Movers & Shakers: Christie Ko of Fiver Children’s Foundation

In July of 2014, torrential storms critically destroyed parts of Fiver Foundation’s summer camp. Christie Ko, Executive Director of Fiver Children’s Foundation, thought if people could see the devastation left by the storm, they would want to help Fiver rebuild their kid’s summer camp. Read on to hear how Christie and her team surpassed their $30,000 goal and raised over $110,000.

What is Fiver Foundation about?

Fiver is a youth development organization. We work with kids over a period of ten years, from eight to eighteen years old. They come from disadvantaged circumstances – meaning, a low-income background throughout New York City. We also service a portion in upstate New York as well.

We receive referrals for those kids who could potentially fall through the cracks– the 60-80% who fall in the middle who don’t qualify for special services.

It’s our hope that in ten years we can prepare them for college and a career, make them engaged citizens, lead them to make ethical and healthy life choices to be happy and fulfilled adults.

What was the reason for your fundraising campaign?

We experienced a terrible storm on July 3^rd of 2014. It was unlike any storm we’ve ever experienced. They call it a microburst with winds up to a hundred miles per hour. We lost several hundred trees. No one was injured, but our waterfront docks were destroyed and we had property damage while our kids were at summer camp.

This summer was Fiver’s 15^th anniversary, and before the storm, we’d talked about doing a fundraising campaign to celebrate, but then this happened! Rather than being overwhelmed with the storm, we thought this was an opportunity to reach out for help.

What was your fundraising approach?

Well, we’d never done anything like this before, but we first heard about the idea of a give-a-thon through Colgate University’s who raised over $5 million in a “one-day blitzkrieg fundraising campaign”. That’s when we started to do research and came across CauseVox.

We were looking for usability, cost, and look. With CauseVox it was easy to set up a page and email people — and the functionality was easy to use and understand.

From there we knew we needed to put together a team of people who were willing to start their own individual pages on CauseVox. These were people who care a lot about Fiver – some had been there ten years, some were newer. We had twenty to twenty-five people who were willing to do this for us and we got that commitment from them before we launched this. We also got the Board involved. They agreed to help raise $15,000 of the $30,000.

We did a soft launch with five or six key staff about four days before the launch of the campaign so that we didn’t launch at $0. We wanted to show strength when we started and we did just that. We launched at $10,000.

What’s your fundraising story?

The whole campaign was a three-week campaign because we wanted it to stay on people’s minds. Once we were about a week in we were very close to our goal. Since we were already so close to our goal we needed something to keep the momentum going so we contacted two foundations for additional matching gifts. Both of them said yes without even blinking.

Our original goal was $30,000 but because of our early success we changed the goal to $50,000, and we exceeded that goal too. At that point, we decided not to raise the goal because we didn’t want to be inauthentic.

We let everyone know we’d reached our goal, but that everything they continued to give would be used to help children at Fiver. By the end of the campaign, we were at $110,000, with $75,000 in matching gifts. It gave us a lot of faith in our donors – and in Fiver’s mission.

Is there any advice you’d give to other fundraisers?

We learned that the first time people give to an organization they give for someone else. The person who’s giving is giving because of the person they know. We tried to diversify our fundraising group to reach as many people as possible and it was a great success.

One more thing, when the storm first happened, we wanted to jump in and get the message out there. But you really have to prepare and plan to do a campaign. You don’t have to rush into it even if something dire is happening.

There you have it — lessons from the fundraising field.