Exceeding our stretch goal

TL;DR: Facing Homelessness tried new things and smashed our year-end stretch goal!

This year, Facing Homelessness exceeded our goal – and even our stretch goal –for our Year-End Campaign, and raised $267,000+ (nearly a quarter of our annual budget) in six weeks. As a fundraising professional, I’ve often felt that part of the job was making it all look effortless – but tremendous work across the entire team brought these results. Raising dollars from community is magical, and it’s also a science, requiring careful planning, internal communication, and focused energy. With philanthropy continually evolving to meet need and find its place in the overall ecosystem of social change, I think it’s valuable to demystify some of the behind-the-scenes work and share what we implemented to send us well over the top of our goal.

Some background – Facing Homelessness , where I am Executive Director, is a small nonprofit local to the Seattle area that inspires deliberate relationship building, engagement, and community mobilization toward ending homelessness. We’re a one-person (me) internal fundraising shop with fantastic consultant support from Common Great who have been working with the organization since before I joined the team last August. I’m the organization's first full or part time professional fundraiser – though anyone in nonprofits understands that fundraising is a team sport. I’m grateful for a caring board and a passionate team of program staff who hold incredible expertise and make our work possible.

The goal: raise $200,000 between Giving Tuesday (November 28) and December 31. Our non-publicized stretch goal (which really did feel like a stretch) was $250,000.

The levers we pulled:

• Expanding our challenge match: In the past, we’ve been fortunate to have one or two donors make significant gifts that were used as a matching challenge for year-end. This year, as part of my relationship development as the new ED, we expanded our matching pool from two donors to 17, plus our Board of Directors, totaling $103,500. Not everyone invited to participate took up the call, but many donors increased their gifts as a result of being asked and we learned more about the motivations and timing goals for those who declined (e.g. ‘I give in March not December because that’s when my company matches.’)
• Investing in social ads: Thanks to our Board President, John Mullin , we were able to tap in to additional resources that brought significant return on investment for our ads across Meta’s platforms. We had a click-through rate of 4.29% (average across industries is 1.51%) resulting in a 38 cent cost-per-click (a rate that is typically 83 cents).
• Good ‘old fashioned’ mail: We sent both a year-end letter that hit in late November as well as a reminder-to-give postcard in December.
• Favoring personal touches over mass messaging: Our donors spoke up and we listened. In a sea of year-end giving emails, they preferred hearing from us via regular email (even if it was mail merged) over our larger email platform. We saw better open and click-through rates regardless of the emails being less stylized.

Other Takeaways:

• Wow! Caroline Rensel wasn’t kidding that our donors like to give right through 11:59 p.m. on December 31. It was not a quiet night for me – both due to fireworks and donations and emails coming in all through the evening.
• All humans make mistakes. Our mail house made a mistake that impacted a few envelopes. I made a different mistake that flipped some reply cards. Everyone survived (after I was briefly mortified at myself), and our few donors impacted understood. High standards for communication is important and human error is inevitable (the recovering perfectionist in me is pained to write that, but I know it’s true). Even keeping the closest eye on details can still result in a few errors.
• An incredibly successful year-end campaign is not enough to sustain our organization for the entire year. I’m very grateful to be starting 2024 out on such a strong foot – and there is still much to do to set Facing Homelessness on solid financial ground. In addition to growing our private philanthropic support, I’m excited to diversify our revenue streams as our organization pursues public dollars and seeks to monetize our intellectual property as well as sell kits of our beautiful BLOCK Homes for private use.

I’m grateful to the talented and insightful Michelle Hynes, M.Ed. for encouraging me to formally reflect on this year-end campaign. It made me realize I had a lot to share. I encourage anyone reading this to do a similar exercise with a recent project. Taking the time to reflect, especially in the ruminative season of a new calendar year is helpful to seeing how far we’ve come and where we might want to go next.

I want to shout out our Board of Directors and my incredible colleagues on staff:

Tolu Akinola, Najja E Brown, MPA, PHR, Jordan Iverson, Jack Mowreader Jr., John Mullin, Adrian Ronsse, Amanda Sachs, Joe Sky-Tucker, Beth Strempler

Phoebe Anderson-Kline, MSW, Aaron Cloudwood, Lisa Boyd, Debriella Debrecki, Maja Evans, Angela Jacobs, Bernard Troyer, and Karina Wallace

As always, I’m eager to talk to anyone who wants to get involved with Facing Homelessness’ mission. You can reach me on LinkedIn or at christina@facinghomelessness.org if you’re inspired to engage.

PS – If you’re in the Seattle area, and are looking to place a high quality, sustainably built ADU in your yard for your own personal use, I’ve got a great home model for you to check out!