Here at CauseVox, we love a good success story. And we couldn’t think of a better organization to highlight than Spur Local.
Spur Local blew it out of the water last year with their Give Local Together Campaign. We sat down with Amanda Liaw, Communications and Marketing Manager, to discuss their giving day success and how partnering with CauseVox helped engage donors more effectively by leveraging customized fundraising tools.
Spur Local (formerly Catalogue for Philanthropy), is a nonprofit dedicated to strengthening communities in the Greater Washington region. Founded in 2003, the organization initially served as an annual publication, helping donors discover and support community-based nonprofits with limited outreach capabilities.
Over the past two decades, Spur Local has evolved into the largest nonprofit capacity builder in the region. They have raised $57 million for their network of nearly 500 small, local nonprofits, with support from 10,000+ donors.
Rooted in values such as equity, collaboration, resiliency, empowerment, and community, Spur Local actively promotes visibility, stimulates discussions, and serves as a catalyst for positive change in the region.
Each year, Spur Local hosts a huge Give Local Campaign on GivingTuesday; in 2023, they had their best giving day yet, raising $1,039,078 million across 5,347 donations.
Spur Local chose CauseVox’s Bespoke service for its highly tailored and user-friendly experience, catering specifically to donors, nonprofits, and their teams.
With a strong focus on supporting small nonprofits, Spur Local acknowledged the unique needs of smaller teams, especially those who work solo on events like GivingTuesday. With our understanding of the dynamics of an agile and responsive team, CauseVox became the ideal platform for their tailored solution.
In this narrative, we see the essence of digital partnerships, where organizations, after exploring options, choose solutions that closely match their mission and specific needs. Spur Local’s decision to use CauseVox isn’t just a product choice, it represents a strategic alignment based on a shared vision for supporting small nonprofits through impactful and personalized fundraising experiences.
The decision to go with CauseVox was ultimately rooted in Spur Local’s search for unparalleled customization capabilities. Rather than navigating from one platform to another, their goal was to establish a sustainable solution conducive to continuous growth.
Given the dynamic nature of GivingTuesday campaigns that require annual adjustments to align with trends and maintain engagement, CauseVox emerged as the perfect fit. With CauseVox, Spur Local could seamlessly adapt to trends and customize new features each year.
In terms of campaign planning and functionality, CauseVox crafted the giving day experience for all stakeholders, resulting in Spur Local’s most successful campaign to date. In our approach, CauseVox emphasized responsiveness, flexibility, and shared dedication in ensuring a fantastic giving day experience for everyone involved.
CauseVox incorporated public-facing features like the donation cart, search and filter functions, organization page showcase, countdown clock, donation counter, leaderboards, power hours, and fundraising pages with diverse payment methods, including mobile wallets and pledges.
On the admin side, the Spur Local team valued the user-friendly editing and customization options across the entire site, enhancing overall efficiency. The public site design was praised for its aesthetics, and the inclusion of multiple payment methods. For example, being able to accept Venmo in particular, proved beneficial.
Below, we’ll talk about specific ways these features added up to a huge increase in overall donations for Spur Local’s Giving Day.
As a custom-built extension of the CauseVox platform, the Give Local Together campaign site offered Spur Local a unique donor-oriented experience. Despite the added layers and customizations, the site remained easily maintained without becoming cumbersome.
A crucial element was the search page, allowing visitors to discover and explore local organizations they could support:
Additionally, users could effortlessly toggle to view individual fundraisers with personal peer-to-peer fundraising pages:
The intuitive functionality mirrors an e-commerce site, enabling visitors to browse and filter causes by category and sub-category, simplifying the search for causes that are aligned with their interests.
Throughout the campaign, Spur Local strategically integrated a range of dynamic elements that infused excitement and transformed the fundraising experience into an interactive journey for donors. These elements were carefully designed to captivate and motivate donors, ultimately leading to a significant surge in engagement.
One feature was a real-time donation counter and countdown timer that provided an instant overview of the amount raised and the number of incoming donations. This transparency not only fostered a sense of collective momentum but also encouraged individuals to contribute and be part of the ongoing success.
Another dynamic feature was the power hour, occurring four times a day, where the nonprofit with the most unique donors during the hour won a $1,000 prize. CauseVox’s system automatically tracked and displayed donor tallies, creating enthusiasm for driving donations to specific organization pages. Before using CauseVox, the Spur Local team manually exported power hour donations and used formulas to compute. This took a lot of time and it wasn’t dynamic, so automating this feature was an absolute gamechanger.
(Spur Local Gratitude Crawl)
Aside from dynamic components, the ‘About’ and ‘Gratitude Crawl’ pages, which operated independently of core fundraising pages, served informational purposes. Despite their simplicity, these pages included an events calendar and interactive map. What appealed to Spur Local staff was having access to add and edit content ad hoc, eliminating the need for IT personnel or developers.
(Spur Local About Page)
(1st Stage’s Organization Campaign Page)
With templated pages, organizations were able to easily input their information. But these pages also streamlined the donation process. In recognizing that 75% of donors are more likely to make donation if the giving process is easy, CauseVox has reimagined a seamless experience for donors through best-in-class donation forms that align with current best practices.
(A personal campaign page created by Alix Edwards to support Free Minds)
Building upon the donor-centric approach highlighted in the CauseVox Giving study, an innovative aspect of Spur Local’s fundraising pages includes a dedicated donation button on each organization page. These donation buttons strategically integrate with a donation cart, allowing visitors to add various organizations to their cart and “check out” when they’re ready.
Essentially, this facilitates a consolidated checkout experience, enabling donors to view all the organizations they would like to support and complete the transaction in a single, cohesive process, as opposed to making separate donations on each page. Upon checkout, donors receive a comprehensive donation receipt, streamlining the acknowledgment process.
As we mentioned previously, not only did Spur Local achieve its most successful giving day to date, but it also witnessed a remarkable 10% increase in donors compared to the previous year, a noteworthy feat considering that GivingTuesday as whole experienced a 10% decrease in donors in 2023. This success can be attributed to the implementation of a faster and more seamless donor experience, the introduction of a public leaderboard, and a simplified peer fundraising process.
What’s more is that Spur Local’s partner organizations expressed satisfaction with CauseVox, highlighting its simplicity and user-friendly nature. They found it easy to set up peer-to-peer fundraising pages, contributing to a smoother overall experience.
Particularly noteworthy was CauseVox’s responsive customer service. The onboarding and setup process for nonprofit partners went exceptionally well, evidenced by fewer inquiries compared to the previous year. Based on their positive experience, the Spur Local team recommends CauseVox to other organizations, emphasizing the close collaboration that ensures a successful giving day.
Now that we’ve explored Spur Local’s success, a key takeaway for ensuring your own giving day’s success is to incentivize donors. Whether it’s through a leaderboard, donation counter, or challenges like power hours, the possibilities to provide a motivational boost to your donors are endless.
For a detailed guide on how to orchestrate a successful giving day, download our complete giving day checklist today.
Dream bigger and fundraise better with CauseVox Bespoke. We’re more than just a vendor, we’re committed to your fundraising success. Here’s what sets us apart:
Schedule call to learn more about running your organization’s Giving Day on CauseVox.
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