THE CHALLENGE
North Texas Giving Day (NTGD) is an annual giving event that raises millions for DFW area nonprofits, therefore representing a major fundraising opportunity for The Sixth Floor Museum, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. However, one of the Museum's ongoing challenges is that many people do not even realize it is a nonprofit and have little knowledge about its programs. Therefore the Museum has raised minimal funds in past Giving Days and has never executed marketing to support the initiative.
THE STRATEGY
In an effort to educate potential donors about what donating to the Museum means, we decided to focus the 2016 campaign around a single project: the Museum’s Everyone Has a Story program, which brought underserved Dallas ISD students on a field study to the Museum. For many of these students, it would be their only chance to visit one of the most important historic sites in the country. A $25 gift, the minimum NTGD donation to qualify for bonus funds, covers the cost for one student to come to the Museum through this program. For NTGD, we asked supporters to give students the chance to discover and learn more about the city they live in, and have a conversation about history. Let them be #InspiredByHistory.
THE CAMPAIGN
For the 2016 campaign, we focused on leveraging owned media and social media channels to both drive donations and bring overall awareness of the Museum's nonprofit status to the community. All communications used the #InspiredByHistory campaign hashtag and messaging about supporting Dallas students coming to the Museum and starting a conversation with them about history. This included email, the website, print collateral, on-site signage and social media. All messaging was accompanied by images of students visiting the Museum and framed by text using NTGD fonts & colors, in order to call back to other NTGD marketing in the community.
Employee engagement was a large focus of this year’s campaign, as Museum employees have the best understanding and passion for the Museum's mission and can be powerful ambassadors during this important fundraising initiative. We encouraged employees to participate not only by giving themselves, but by helping us spread the word to their friends & family on social media. We offered an employee raffle incentive for participation and made it as easy as possible for them by providing pre-written "cheat tweets" and graphics they could share and repost.
THE RESULTS
2016 was the Museum's most successful Giving Day ever. At the beginning of the campaign, we set an ambitious goal to raise 60% more than the previous year. Instead, we nearly doubled our total from 2015 and more than doubled the number of gifts. Even more encouragingly, about a third of our gifts were from first-time donors, expanding our donor list for future asks.
Additionally, the employee engagement component of the campaign was extremely successful. Employee engagement drove nearly half of our total gifts, and we saw participation from every department. Additionally, employees posted about NTGD on social media more than 50 times during the day to help spread the word. Through this campaign, we were able to make NTGD an institution-wide initiative in a way it never has been before in the past.