Cassie Sonnentag, Director of Media Relations and Outreach at the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation, joined us to share how the WFBF was able to raise over $21,000 in 5 hours by leveraging Facebook and Instagram to promote their Giving Day fundraiser.
How can you emulate these fantastic results?
Meet Your Audience Where They’re At
Wisconsin Farm Bureau Foundation was established in 1988 to provide support for agriculture education and leadership programs, empowering the next generation of agriculturists.
The organization has hosted a successful golf fundraiser annually. Inspired by online telethons like Red Nose Day the organization decided to pivot for their 2022 event and introduced Giving Day, an online fundraiser lasting 5 hours.
Giving Day was hosted primarily on social media, featuring challenges and simulated live content that reached fans where they already were, on social media, at a time that worked for them. Content invited fans to engage and share their own stories about how Wisconsin Farm
Bureau Foundation impacted their lives.
Prime Your Audience
Engage potential donors ahead of time so they are ready and prepared to get involved, make a donation, and have fun during the event. Wisconsin Farm Bureau Foundation leaned into past participants and event attendees to not only drive donations the day of but to help share the event and raise awareness of Giving Day.
Leading up to the event, Sonnentag prepared a promotional toolkit to make it easy for those involved to share the event and ensure that messaging was consistent across all platforms regardless of who was sharing.
This early engagement also extends to sponsors. One month prior to the event, Sonnentag and the team reached out to past sponsors of in-person events and offered them the opportunity to participate by sponsoring or making a donation of prizes to be given away during the event.
Fill Your Tool Belt
Wisconsin Farm Bureau Foundation found success through not just translating an in-person experience to a digital medium, but rethinking what the event could be and leveraging digital tools to really uplevel the experience.
Coordinating a live, digital event across sponsors, volunteers, and participants is very difficult. To create a live feel without requiring every single person to be available at the same time, Wisconsin Farm Bureau Foundation used Streamyard to create simulated live content.
Streamyard is a live streaming studio that lives in the browser (no need to have participants download software) to easily record video content that can be streamed live (or later uploaded) to Facebook, YouTube, Linkedin, etc.
To create those brand elements, Wisconsin Farm Bureau Foundation used Canva, a graphic design tool that makes it easy to create on-brand elements that can dynamically be adjusted to meet the design requirements of modern platforms.
Nonprofit Spotlight:
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