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Jan 18, 2011

Giving Impact™: PNOLA Raises Over $5,000 To Help Rebuild New Orleans

Posted by: MOD-Lab

The Phoenix of New Orleans, PNOLA for short, is a non-profit organization that provides direct and hands-on construction and rebuilding assistance to the Lower Mid-City neighborhood in Orleans Parish to address the still present devastation of Hurricane Katrina. PNOLA was one of our first Giving Impact™ Grant applicants and we are excited to share that they successfully funded their first campaign with us.

As a licensed contractor providing construction services, PNOLA needs the right tools and vehicles to support their great volunteers. The truck they had used to get their teams where they need to go and to carry the tools they need to do their job had died. To address funding a replacement, PNOLA setup a campaign to raise $5000 to purchase a used truck. As of December 30th they had exceeded their goal, raising $5,100.

The following details some of PNOLA’s key efforts to reach this goal across multiple channels utilizing both Giving Impact’s toolset as well as that of others.

• Campaign launched in early November and met its goal at the end of December 2010.
• Added a Giving Impact widget to their blog so it would appear on all pages.

• Opted to not reveal the current donation total on the widget and campaign landing page until they had met a notable percentage of their target goal.
• Used the Giving Impact share feature to promote the campaign through their Twitter account.
• One of PNOLA’s executive leads promoted the campaign using a birthday wish through Causes on Facebook.
• Documented each of the donations made through Causes in Giving Impact as “Offline” donations.
• Promoted the campaign in a November email blast using the campaign Givlnk (short url) to link directly to their campaign landing page.

The Giving Impact campaign overview and donation areas showcase a host of useful information including the number of donations and totals as well as campaign shares.

Donations (Giving Impact and “Offline”)	56
Amount raised	$5,100
Target	$5,000
Facebook shares	11
Twitter shares	5

Exporting the donation log (CSV) and working with these data reveals additional information to explore. Given our recent capability to record donations made outside of Giving Impact through our “Offline” donation feature, and our knowledge that PNOLA used Causes on Facebook as part of their campaign, we were interested to look at a breakdown of activity through our tool and outside of it.

Online Donations – Donations made through Giving Impact

Total	8
Amount raised	$2,476
Average donation	$309.50
Largest donation	$2,000
Smallest donation	$5
Number of people who did not opt out of follow-up communications	8
Number of Facebook shares post donation	3
Number of Twitter shares post donation	0

“Offline” Donations – Donations made outside Giving Impact

Total	48
Amount raised	$2,624
Average donation	$54.67
Largest donation	$500
Smallest donation	$10
Number of people who did not opt out of follow-up communications	Unknown
Number of Facebook shares post donation	Unknown
Number of Twitter shares post donation	Unknown

Reflections

“There’s no way that our campaign would have been such a success without the Giving Impact widget on our blog! Setting up our campaign was really simple, and I love that we were able to edit it any time we needed to. Seth and the Giving Impact team were very responsive and helpful throughout our campaign.” – PNOLA Team

One of the goals of our grant program is to allow us to learn from the successes and challenges of organizations whom feel they can benefit from the Giving Impact tools.

Some things that excited us about PNOLA’s campaign:

• They met their goal!
• They used our campaign total toggles to control when they wanted to reveal how much they had raised in order to help them share when there was sufficient momentum. This feature was released right around the start of the campaign and was something that the PNOLA team put to use right away and that they felt helped their effort.
• They reached out across multiple channels including their blog, Twitter, Facebook, and email newsletter using Giving Impact widgets and Givlnks as well as other tools, most notably Causes, to help them achieve their overall goal.
• They used our “Offline” donation feature extensively to record all of the donations made through Causes in order to document donor activity in one place and to update campaign totals to showcase overall momentum. This is another feature that was released during the campaign that PNOLA quickly employed.

Some things we are thinking about related to PNOLA’s campaign/experience:

• Peer to Peer / Team fundraising
• Making logging of “Offline” donations even easier, in particular in the case when you want to log an anonymous donor.
• The term “Offline” donations is the right label for check, cash, or similar donations, but not for other online sources.

We wish our sincerest congratulations to PNOLA, our thanks for their feedback, and we look forward to seeing what they do next and learning from it.

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