Giving Tuesday 2015
Giving Tuesday 2015 was my second giving day with PAWS Chicago. 2014 had been a banner year for online fundraising during Giving Tuesday and I wanted to build upon that momentum. The email focus was on storytelling and customizing and targeting based upon audience. By pairing Oatmeal's compelling rescue story with a targeted ask based upon past behavior, we were able to grow our fundraising efforts in 2015.
Below is an all graphic email asking Giving Tuesday 2014 donors to match their donation on Giving Tuesday 2015. This was our most successful email from 2015 and brought in a significant portion of our Giving Tuesday email revenue. The email was so successful that we repurposed it to send once a month, reminding people of their donation during that month the previous year. Personalization and reminding folks of their donation was a key to success.
We also tied in our social strategy to complement the email strategy but focusing more on sharing and engagement in addition to a fundraising ask
Fundraising Email Appeals
Advocacy 2015
PAWS had not undertaken an online advocacy campaign before my tenure there. By harnessing real and compelling stories around key action, we were able to reach well beyond our normal audience and grow our email list. Lacking a good toolset internally, I worked to build out a campaign via MailChimp coupled with The Action Network's petition feature.
PAWS Chicago Social Engagement
Over the course of my time with PAWS Chicago, I grew the Instagram audience organically from around 7,000 followers to over 18,000. Strategically, in that time, I moved the focus of the account from event focused to storytelling and engagement focused, contributing towards our growth.
PAWS Chicago's Instagram account was named one of the top 4 animal shelter instagram's to follow by the Chicagoist while I was overseeing the acocunt.
Matt Forte's Big Announcement
Former Chicago Bear's Running Back Matt Forte graced the cover of the PAWS Chicago Magazine. To tie the excitement around Forte's celebrity and to poke fun at the speculation at the time as to whether he would be staying or leaving the Bears, we created a social campaign to announce his cover shoot. And then further built on the momentum around him once the issue hit the stands.
In addition to growing the social audiences and engagment. I also worked to build digital campaigns around key priorities such as fundraising for critical cases like Rupert's.
By reaching our low dollar donors with a compelling story to follow and a low-level ask, we were able to raise twice the amount needed for his medical care--allowing us to help more animals.
Nearly half of our fundraising for Rupert came from social media as we wanted to have a fully integrated campaign across platforms: email, social, web. Just by asking folks to share his dramatic story, his post was shared almost 500 times on Facebook alone.
Highly Shareable Content
The key to increasing awareness for the brand was to create content that became highly shareable. Creating storytelling moments was a great way to increase engagement with our audiences online and to get them to share our content. One example of a successful campaign was the "Homeless Pets of Chicago" campaign which highlighted long-term pets in the style of "Humans of New York" storytelling.
Graphic Projects
While our design team did the majority of graphic work. I did create some basic social media graphics such as Facebook cover photos as needed.
