Winners of the 2014 Gold Awards for Fundraising Excellence

By Margaret Battistelli Gardner

“From using a Buerger Center-branded box as the carrier to including personalized blueprints of the building, the intention was for the donor to feel that they had been hand-selected to receive an exclusive invitation to become part of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” says Christina Kukelhaus, an account executive at Schultz & Williams.

Our judges also applauded the hospital’s willingness to take a risk, as well as the package’s ability to draw a great average gift without sacrificing response rate.

BRONZE: St. Louis Children’s Hospital — Secret Guide to Children’s Campaign (Submitted by The St. Louis Children’s Hospital Foundation)

The Numbers
Recipients: 115,000
Response rate: 1.47 percent
Total cost: $89,800
Income generated: $103,117.73
Average gift: $77.60
Cost to raise a dollar: $0.87

There were guffaws all around as our judges looked through this submission from the St. Louis Children’s Hospital Foundation. Always a good sign.

Not that humor is necessarily a hallmark of a great campaign, but when done right it can elevate the effort to award-winning status.

Although it is a multichannel campaign using direct mail, email and a social-media element, this submission’s reach alone wasn’t what earned it its honor here. More impressive was how it found numerous ways to present its consistent message. The theme — missives from Josh, a 16-year-old patient at the hospital, offering “insider” information about the facility — stayed consistent throughout the elements of the campaign, but each of the six mailings, one year-end piece, an email and a Facebook page seemed fresh and unique.

Plus the humor didn’t hurt. Josh’s personality and perspective on life are real, his voice is his own, and he was able to paint donors and potential donors a genuine picture of how much their support means to a real patient and his real family.

“Because Josh’s stay in the hospital plus his ongoing treatment have been so extensive and put him in contact with so many facets of the hospital, we focused each mailing around a different area that the foundation wanted to highlight,” explains Angie Winschel, a partner at Almanac, the design and branding firm that worked on the campaign.