How A Personal Fundraiser Raised $13,000 In 10 Days.
A Mightycause case study on making your fundraiser work.
Francie Fitzgerald started her personal fundraiser on Mightycause in honor of her doctor, Dr. Heiman-Patterson, who she describes as “one of those really rare medical professionals that simultaneously exudes a no-nonsense attitude and possesses one of the most compassionate hearts I’ve ever encountered.”
Francie’s campaign began just as she was about to undergo a five-day, experimental treatment for a rare, chronic disease. She kicked off her fundraiser on October 16, 2016, with the ambitious goal to raise $10,000 in just five days while she was undergoing treatment and planned to split the funds between ALS Hope Foundation and Vanderbilt’s Autonomic Dysfunction Center.
After researching other platforms, Francie chose Razoo because of the aesthetics of the platform and the easy-to-use wizard for personal fundraisers. “It was easy to navigate for me and the donors to navigate,” Francie said. “I’ve never done an online fundraiser before so it helped having such a great framework to walk me through process.”
As Francie headed off to treatment, donations poured into her fundraiser from friends and family to show their support. In less than five days, she exceeded her $10,000 goal, raising $11,190 from nearly 100 donors. In the week that followed, she raised an additional $2,000, bringing her total to $13,880 in under 2 weeks.
Her father, Ward Fitzgerald, added the link to her fundraiser in his email signature, ensuring all his colleagues and acquaintances were exposed to her message. Her mother added it to her highly-followed blog, A Rare Kind of Fairytale. (A best practice for crowdfunding is to share your online fundraiser with a captive audience that is already familiar with you and your cause.) They also added updates to Facebook and sent out texts to friends with the link included. Although most of Francie’s donations came from her family, friends or colleagues, Mightycause’s team helped the effort by sharing the post and custom hashtags Francie had created to track her campaign on their social networks as well.
Francie’s fundraiser proves that people give to people, and the comments of support on her page show just how much people care. One donor described Francie in a comment, saying, “In honor of the beautiful and courageous Francie Fitzgerald. You are a true hero. The world is a better place with your light.”
During her treatment, her hospital visitors would post her updated fundraising total on the room’s whiteboard where nurses would also write their notes and information.
“It makes a big difference to fundraise for something that matters to you,” Francie advises other fundraisers. “A lot of people know how important health care is to me and so if you make people aware of how personal something is for you it makes all the difference. There are a lot of people fundraising for causes out there.”
Francie’s success is a great example of how easy running a personal online fundraiser can be even when up against the odds.