
With Friday's deadline looming, we've received many calls and e-mails asking for an extension on getting submissions in for the 2012 FundRaising Success Gold Awards for Fundraising Excellence here at headquarters. You asked for it … and now you've got it. The deadline has now been extended by three weeks, meaning all entries must be in our office by Friday, Sept. 7 to announce the winners in our October issue.
There are six categories, with each category split in two between nonprofit organizations with a $7.5 million and above annual operating budge and those with an annual operating budget less than $7.5 million. The categories are:
- Direct Mail
- Multichannel
- Telefundraising
- Special Events
- On the Edge
Entry fees are $125 for the first entry and $75 for each subsequent entry. Get your entry form and tracking sheet here, and send your submissions in today because we cannot extend the deadline any further.
As a bonus, check out last year's Special Events Campaign of the Year: American Jewish World Service.
AJWS won for its 25th Anniversary campaign, which went out to 14,040 recipients with a response rate of 5 percent. The result was more than $1.4 million generated with an average gift of $1,977.
Wrote FS Editor-in-Chief Margaret Battistelli Gardner in last year's Gold Awards issue:
"Rather than bring in a big-name headliner (like it had done with Bill Clinton a few years prior) to celebrate its 25th anniversary, the organization presented an elegant affair built around live performances, multimedia presentations and speeches that focused on the organization's mission to support human rights in the Global South. The event, hosted by ABC News' Christiane Amanpour, included a tribute to 14 grantees, musical performances, remarks by journalists and activists, and a 70th-birthday video tribute to AJWS President Ruth Messinger. But perhaps the biggest splash of the evening was the premiere of a star-studded comedy video produced by Judd Apatow. According to AJWS's Suzanne Offen, the video eventually generated more than a million hits on YouTube
and raised more than $60,000 in subsequent online donations."
