About
Project Renewal is a non-profit organization located in New York, New York with a mission to end the cycle of homelessness by empowering men, women and children to renew their lives with health, homes, and jobs.
Project Renewal’s initial goal was to raise $50,000 on GivingTuesday. By choosing CauseVox as their fundraising platform, and utilizing strategic planning and marketing, the organization far exceed their goal and raised more than $77,000 in 24 hours.
Challenges / Problem
Project Renewal has historically received the majority its funding from public sources, foundations and corporate grants. Joanna Stanberry, Project Renewal’s Director of Communications, came on board with Project Renewal with extensive experience in both the nonprofit and the tech startup spheres.
She understood that crowdfunding would mean that Project Renewal would need to venture outside of its “cultural comfort zone.” She also recognized that doing so would invite new supporters and additional resources for their mission.
First, they wanted to step beyond more traditional fundraising methods in order to utilize peer-to-peer fundraising for the first time.
Additionally, they needed a well-planned, strategic campaign in order to achieve an ambitious goal during a busy holiday season.
How CauseVox Helped
Stanberry stumbled across CauseVox content two years prior to the initial Project Renewal campaign. As she continued researching fundraising platforms she continued to revisit CauseVox. Customization and custom domains were must-haves in a fundraising platform for Stanberry. She was impressed that while other platforms offer these features at a premium, CauseVox even has them built into the Starter Plan.
Stanberry’s “passion for clean technology” and “elegant solutions” were found in CauseVox. Project Renewal found that CauseVox was versatile and easy-to-use. The blog feature of their campaign site was another outlet to share the organization’s visual and digital collateral.
Ultimately, having supporters sign up for personal fundraising pages expanded the reach of their campaign to new networks and got their supporters engaged on a new level.
Their Results
Project Renewal’s initial goal was to raise $50,000 on GivingTuesday. By choosing CauseVox as their peer-to-peer fundraising platform, and utilizing strategic planning and marketing, the organization far exceed their goal and raised more than $77,000 on GivingTuesday alone. In the days to follow they continued to receive donations, raising a total of $84,637.26.
About $38,000 of their goal was brought in from personal fundraisers, a massive success for a first-time peer-to-peer campaign.
Since then, Project Renewal has used CauseVox for 6 other campaigns, encouraging supporters to set up their own pages for their birthdays, or “hijacking for an event as necessary,” said Joanna.
