Meat Fight is a nonprofit dedicated to “funlanthropy” who has used CauseVox to set records in their digital fundraising. We recently sat down with Meat Fight’s CEO, Alice Laussade, to have a fun conversation about her experience with CauseVox, key fundraising tips from Meat Fight that allowed them to raise more money, and the do not do’s for nonprofit fundraisers.
VIDEO: Watch the full interview recording here.
Who is Meat Fight?
We know you’re wondering about that extraordinary name. Meat Fight is Texas barbecue for a cause. They’re all about finding a cure for multiple sclerosis and empowering those living with the disease, through barbecue, beer, bikes, and community.
They host barbecue competitions to raise money for the National MS Society and for what they’ve coined Meat Bike: funding bikes and race fees for people currently battling MS.
Their events are like a big party, so they call themselves a “funlanthropy”. We love this, because raising money for a good cause should absolutely be fun!
How Meat Fight Uses CauseVox
“We could not have raised $100k without CauseVox. It’s a snap to set up pages. 5 minutes each. It’s so easy to make changes.”
-Alice Laussade, Meat Fight CEO
Meat Fight uses CauseVox for their peer to peer fundraising, crowdfunding pages, and donation pages.
Peer to Peer Fundraising
Meat Fight used peer to peer fundraising through CauseVox for their Meat Bike campaign. Their campaign site allows them to show donation progress and allow supporters to create personal and team pages to host their stories.
Benefit: Fundraising On Autopilot
Meat Fight’s CEO, Alice, loves that peer to peer fundraising through CauseVox saves her time as the CEO to focus on other parts of the organization while much of the fundraising runs on autopilot: individuals who have themselves been impacted by Meat Fight can pay it forward by raising money for them on their own peer to peer campaign pages. Automatic fundraising dollars coming through = any nonprofit’s dream!
Benefit: Streamlined Setup
Alice says that peer to peer Fundraising on Causevox allows Meat Fight to automate their processes. This gives her as CEO the ability to serve both donors and fundraisers very quickly. She uses CauseVox’s cloning feature to speed up the process.
For each campaign, she builds her CauseVox campaign site, creates a template, and then clones it for all of the fundraisers involved, all in just a few minutes! Each time there’s a new campaign, she can make small tweaks and it’s ready to go.
She also loves that CauseVox makes it easy for individual fundraisers to customize their own page, while following the template Meat Fight gives them.
Pro Fundraising Tip
Alice’s advice for other nonprofit leaders? To make sure potential donors are aware that there are programs they can directly donate to, in addition to donating to your nonprofit in general. This gives donors the opportunity to feel connected to the way their dollars are specifically making a difference.
Want to learn more about using peer to peer fundraising for your nonprofit? This article is a great place to start.
Crowdfunding
Meat Fight takes advantage of CauseVox’s crowdfunding functionality to motivate more giving for specific projects. This allows them to have a main fundraising site that showcases the total that everyone involved has raised together, as well as individual pages for each fundraiser.
Benefit: Easy Customization
Meat Fight gets creative with customizing their campaigns on CauseVox. Just quick and simple steps- like using relevant photos and brand colors- can go a long way in making each campaign present as unique and professional.
Benefit: Track Event Activities
Meat Fight recently started using CauseVox’s activity metric that helps track the amount of activity someone does for a campaign, like how many miles or steps are being walked.
Fundraisers use this in their approach to motivate giving: for example, in the Meat Hike campaign, Meat Fight’s network of peer to peer fundraisers can use their own variation of “for every mile I hike, you donate $1.” Then, each participant can update their own activity as they go.
We love that Meat Fight’s “funlanthropy” approach really shines through when they use the activity metric to highlight milestones!
Benefit: Reward Top Fundraisers
Meat Fight can give prizes to the top fundraiser and the fundraiser with the most donors, because CauseVox allows this tracking. Alice especially loves this feature, because when fundraisers get more donors involved, it gives Meat Fight more potential repeat donors.
Donation Page
Meat Fight uses a customized CauseVox donation page that is hosted on their own website. Alice loves that it is automated and that it enables them to get donations from online traffic. Many times she is not even sure how they found them.
At CauseVox, we make it easy to use and customize our donation form that converts. The fact that it is integrated into your own website makes a smooth and trustworthy experience for donors.
Pledge & Recurring Donations
Our pledge donation feature on donation pages allows both donors and organizations to set their donations on autopilot. So donors can give what they’ve intended over time without having to think about it, and nonprofits don’t have to chase the donors down.
Donors can choose their pledge amount, and then it automatically breaks it down into smaller monthly or yearly payment amounts over time. Then, their credit or debit card on file is automatically charged when each payment is due.
For Meat Fight, pledge donations are exciting because Alice has been manually tracking monthly recurring donations to see when donors hit an important milestone. Now donors can pledge to fund something meaningful over time. Because donors don’t care so much about dollars; they care about impact.
Check out this article to learn how our pledge feature could revolutionize your fundraising model!
The Cost/Benefit of Using CauseVox
Alice says that the fundraising results that Meat Fight has seen through CauseVox more than paid for the cost of using the platform almost immediately. With our budget friendly pricing and plans, you can get started with little investment.
Meat Fight’s Top Fundraising Tip
Don’t center the sob story. Alice says that many nonprofits make the mistake of centering their messaging on the problem, and not the solution. She advises that instead of focusing on the sob stories of the population your nonprofit is serving, focus on the positive impact your organization is making. She simply summarizes this sentiment with:
“Make Fundraising Fun again.”
By building the narrative around the positive impact that your nonprofit and its supporters are making together, donors will be so much happier to join the movement.
Action Items
- Learn more about Meat Fight by visiting their website.
- To learn more about Meat Fight’s funlanthropy, tips for fundraising, and the creative ways they are putting CauseVox tools to use, watch this on demand webinar.
- Watch a free demo to learn how CauseVox can help your digital fundraising soar, just like it has for Meat Fight.
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