January 31, 2011 | Read Time: 2 minutes
World Vision bombarded Spokane, Wash, with every fund-raising approach it could mobilize over the past few months.
But it still didn’t manage to meet its goal of recruiting at least 2,600 donors who would make a gift once a month to help a needy child in a developing country.
Even so, the charity met enough of its other goals to decide it is worth experimenting with the idea in other cities.
In Spokane, World Vision plied local residents with direct mail, paid radio and television spots, ads in buses, celebrity appearances, a shopping-mall exhibit, house parties, and presentations to church congregations.
While the charity fell short in getting that number of new donors, it spent less than it had expected in recruiting the people who did agree to monthly donations, says Steve Quant, a World Vision director who helped run the campaign. (He declined to say exactly how many new monthly donors the charity acquired with the campaign or how much it cost.)
World Vision achieved two of its other goals:
* Increasing the number of people in Spokane who have heard of the charity, a which it measured with market research before and after the campaign.
* Proving that people from different departments inside the organization could work together profitably, says Mr. Quant. For example, he says, staff members who focus on recruiting the monthly donors worked well with others who make presentations to church groups.
Another innovation of the campaign was turning a 3,000-foot World Vision display that had been used in churches into an exhibit in a Spokane shopping mall.
“The mall loved it because it drew people, and we got sponsors for it,” says Mr. Quant.
The exhibit blocked a Mrs. Fields cookie store, he says, “but the manager loved it because he got more business than normal.” The cookie store, he adds, even created a special cookie and gave one free to anyone who agreed to make monthly gifts to sponsor a child.
One thing that failed in the campaign was a direct-mail appeal to Spokane residents who had never before donated to World Vision, says Mr. Quant. “We will not do that again.”
Nevertheless, the citywide campaign generated enough successes that World Vision will repeat it in a couple more cities this year, says Mr. Quant. “It will be four or five more campaigns before we know what we are doing,” he says. “But we will definitely go forward with this. For every mistake, we learned.”
