February 7, 2024
Fundraising, tech, and transparency: Dream big with me in 2024
READ TIME - 10 MINUTES
At a glance
Here's what to expect:
- Our biggest goal for 2024 is building Suubi Academy, a school in Musima, Uganda.
- We're building The Dream Club, a monthly giving program to fund more education projects.
- We have three ways we're going to accomplish our goals this year: increase membership to The Dream Club, raise awareness of the global education crisis, and leverage technology.
Welcome to 2024 & Dreaming in Public
It’s officially 2024! Wow. Happy New Year, friends!
It’s been a while since I posted here, but my biggest priority for 2024 is creating more content and showcasing the behind-the-scenes of running a charity and a DTC brand (peep the foreshadowing, whaaat!?).
On that note, I will be building in public — I call it Dreaming in Public 😉 — and showing you exactly how I’m building our various brands, approaching decision-making, and sharing the lessons I learn on this ✨wild✨ journey. (cries)
If you’re new here, I’m the Founder and CEO of dream: success, a nonprofit with an ambition to bring education to every child on the planet. Our biggest goal for this year is to fund our first school in Uganda, which will provide education for up to 700 children every year.
The Dreams for 2024
As I shared earlier, our first Dream for 2024 is to build Suubi Academy. Led by our local partner in Uganda, Project Yesu, this education project will allow children to learn in their local community instead of traveling to distant boarding schools.
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Another important Dream of ours this year is building our supporter base, increasing our social media following, and raising awareness of the global education crisis. While much of this sounds like marketing speak, we recognize the importance of having a solid community of supporters to reach our ambition of bringing education to every child on the planet. As a startup charity, our approach must be very nimble and frugal.
With that in mind, our strategy features a multi-pronged approach highlighting several key areas we've identified as paramount to accomplishing our 2024 goals.
Our strategy
#1: Increase membership to The Dream Club.
The Dream Club is our monthly giving program, an exclusive community of supporters giving at least $5 each month. This provides ongoing sustainable support for our local partners and allows us to fund education projects that increase access to learning.
When writing this, we have ten members of The Dream Club giving a combined $225 a month to support dream: success. While most of this is board members, staff, and close family and friends, we're excited to share this wonderful opportunity with more Dreamers — and grow its impact.
Our goal for the program is to increase our membership to 300 members before the end of the year. We have yet to set a monetary goal; instead, we'll monitor our giving data closely to create a baseline for fiscal years 2025 and beyond. We're most comfortable with this, given our need for fundraising data.
Our strategy for increasing The Dream Club membership is centered around grassroots fundraising, starting with our close family and friends and then incorporating a cold email outreach strategy for people in our network we'd love to share The Dream Club with.
Suppose you're creating a monthly giving program for your charity. In that case, all of your board and staff must be members of your recurring giving program since it's an easier sell to prospective supporters when you have 100% participation by your organization's people.
I wouldn't set a minimum monthly gift amount as that could be difficult for some members to partake in. However, staff participation is essential. Just think, if your organization's people don't want to get involved, why should outsiders?
Now, let's talk about The Dream Club in more detail.
Creating this membership program was quite a strenuous process. We approached the creation of The Dream Club with a product mindset similar to that of membership-focused services like Netflix, Hulu, or Spotify. We created separate branding for The Dream Club and thoroughly mapped out what the supporter experience would look like from when they joined to the ongoing communications they'd receive.
Your giving program's landing page is arguably the most important asset you'll make, as it's essentially the product page you're "selling" to prospective supporters. We examined hundreds of landing pages, customer loyalty programs, and other charity's monthly giving programs as inspiration. You can view our main landing page for The Dream Club here.
Some of the best charity monthly giving programs include charity: water, Ally Global Foundation, Splash, The Adventure Project, Watsi, and GiveDirectly.
(This is a random tip that deserves its own post — and I will write it very soon — but if you're a charity looking for the most powerful (AND inexpensive) donation platform, use Fundraise Up. I am not affiliated with the company in any way other than being their client, and it's ridiculously powerful software that every charity should use — especially if you're setting up a monthly giving program. Period.)
Many of the streaming platforms also serve as excellent landing page inspiration, as they succinctly showcase their value propositions and work to reduce friction for a visitor becoming a paying customer. Examples include Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Paramount+, and Max.
Overall, recurring support through The Dream Club will be a central factor in funding our first education project and the many more that will come after.
#2: Raise awareness of the global education crisis.
We recognize that one of the most significant marketing issues (and opportunities) has been educating our existing community and newcomers about the global education crisis. Our primary target audience resides in the U.S. (not surprising as a proud American-based charity), and we've noticed confusion among people about: i.) why supporters should give to international causes instead of local missions, ii.) why we're an American-based charity doing international work, and iii.) why we're not supporting the insufficient American public schooling system.
