Victoria Dandelion Society's Easter Match

History

The Victoria Dandelion Society (VDS) was founded in 2011 by Reverend Al Tysick, in order to meet the need for both tangible and emotional support within Victoria’s homeless community.

We had been working with VDS since early on, building them a new website and implementing email and direct mail programs. Thanks to this we were we were able to follow best practices from the start, not only in the website we built but in fundraising campaigns. We have seen the fruits of this in continued growth of VDS’s donor base.

This year a rare opportunity arose when an anonymous donor stepped up, offering to match gifts up to $75,000. Having experienced great success with match campaigns run for larger clients such as Union Gospel Mission, we wanted to bring those outcomes to our most grassroots client, the Dandelion Society.

The Game Plan

This was not the first match campaign we had organized for VDS—they had participated in two campaigns through Chimp.net in 2014 with moderate success. In both these cases the donor had been directed to an external site, so we decided on a new approach to streamline the giving process and hopefully bring in more donations.

The new Spring Match campaign would keep donors on the VDS site, creating less distractions that would draw away from the process. We would implement an aggressive email campaign as well as two print appeals in order to reach a diverse array of donors and create a truly integrated campaign.

Frontier laid the groundwork for this campaign by inserting a ‘soft’ launch in the February print appeal and the Winter Newsletter. This ensured that donors would be expecting the match and thus more receptive when it was fully launched, despite our email strategy being fairly aggressive.

The campaign included 8 emails, 2 direct mail appeals, web boosts and several social media posts. The core messaging was simple: Donate now to help twice as many people, increase our impact on the street.

Print appeal and envelopes with match campaign branding

The 8 emails were segmented so that not every contact received every one. Those who clicked donate on a certain email would not receive a reminder, and those who hadn’t donated were sent a follow-up. As the campaign deadline drew closer, the frequency of emails increased to give a sense of urgency.

Results

Our persistence paid off. Including matched funds the campaign brought in $91,026. For a small organization like VDS, this was a huge success. The previous two match campaigns through Chimp.net had only raised $6,830 and $5,044 respectively, affirming that the fewer steps the donor has to complete, the more likely they are to give, and that integrated campaigns perform best.

The results of this campaign confirmed our suspicions that an aggressive approach can work, especially when people are given a deadline. It creates a sense of urgency and often will encourage donors to give more.