About
Trinity Grace Church (TGC) is a collection of neighborhood churches, or parishes, across New York City, each taking spiritual responsibility for its own neighborhood. Each city parish church is diverse in its essential nature, uniting women, men, and families from various cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds across the major metropolitan area.
Challenges / Problem
Many parishes began as community groups. Community leaders in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, became aware of the neighborhood’s need for a place for youth to turn to. They got the blessing to transplant as a parish, but needed funding — $30,000 — to begin operations.
A secondary goal was to motivate community involvement and encourage other church members to get involved.
Knowing they had a dedicated community group, they decided to launch a crowdfunding campaign to engage their community in fundraising, as well as expand their reach.
How CauseVox Helped
TGC Crown Heights turned to CauseVox to fuel their efforts.
While the cause for TGC Crown Heights was more organic than that of a typical nonprofit, they knew that they needed a fundraising campaign that was a savvy, structured one.
Admins set their campaign duration at thirty days to correspond with the amount being raised. Using the end date created a sense of urgency for donors, helping them raise their goal in a short amount of time.
In addition, they built anticipation by telling the story of their church on their campaign site, presenting a narrative with a clear past, present. The “hard ask” was made in the video and homepage of the campaign website.
They also used social media to spread the word and drive traffic to the campaign website. Pastors from fellow TGC parishes lent their support and encouragement, retweeting and sharing the link to the campaign website to parishioners and their personal networks.
Their Results
The campaign surpassed its original goal, raising a total of $32,822. It took about four days for the funds to start flowing in, but they were quickly able to engage their community, raising on average over $1000 a day. Today, TGC Crown Heights is thriving, one of 11 parishes in the network.
