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“If you truly understand why you’re raising money, you can go raise it multiple times a year.”
March 2023
By Raimy Rubin
Reading Time: 10m
Talmudical Academy (TA) in Baltimore is an educational institution with more than 1,000 students. Each year, they run a CauseMatch campaign that raises $1.5 million for general operating support. Recently, they began to push the boundaries of what is possible.
They launched a secondary campaign for Lamdeinu, their special education division. Then, they moved their raffle sweepstakes to the CauseMatch platform.
Now, they’re raising multiple times a year cleanly, simply, and with no extra platform fees.
The Switch To CauseMatch
Until now, we just created an online form with payment information and built a platform ourselves.
The reason we went with CauseMatch was a) to take advantage of features like Donor Rescue and b) there’s a cleanliness to using the same platform. I knew how it worked. I knew how the data came in. I knew what the site would look like.
Ambassador Diversity
With Lamdeinu, we positioned ourselves for success because the campaign was focused on a specific cause, our special education students. We had buy-in from a different crowd. The parents of those students became our primary ambassadors.
The Option for Retargeting
We have all these tools at our fingertips. If we went with a free form site, options like retargeting would not have been available to us. These options give us flexibility to change course, even in the middle of a campaign.
Ambassador Management
I was WhatsApping and texting the ambassadors for accountability during the campaign. Before CauseMatch, it took forever. I had to contact each of them individually. This year, I was able to do it in five minutes.
I had 50 ambassadors that I could message ‘How’s it going? How can I help? I’d love to see you reach X percentage by this time.’ It was just simple.
PhoneRaise
PhoneRaise was a big factor for us.
The tool is amazing and so simple. You give people their list from last year or you give them names to call. Then, they hit a button and all this information appears: their name, the amount they gave last year, etc. You push WhatsApp or text or the call button, and you’re in touch in an instant.
Now that we’ve done a couple of campaigns, all the Ambassadors want their donors from last year. In the past we’d send them a spreadsheet with their donors and they’d have to work off of it. Now, we just load their list into PhoneRaise. They get a text, bam, all their cards are right there.
PhoneRaise: A Case Study within a Case Study
During our Lamdeinu campaign, our biggest Ambassador didn’t use PhoneRaise at first. Toward the end of the campaign, with about three hours left in the campaign, she started using the tool. She texted us immediately, and she said, ‘I wish I would have known about this for the last 33 hours. It’s so easy to use and keeps me organized.’
A Guiding Mantra
Don’t be scared to ask for money multiple times a year. You can do it and it works.
