Winners of the 2014 Gold Awards for Fundraising Excellence

By Margaret Battistelli Gardner

Each of the pieces featured casually written side notes from Josh and offered tidbits of advice such as, “Order extra butter at every meal. Save them up for your mashed potatoes,” and, “Meet Toni (one of Josh’s favorite physical therapists). She’ll make ya work!”

Mailings guided recipients to a themed Facebook page to keep the engagement going, and it also worked as a vehicle to engage other potential donors who weren’t on the mailing list.

Sick kids aren’t the easiest topic to joke about, but this campaign succeeds by letting Josh just be a teenager and drive home a point to donors in a way that engages, entertains and educates.

Additional Multichannel ($10 million and over) Winners
SILVER: Human Rights Campaign — The Supreme Court and A Red Equal Sign (Submitted by HRC)

The Numbers
Recipients: 99,114
Response rate: 1.82 percent
Total cost: $67,031
Income generated: $130,391
Average gift: $72.04
Cost to raise a dollar: $0.51

It all started with a simple red equal sign. Well, sort of. HRC’s historic overtaking of Facebook and Twitter with a red-tinted version of its iconic blue-and-yellow logo actually started with an email when, in March 2013, two landmark marriage-equality cases reached the United States Supreme Court. The email educated the organization’s more than 1.5 million members and supporters about the cases. Then on the first day of oral arguments, HRC posted the specially hued logo and asked others to adopt it on their social-media pages. By June 2013, HRC had provided innovative apps for mobile, Facebook, Twitter and HRC.org, and the red logo was everywhere. Following up, the organization mailed an Equality-Gram fundraising appeal, asking for a special donation to continue its mission.

In three short months, the Red Equal Sign and campaign around the marriage-equality cases added more than 300,000 new followers to HRC’s Facebook page and 26,000 new followers to its Twitter page; smashed previous one-day Web traffic records for HRC.org four times over; added 100,000 new email addresses to HRC’s online activist files; added 150,000 signatures to its Majority Opinion e-letter, resulting in $42,000 in post-action donations; fulfilled 63,000 requests for free HRC logo stickers, with more than 50 percent of those requests coming from people who had never engaged with HRC in the past (after requesting a sticker, those people were presented with an opportunity to donate to HRC — that page saw a 1.74 percent response rate, with more than 80 percent of those donations coming from first-time HRC donors); saw 40,000 smartphones download HRC’s Red Logo iPhone and Droid apps, with more than 25 percent of the users providing new email addresses. In addition, the Equality-Gram mail piece exceeded it goal fourfold.