Turning Fundraising on Its Head

"Everything that we do online is designed to drive traffic back to the website. We're promoting the same story within Facebook and Twitter. We're promoting the same story on our website. We're promoting the same story on our blog, on our e-mail marketing and, of course, in our direct-mail campaign. So no matter how someone views us that month, the first thing they see is that same story. Everything is designed to work together," Brown says.

"By us being very selective in our appeals, by us focusing upon our children and leading supporters back to the website to where they have multiple opportunities to give money, it's led to that natural progression," he adds.

Over the next year, Brown says the organization hopes to begin integrating QR codes into all of its direct-mail pieces to make it even easier for people to get to the website.

"The real key for us is that we've been able to take all of the different parts of all the different digital marketing tools that we have and make them all work together — versus always trying something new, always following the hottest trend and never getting anywhere with them," Brown says. "We've figured out what we do well, and we focus upon what we do well."

Team Be 
the Match

Every day, thousands of people are in need of bone marrow and umbilical cord blood transplants. The Be the Match Foundation is dedicated to raising the funds needed to help all patients get the transplants they need, working with the National Marrow Donor Program to recruit donors for the Be the Match registry. It has recruiters all over the nation soliciting 
volunteers to donate bone 
marrow, blood and funds.

Always looking for simple, effective ways to fundraise, Be the Match thought a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign could give the development department a boost. So the foundation developed Team Be the Match, an online peer-to-peer initiative developed to capitalize on the large community of folks affected by those in need of transplants.