official close of the campaign.
2. Using the Matching Grants module enabled the school to give special recognition to large and medium donors. These donations were solicited before the campaign’s launch and continued until the campaign’s official end.
Using Raisegiving’s Tools to Automate Fundraising
Donations are vital to the CMCH Elementary and Middle School as a private school. Through the generous contributions of regular supporters and students’ families, CMCH continues to deliver the highest quality education.
However, fundraising is an arduous and time-consuming effort. It can also be expensive to use traditional fundraising techniques like banquets and individual donor meetings. Raisegiving’s fundraising platform organizes, automates and streamlines the campaign effort. The key benefits to automation include extending the reach of CMCH through Team efforts, reducing administrative time and expense, creating uniform messaging, simplifying donation processing and more.
Campaign Organization
Using the Team Fundraising Pages (Teams) and Matching Grants modules, CMCH automated the process of requesting donations, including the pre-campaign and campaign periods. In addition, these modules created an ongoing fundraising presence, allowing contributors to donate at the most convenient time.
CMCH uses the Teams module to create a donation page for interested families. This page expands the reach of the fundraising effort to the network of the family. Each Team sets and promotes a dollar goal and becomes an ambassador for the school. During the campaign, CMCH reached hundreds of new donors.
The Matching Grants module captures large and medium donations. Before the official campaign launch, it creates excitement among the Teams and provides special recognition to these donors. It also enables CMCH to secure the majority of its fundraising goal before the campaign launches.
Streamlined Performance
The Raisegiving platform automates campaign communications via its integrated messaging tools. The campaign administrator and each Team leader can compose and send messages electronically. Follow-up and confirmation are also greatly simplified.
Contributions are made online via secure transactions. Donors receive electronic confirmation of their donation and a thank you. Raisegiving builds a database of contributors and their history supporting CMCH. Future campaigns are quickly built from this database, allowing seamless contact for the next campaign.
Lessons Learned
During the 2021 campaign, CMCH learned several lessons. First, ask for a donation amount that reflects the value of CMCH - ask for an amount that you think your organization is worth. When you undervalue your worth with a low donation level, you will underperform against your goal.
Second, strive for a balance between the Matching Grant and Teams contributions. CMCH found that setting a low dollar threshold to achieve a Matching status resulted in a considerable imbalance, with most money appearing on the Matching side. A balanced split acts as a motivation to the Teams, recognizing their contribution.
Third, using Teams motivated family participation and made it easy to ask members of their network for support.
Best Practices
CMCH offered this best practice, identify and commit 50-75% of your campaign goal before the campaign launches. This is especially important when raising larger dollar amounts. It takes some pressure off the campaign participants and significantly increases your chances of success.
The Results
How did CMCH’s 2021 campaign do? Very well. The school created 41 Teams and raised $529,722 against $500,000. The CMCH campaign page is still up and operational. You can see what it looks like here.
Learn More
Learn how you can put the power of Raisegiving’s tools behind your fundraising efforts. Call us today at 404-801-3903, email us at support@raisegiving.com or fill out our contact form. We look forward to powering your campaign to success.
