Developing a community fundraising product is a challenge that can transform your organisation.
Every charity should have a community fundraising event as part of their income stream. A successful community fundraising event should be sustainable, scalable over time, simple to do and simple to understand.
At heart, they should be a fun way to show you care.
MAKE IT SCALABLE AND RELEVANT
A simple, relevant idea will grow year on year.
Defining the activation starts with research and insight into your organisation and your audience. At Marlin, we seek to identify a clear connection between the services you offer and the activation that is proposed.
For example, Marlin has developed Caritas Australia’s largest annual community fundraising campaign—Project Compassion—since 2015.
By developing an integrated campaign idea with consistent messaging and look and feel, Marlin has helped Caritas Australia to consistently raise more than $10M each year.
Our role is to create clear positioning, that enables the story surrounding the campaign to feel linked yet different from year to year.
LINKING ACTIVATION TO CAUSE
Easy to do, well-defined challenge
Once your supporters see the value of your cause, offer them an easy to do, well- defined activity to participate in.
When MS Australia approached us to create a brand new community fundraising product, they selected one where we had linked the fundraising activation of running or walking 50K with the organisation’s desire to help make MS a thing of the past—and so the May 50k campaign began.
This event raised $2.2million in the first year and $6.6m this year.
A STRONG LOOK AND FEEL
How the public perceives the campaign
Understanding brand, psychology and fundraising all help create a strong campaign identity that can be promoted to your audience, and to the wider public.
We use strong creative direction to create consistent messaging, campaign look and feel to articulate your purpose and connect your supporters to a clear call to action which can be integrated on various platforms and channels.
For MS Australia’s ‘May 50K’, we created the campaign name, campaign headline ‘Leave your limits behind’, which connects the role of the run (to the runner) and the outcome of the funds raised (to the beneficiary). We developed all the campaign materials including a sub-brand book that can be used consistently in all promotional channels and platforms.
FUNDRAISING STRATEGY
Over time, it expands participation, reach and engagement
An effective fundraising strategy behind an event helps expand participation, reach and engagement over time.
It brings the whole campaign together—from recruiting your supporters, mobilising them to fundraise, to coaching them to become ambassadors for your event.
We combine event creation, campaign look and feel, supporter engagement and experience, event awareness and post-event acknowledgement to ensure a successful community fundraising event.
FUNDRAISING PLATFORMS
Data approach, digital fundraising practices
We work closely with leading community fundraising and event platforms in Australia to deliver best practices online supporter experiences.
Our close collaboration with our partners at Raisely and Funraisin enable our team to build customised fundraising platforms that bring the events and fundraising campaigns of our charity partners to life.
As part of our builds we integrate with well known communications platforms including Campaign Monitor and Mailchimp as well as CRMs including Salesforce., while ensuring a data-first approach to create a custom journey for everyone involved, and allow organisations to respond to new information as the campaign evolves.
HOW WE CAN HELP
A goal without a plan is just a wish.
Events connect people with a cause and give them an immersive, tactile experience that ideally increases their relationship with a charity.
From initially developing your idea for an event, all the way through to providing the materials needed to advertise and run the event, we ensure that the final experience is both highly rewarding for supporters and a successful fundraising channel for the charity.
We can help you with:
- Event/Activation development
- Competitor analysis and research
- Audience identification and insight
- Concept development
- Creative strategy for launch and promotion across messaging, fundraising platforms, promotional channels and fundraiser toolkits and resources
- Campaign materials including a campaign book, multi-channel supporting collateral such as press, OOH, digital including video, print and mail
- Creative assets and re-skins for website and fundraising platforms
- Supporter journeys including onboarding and journey mapping
- Creative assets for eDMs and SMS
- Campaign websites and landing pages
- Custom fundraising platform and integrations
WHY MARLIN?
You can count on our experience.
Over the last 15 years we’ve helped clients such as Caritas Australia, MS Australia, Baptist World Aid, Life Education, National Breast Cancer Foundation and many others, launch their event and continually engage more supporters year on year.
Please get in touch to discuss how we can help you launch your community fundraising event.
Let’s work together.
Say hello to Karl
With over 15 years of experience as a strategist, I make it my mission to understand ambitions, get to the heart of a problem and work collaboratively to develop a solution. I would love to hear from you!
