One of my Kiwi charities shared a case study of a UK community fundraising campaign that was bringing in digital donations in droves.
It’s a great campaign “Run for Heroes” to raise money for NHS staff in the UK who are struggling under the weight of COVID-19.
What makes it even better is that it was a stroke of inspiration from a woman who went out for a run, observed other people doing the same thing around her and had an idea about how to drive digital donations for the NHS frontline workers.
When my charity put it to me as an idea, this was my accurate, but somewhat cynical, expectation setting (and risk-management) response:
“This is a perfect storm of getting a very timely and topical issue with huge press coverage and awareness and a really simple action at a low cost (5 pounds).
This would work well with younger audiences too, the low barrier to giving fits with their income and way of ‘contributing’.The pick up would have been largely PR based I imagine.And her being a documentary film maker, the content would be have been awesome.Definitely good inspiration – but its all about the CAUSE and timeliness of it and the huge awareness of the issue.”
But we should never let cynicism stop us from being inspired and aspire for greatness.
This was a good idea. Run 5 km, donate $5 (to the NHS) and nominate 5 friends.
It builds on all the facebook “chain mail” challenges that we’ve been seeing lately – music albums, flashback pics of when you were 20/ senior year, 7 random pictures with no caption – and turned it into a very timely, very relevant, very successful fundraiser with lots of digital donations.
So I thought I’d share it with you. Be inspired. Donate online.
Olivia Strong – Run for Heroes founder
Blog UPDATE – August 2020
So it seems that the Run for Heroes campaign got the attention of UNHCR who have borrowed the concept for their new ‘Run 5’ Run for Refugees campaign. They’ve raised almost $5k in the first week, which isn’t too bad for a public awareness, friend get friend fundraising driven campaign.
