Fundraiser: Jimmy’s Appeal

There is just no doubt in my mind that Jimmy’s Appeal letter has been the cause of our wonderful, incredible fundraising bump over the last 7 days.  None of us here predicted  such a wonderful response…but when you think about it, it really makes sense.
A few blog posts back, we proved that people do read our site notices…our messages matter.  So is it so hard to imagine these results?

Yeah… I guess it might be hard to imagine.   Those LONG green lines are the donation totals for Jimmy’s Appeal.  It’s roughly 8 times what we had been raising on a daily basis previous to the appeal.
Date    # Donors    $USD
12/23/08    8,192     $283,994.98
12/24/08    6,823     $229,293.59
12/25/08    5,139     $169,109.73
12/26/08    5,995     $213,963.27
12/27/08    5,791     $200,988.24
12/28/08    5,627     $196,524.30
12/29/08    5,850     $207,349.76
Compare those results to the recent weeks (when we were averaging about $30,000 per day), the biggest change is running the Jimmy Appeal at 50% of the time.
Site Notice Frequency 12/20/08 to 12/22/08:
There Need it Meter: 25%
Rely on donations Meter: 25%
Wikipedia is a Non Profit: 25%
Various Quotes:  25%
And from 12/23 to present:
Jimmy Appeal Red Border:  25%
Jimmy Appeal Grey Border:  25%
There Need it Meter: 10%
Rely on donations Meter: 10%
Wikipedia is a Non Profit: 10%
Various Quotes:  20%
Incidentally, how did the grey bordered vs. red bordered vs. quotes and other site notices do?
# donations        sum           average
red border            13,372      $441,163.75     $32.99       25%
grey border          12,215       $419,911.63     $34.38       25%
quotes                     1,560        $59,445.81     $37.69       20%
Helped Meter           963        $35,814.23     $37.19       10%
Need it Meter           927        $32,502.97     $35.06      10%
NonProfit Meter      867        $38,412.25     $44.30      10%
Nope… no doubt.   The Jimmy Appeal was a huge push.
The Appeal really hit the right notes for our community:  direct and honest.  It was straight to the point and forceful.  And it helped our donors understand why we needed the money and what we were going to do with it.
As I write this, we’re at approximately $5,500,000.00 and still going strong toward our $6 million goal.   That’s with over 100,000 donors (many of them new donors) averaging over $30.00 per donation.   That speaks very well for the depth of our donor pool and the future.
Rand Montoya
Head of Community Giving

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