Fundraising Event Success Story: SPCA of Tompkins County March for the Animals
On Sunday, October 2nd, the SPCA of Tompkins County held a fundraising event called March for the Animals to celebrate 15 years of being a no-kill animal shelter and to raise awareness and support for the animals.
This event involved several supporters coming together for a march through a designated area of the Cornell Plantations, some with their own pets and others with those from the shelter. An online campaign through GiveGab was launched well in advance in preparation for the day, where supporters could start making donations, sign up to be fundraising champions or create teams to fundraise in groups.
With a campaign goal of $100,000, the SPCA surpassed it through a combination of online donations through their GiveGab fundraising event page and in-person donations on the day of the event.
At GiveGab, we want to see all of our nonprofit customers walk away with successful campaigns and events. This is why we’re featuring this fundraising event – not only to give much-deserved praise and recognition to the SPCA for their incredible work – but to inspire other nonprofits to run successful fundraising events as well!
March for the Animals involved fundraising champions, teams, local sponsors, and various forms of community outreach. We hope sharing some of the details of this event provides you with inspiration for your own!
Creating a Fundraising Event on GiveGab
Event Profile & Details
No fundraising event is complete without a profile and story, describing what the event is for, how to participate, and other important details. This includes adding your nonprofit’s logo and a color scheme that jives with the theme of your own website (or how you’d like your website to look!).
Remember to also include details about when and where your event will take place, along with anything else they might need to know (i.e., what to wear, what to bring, etc.).
Compelling Photos
Fundraising events on GiveGab are easy to customize with banner and story images. You can also include a compelling video if you have one.
Sponsorship
If you have sponsors for your event, give them the proper shoutout by including their logos on your event page. You can even link to their websites within the logos.
Calls to Action
Calls to Action (CTA) make it easy to “Donate”, “Register”, “Share”, and MORE! Having convenient and diverse ways for supporters to contribute increases the likelihood of their involvement.
Launching & Promoting an Event
Fundraising Champions
Fundraising champions are also known as peer-to-peer (p2p) fundraisers; these are people who volunteer to actively raise money on your behalf – It’s pretty awesome. For this event, there were 186 fundraising champions who collectively raised 39% of the total collected online!
Fundraising Teams
Fundraising teams are a group of people who act as fundraising champions to bring in a set amount toward a campaign. There were 43 fundraising teams for this event, one of which raised over $10,000!
A fun, unique, and highly motivating strategy the SPCA used for fundraising teams was to encourage people to create teams from their pets’ perspectives! Below is an example of such a team:
Being loyal fans and supporters of our local SPCA, some members of the GiveGab team came together to create a fundraising team for this awesome event. Below is a screenshot of Team GiveGab’s fundraising results:
As you can see, fundraising champions and teams can make a SIGNIFICANT difference to an organization’s overall fundraising totals. Plus, think of how many animals were adopted and new supporters gained as a result of the outreach from these fundraisers – Amazing!
Social Media Outreach:
The SPCA of Tompkins County has an active Facebook, Twitter and Instagram presence that helped them reach out to their followers for this event. To reach those who weren’t already following them on Facebook, they utilized paid Facebook advertising to gain more followers. Along with their typical promotions on social media, they recorded a video through Facebook Live during the actual event on October 2nd: Watch their video!
Yard Signs:
Supporters helped promote the event by displaying yard signs throughout the community leading up to event date!
The Event Outcome
Members of the GiveGab team spoke with Lynn Conway,Volunteer and Philanthropic Programs Manager for the SPCA, soon after the event was over to get her feedback.
Lynn started off by telling us how much she loved the fundraiser’s toolkit that made it easy for fundraising champions to share the event page and bring in more donations. She was also pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to thank her donors right from her GiveGab page, and how easy it was to fundraise through her toolkit.
She considered the personal emails she was able to write from pulling in her contacts one of the top reasons she was able to raise as much as she did. And because GiveGab is so mobile friendly, Lynn was quickly and easily able to add offline donations to the campaign goal right from her phone – She shared that she would do this first thing in the morning, with her PJs still on, as her coffee was brewing!
“We reached our $100,000 goal with the help of more than 180 fundraisers and over 800 donors!! Thanks again to all who donated and made this event so successful!”
Congratulations to the SPCA of Tompkins County on your successful event and 15 years of being a no-kill animal shelter – you guys are inspirational!
