Creating a Campaign for a Statewide Giving Day

The Delaware nonprofit Spur Impact, in partnership with United Way of Delaware, runs this state-wide day of giving in March. Now in our third year of involvement, Iris Creative has worked with the logo and branding initially developed by United Way to grow this event.

Challenge

When Spur Impact first came to us in 2019, they were looking for a firm to create a marketing strategy that would help engage more than one hundred nonprofits for Delaware Gives Day 2020. Each year since, we have worked together to increase participation from nonprofits. In 2022, the goal was to increase giving by shifting their focus from nonprofits to Delawareans.

Solution

To accomplish the ever-growing participation goals, we have continued to support Delaware nonprofits and have now expanded marketing to reach individual donors. To connect with Delawareans, we placed local advertising and secured media stories showcasing how people and organizations benefited from donations raised through past giving days. These stories were distributed via newspaper, radio, and TV channels.

Integral to this years’ growth was onboarding 100 students from the University of Delaware to volunteers as campaign marketers. These ambassadors, as we call them, were provided a comprehensive toolkit for email and social media marketing. The toolkits included social media graphics, post copy and email templates as well as campaign hashtags and additional campaign information.

The tools were provided in ready-to-use and editable formats so that the volunteers could start with a template and customize it with photos, logos and language for the nonprofit they were supporting.

Additional resources were offered to share Keys to Success Guide and an Ideas Guide to assist nonprofits and their volunteers in planning how to participate.

A separate toolkit was developed for the hosts, Spur Impact and United Way, to promote the campaign. This provided materials for their staffs, board members and ambassadors to help in spreading the word. This toolkit included audience-segmented social media graphics and post copy so they could easily reach out to local nonprofits to participate and Delawareans to give.

Outcome

This past year, 17,000+ unique donors donated from the 50 states, Washington, DC, Puerto Rico and 11 countries resulting in $2.3M raised for 524 Delaware nonprofits.

“The Iris Creative Team was a tremendous support system in launching, promoting, and growing Do More 24 Delaware. Over the last four years, Iris Creative have developed and built upon their robust marketing/ ambassador toolkit that has transformed how we have been able interact with over 30,000 donors. Iris Creative has been an integral part of the giving day growth from raising $400,000 up to $2.6 million in just a few short years.”

— Jenn Saienni, Director of Nonprofit Engagement