Yet another selection of Christmas fundraising novelties
Howard Lake | 5 January 2012 | Blogs
This is my third roundup of Christmas fundraising stories that deserve coverage.
E-cards
This video e-card from St Nicholas Hospice Care raised over £10,000, with donations coming via JustGiving:
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Kevin Clements, Acting Head of Fundraising, told UK Fundraising about the success.
“After developing a business case, I convinced our trustees to invest in a social media fundraiser last year”, he said. “After the recruitment phase, the ecard was our first real social media fundraising project, and we used the skills and contacts of our corporate fundraiser to help sell it. Companies and individuals made donations specifically to receive the ecard so that they could forward it to their clients, friends etc instead of sending traditional Christmas cards…
“The money came in over a period of just one month. Next time, we will be encouraging more direct donations online, but this was certainly a good start for us.”
He added that the hospice will be running another social media campaign this year.
Breakthrough Breast Cancer invited supporters to Send a Snowflake, which could be personalised with a message and which would appear on screen with all the other snowflakes, appropriately pink. Senders were encouraged to donate £3 for each snowflake sent. By the end of Christmas 2,217 snowflakes had been sent.
Trading
The Christmas shopping frenzy is over, so it’s time for the January sales frenzy, so frenzied that it begins these days in December on Boxing Day.
Give As You Live have been encouraging shoppers to shop via their site to go sales shopping and generate funds for charities.
Cadbury’s supported Make A Wish Foundation over Christmas by making a donation from sales of some of its chocolates.
Advent calendar
The advent calendar can be used as a seasonal version of the list, that popular model for blog posts with titles like ’50 tips for fundraising’, ‘Top 10 direct mail saluations’ and the like.
The Guardian ran an advent calendar in December 2011, each of them “profiling a range of charities who are seeking volunteers or financial support”. Charities featured included:
• Battersea Dogs and Cats Home
• Joanne Bingley Memorial Foundation
This model could quite easily be replicated by other newspapers or bloggers, so why not approach one now with a suggestion for their Christmas content in 2012? Make a joint approach with a few other different charities and you might stand an even better chance.
NCVO’s Karl Wilding used the similar 12 days of Christmas theme by sharing some very useful comments in The 12 Myths of Christmas Giving. They weren’t specific to Christmas but they were designed to counter some common misperceptions and ‘reasons’ that people choose not to give to charity.
For example, he countered myths including:
• You don’t need to give to charity if you’ve played the lottery as they give to good causes
• Rich people don’t give, so why should I?
• Charities are just big businesses now, there’s no point giving to them
You might want to borrow one or two of these arguments during the year, just to remind existing supporters why their support does still count.
More Christmas campaigns
Mozilla promoted the social elements of its Firefox web browser with a celebrity charity campaign called the Mozilla Firefox Challenge. Using the Crowdrise fundraising platform 12 US celebrities including Will Ferrell, Sean Penn, and Barbara Streisand raced to see who could raise the most money for their cause in the run up to Christmas.
Mozilla claims: “We’ve brought together thousands of people to build a better web. Not for profit, but for good.” It kickstarted each celebrity’s total with $5,000 and pledged to add $25,000 to the winning celebrity’s cause on 11 January.
Merlin ran a Christmas campaign promoting its heroes: “With your help Merlin’s heroes can save more lives this Christmas”. On its Facebook page, visitors could choose to donate via JustGiving but first by dragging a slider across the page. “I will give £4 to save 2 children’s lives” said the default image. You could drag it to the left and choose to save just one. Or you could drag it to the right to donate up to £10 and save five children’s lives.
That is a compelling donation tool. I can’t believe many people chose to give just the £2 minimum.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.