Their team might be small, but they’re mighty at Grey2k, an advocacy group for greyhounds in Massachusetts. In 2014, they decided to try CauseVox for their GivingTuesday campaign, and within hours, they nearly surpassed their $5000 goal! Let’s hear more from Danielle Festa about her GivingTuesday campaign success.
Tell me more about who you are and what you do with Grey2k, Danielle.
Well, I am part of the development of fundraising materials, the execution of fundraising, how it looks online, and how it’s delivered. However, I have had a personal interest in dogs for some time now. In my spare time, I do some freelance work out of Puerto Rico rescuing dogs and every now and then I get to do watercolors of greyhounds for Grek2k, which I find both very enjoyable.
Can you tell me more about Grey2k?
We work worldwide to protect greyhounds from the dog-racing industry. We partner with lawmakers and advocates across the country to try and make laws and influence laws to have greater protection for greyhounds. In some cases, if we’re able, we try to close down tracks. For those dogs who are racing, we focus on the humane issues, making sure the people who are in charge of racing dogs are held accountable for how the dogs are treated. This would include holding them accountable for reporting injuries and living conditions.
What happens to a dog when they race?
Based on the research we’ve done there are a variety of problems. The life of a racing greyhound is one of confinement. They’re in their cages for twenty to twenty-two hours a day. Cages are just big enough for them to stand up and turn around. Obviously this is not a life for a dog that’s a social animal.
Not to mention every time they get on a racetrack they’re putting their life in danger. These dogs are raised in all kinds of living conditions– states where it’s hot and racing in the wintertime, so we want to make sure we’re confronting all of these problems in our advocacy for them.
Why CauseVox?
I had been looking around a while for a platform that was affordable and manageable – one that would also allow me to customize graphics. After having experience with other platforms, I knew CauseVox would be worth a try.
It’s also easy for people who are donating. People want to give, but they don’t want to spend twenty minutes trying to do that. We had only a few people having difficult with us and the troubleshooting was minimal.
This was a GivingTuesday campaign. What was your fundraising approach?
I started out making graphics and spent around five hours preparing all the social media that would be pushed out. Our campaign was only one day so we prepared to bombard social media with our content to reach our goal on GivingTuesday.
We started out the day at eight o’clock in the morning with an email to supporters. Our goal was initially $5000 but by 11:30 we were already close to that number so raised it to $10,000! We mostly used Twitter and scheduled a post for every hour. We made only five posts on Facebook and also posted on Google+ and Pinterest.
We encouraged people to ‘give small’ and share and it worked, especially since we were very lucky to have a high donor to match donations. People really liked knowing their gift was worth double.
Will you be using CauseVox in the future?
Yes, actually! We’re going to try another campaign. This time we will recruit individual fundraisers. It will be a ‘run in your own community’ race to raise funds for the greyhounds and advocacy. We want them to use an app called Map My Run so they turn it on where they run and it shows their supporters their race. We’re looking forward to seeing how individual fundraising pages makes a difference from our first campaign with CauseVox.
