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The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia: Recruiting Monthly Donors Online
By Elizabeth Velardi, Traffic Manager
March 2011

Client Challenge
The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Foundation (CHOP) wanted to increase the number of participants in its monthly giving program, but acquiring new monthly donors through the mail had proved challenging.

Monthly Miracle Makers is a small group of dedicated donors who pledge gifts of as little as $15 each month. Schultz & Williams’s goal was to show how monthly contributors not only help fund patient care for children, but also support the research that will one day find new treatments and new cures. To secure the trust of a monthly donor, our assignment was to show that funding for programs results in real-life successes.

Schultz & Williams Strategy
First, we moved the campaign from the mail to online. This allowed us to reduce costs, use more assets – like video – and target a group of donors who were more likely to sign up for monthly deductions.

Messaging for the campaign focused on spina bifida – a birth defect of the spine and the most common birth defect in the nation – and drew from existing CHOP resources to inform readers about the disease.

The groundbreaking research and successful treatments conducted at CHOP make for convincing reasons to donate. But it was the compelling story of a single CHOP patient, two-year-old Celeste, who lives with spina bifida, that drove this series and led to unprecedented results through an online solicitation.

The story began with the devastating diagnosis revealed to Celeste’s parents when her mom was 20-weeks pregnant. The appeal comprised just four emails – three stand-alone campaign e-appeals and one final, short, “Thank you, we made our goal” email.

The emails tracked the journey for Celeste and her family from initial despair to pure joy.

The email campaign explained Celeste’s surgeries and ongoing treatment and highlighted the need for increased funding to maintain CHOP’s programs. Photos of Celeste, a happy, smiling little girl, were included throughout. Video content produced by Celeste’s parents was embedded into the second email and the donation page. S&W made only minor edits and added background music. Since those closest to the story did the filming, the video had a poignant “home-movie” quality that reflected pure love.

To add urgency, we established a fundraising goal using a number that was reasonable yet significant to the story: Since the emails went out 33 months after Celeste’s mom’s ultrasound revealed her unborn baby had spina bifida, we used “33” as our inspiration and set a goal of obtaining 33 new Monthly Miracle Makers. This was explained in the first email, repeated in the second, underscored in the third (“We’re almost there.”) and celebrated in the last.

Each email had a subject line that was designed to increase open rates by hinting at the content. The series was supplemented by spina bifida-related subject matter in CHOP’s monthly e-newsletter, on the homepage and through a series of Facebook updates which directed users to the website.

Results
The results were truly extraordinary. We exceeded expected response by 48% and outperformed the previous year’s appeal ten-fold. In addition, these new monthly donors will provide significant revenue over the course of the year, for little cost beyond stewardship.

The real lesson to be learned here: facts and statistics about the lifesaving work that CHOP researchers and physicians are engaged in every day have much greater impact when augmented by real stories of hope.

Schultz & Williams is a national consulting firm based in Philadelphia; providing management, fundraising and marketing consulting for nonprofit organizations, along with full-service direct marketing, database and creative/production services.