We've leaned into these great questions instead of shying away from them. So much so that we've revisited our website and other marketing materials to include information about these typical objections to be proactive. An example of this can be found here, on the "Why Give Internationally?" page on our website.
Our Chief Communications Officer, Nancy Cossio, and I spent quite a bit of time recalling interactions with our supporters and members of the public to draft the frequently asked questions listed on the page above. This is where listening and recalling information is SO important. As a founder (or leader, marketer, etc.), your job is to LISTEN and anticipate questions, hesitations, and downright objections to your product/service. The more you can address these "painful areas" in the minds of your consumers, the better you can tailor your marketing to mitigate these doubts in the first place.
Let's face it: America has public education, so it's hard for Americans to imagine a world where a child needs access to education. It's up to us to paint that picture for them. This is precisely why we created the "Why Education?" page on our website, which provides a brief synopsis of the issue our organization is working to tackle. We've included a narrative on the global education crisis, with academic and professional organization citations for the data we're utilizing.
Prioritizing education around the education crisis (see what I did there!?) in our marketing is a HUGE strategic imperative in 2024 so that we can make people aware of the issue, its damning consequences in the coming decades, and most importantly, how they can help. So many people are unaware that a global education crisis even exists — so every touchpoint has to be an educational journey that guides the viewer/follower.
#3: Leverage technology to propel us to our ambition.
Driven by the most critical purposes and missions, nonprofits operate with chronic understaffing, underfunding, and under-resourcing. They bridge the crucial societal gaps that neither the private sector nor the government addresses. Add to this the complexities of navigating the "overhead myth" (perpetuated by countless charity watchdog groups) and the constant public scrutiny, and pursuing a career in these waters might seem daunting. Yet, these challenges call upon exceptional dedication and resilience, attracting individuals who find deep purpose in tackling our world's toughest problems.
Nonprofits are SO behind the for-profit sector by many orders of magnitude, so much so that it's not even funny. (As such, I have to be really careful not to go off on a tangent on this strategic pillar.)
With that, we've always had a "startup" mentality when it comes to dream: success. We have a few guiding beliefs:
- Just because we're a charity doesn't mean we can't invest in our technology.
- Just because we're a charity doesn't mean we can't invest in our marketing.
- Just because we're a charity doesn't mean we can't invest in our growth.
- Just because we're a charity doesn't mean we can't invest in our people.
- Just because we're a charity doesn't mean we can't invest in (insert anything that a startup spends money on).
You probably get the point by now. Rant over.
From the beginning, we've obsessed over our marketing materials, website (you can read about that here), and branding. We've also tried hundreds of technology tools to land on the (near) perfect tech stack with the (near) perfect workflows. [I'll walk through our tech in another newsletter; stay tuned!]
Our goal for 2024 is to continue to invest in our technology and create more personalized experiences for our supporters. We've started a Salesforce project, which entails a custom integration with Sendlane, an email marketing platform:
This project will keep our CRM (Salesforce NPSP) in sync with our email marketing platform (Sendlane) so that both applications have a bidirectional data sync. Put simply, data in Salesforce matches with the data in Sendlane, and vice-versa.
This is important because it allows us to personalize our marketing emails. Instead of saying (ugly) generic things like, "Hey friend," we can say, "Hey Matthew, thank you for joining The Dream Club. Your monthly gift of $40 can provide 2 kids with access to education." (To clarify, the bolded text is data points pulled from Salesforce.)
We can also have automated email sequences that wish our supporters a happy birthday, remind them of their giving anniversaries, and thank them more specially for their generosity. Another powerful use case is sending supporter up-sells. For example, if someone is a part of The Dream Club (as discussed earlier), we can send a mass email sharing an opportunity to expand their impact by giving an additional $5 per month. This functionality used to be reserved for larger enterprise charities. (And I'll spare you the rant on many of them for another day...hmphmp.)
Ultimately, our goal is simple: show our supporters where exactly their money is going and steward them appropriately for their selfless generosity — using the power of technology. ✨ It's that simple. ✨ (But not gonna lie: simple things become easy to miss sometimes!)
To be honest, it was a MEGA pain in the butt manually importing our email lists across systems each time we wanted to send an email, so we're so excited to have our data flow into everything the way it needs to!
If you're the founder of ANY business entity, I strongly urge that you learn AND leverage technology. Specifically, find tools that make your job easier and save you time. Use software curators like Product Hunt or G2. Time is your most valuable asset; don't waste it doing manual, mundane tasks that software could do better (and faster)!
If you'd like to join our ambition of bringing education to every child on the planet, please consider:
AMPLIFYING: Share this post with your network and raise awareness about the global education crisis. Help us build a community of Dreamers around the world.