Feed The Children’s best-in-class move achieves 31% increase in monthly gifts

Feed The Children (FTC) was ready for a fresh start with online fundraising. And with two new internal champions, the organization was excited to transform its digital strategy. With the help of Fundraise Up’s best-in-class donation platform, and a broad range of integrations, FTC was able to handpick tech solutions for every need.

About Feed The Children

Feed The Children is a leading anti-hunger organization delivering food and other critical resources to children and families. Since 1979, the organization has dedicated its work to delivering food and household essentials, nutrition training, clean water programs, and disaster response. On an annual basis, Feed The Children supports 15M people around the world, delivering 94M pounds of food and resources to children and their families.

The challenge: break free of silos and a revolving door of technologies

At the start of its digital transformation journey, FTC relied heavily on external partners and agencies. But without an internal champion, strategies often fizzled out leaving the organization to start over again and again.

Enter Harper Grubbs, who joined Feed The Children as its first Vice President of Digital Fundraising and Transformation in 2022 along with Colleen Ridenhour, who stepped in as the organization’s Chief Growth and Strategy Officer. Their new mandate? Re-envision Feed The Children’s fundraising programs.

“Everyone knew we needed to ‘do digital’ but no one knew how to approach it,” he explains. “The revolving door of agencies led to frequent changes in technology. It was preventing us from building any kind of consistency,” explains Harper.

The solution: best-in-breed technologies that play nicely together

What Harper was looking for was a partner that could bring the best possible donor experience to Feed The Children.

“Above all else, donor experience took priority,” says Harper. “We were willing to trade off an all-in-one approach for an integrated solution using best-in-class technologies for donations, email, text messaging, website, and CMS.”

After careful evaluation, Harper and the team moved forward with Fundraise Up for donations, WordPress for website and CMS, HubSpot for email marketing automation, and Tatango for text messaging. Blackbaud would continue to serve as the organization’s customer relationship management system.

“The whole solution came together really fast. Much quicker than we thought possible,” says Harper. “Fundraise Up’s ease of implementation and speed of deployment was fantastic.”

In fact, the FTC team was so excited, they pressed to have Fundraise Up running by Giving Tuesday!

Says Harper, “It was a collaborative, integrated approach across our departments and Fundraise Up’s team. Everyone understood the importance and the urgency.”

The results: a better donor experience creates more revenue

Giving Season success

Feed The Children went live with Fundraise Up a week before its Giving Tuesday deadline. As a result, Feed The Children experienced a 10% donation increase in the week leading up to the event, and a 25% increase in donations on the day-of.

Into the holiday season, Harper also notes that Fundraise Up had a positive impact on mobile giving. “If you look at benchmark data, you’ll see that roughly two-thirds of traffic to nonprofit websites right now come from mobile devices. But still more than half of donations happen on desktop. Since moving to Fundraise Up, well over 40% of our donors are donating via their mobile devices. That has a huge impact on conversion. People are making that donation now on their first visit because it’s so easy. They just use their Apple or Google Pay, or even Venmo. It’s made a huge difference.”

Social Proof and Upsells enabled by Fundraise Up have also had a positive donation impact. “People were uncertain at first,” says Harper. “There are different perspectives on how many nudges one gives to a donor. That said, Social Proof has helped us raise $40K in additional revenue in three months. That’s a pretty defensible argument.”

The next area of focus for FTC is to grow their monthly giving program. They’re using Fundraise Up’s Upsell feature and seeing excellent results. “We’re seeing 31% of our monthly gifts come from that Upsell moment, which is fantastic.”

“In parallel, we’re growing our monthly giving program with improved retention rates. And we’ll continue to see improvements as we fully migrate our monthly donors to Fundraise Up because of the platform’s Upgrade Links functionality. That’s a capability we never had before with our monthly giving program and we’re really excited about it.”

The entire Feed The Children team is excited about the growth potential Fundraise Up has unlocked for the organization.

“We’re using just about everything,” he says. “We’re working on a campaign that will use the Campaign Page functionality. We’re using the Insights Dashboard for reporting. We’re using the Remind Me Later widget to prompt a donor to complete the donation process. We’re using the Virtual terminal with our after-hours call center. And we’re using the integration with HubSpot to send donations over to that platform in real time,” raves Harper.

“Fundraise Up makes it so easy to explore all its features. You just go through, configure a few things, let it run and it works. If we have any feedback or questions at all the support team always gives us answers promptly. Fundraise Up is a true partner that is invested in our success.”

The seamless and fast implementation of the platform has been a cause for celebration within the organization and an example of the culture change and “North Star” Colleen, Harper’s boss, envisioned. With Fundraise Up, Feed The Children is providing the best possible donor experience — driving more revenue to help more children and families everywhere.

“If I was sitting down with a counterpart in the industry to talk about moving to Fundraise Up, I’d ask them one question,” says Harper. That would be, “Why haven’t you done it yet?”

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