End of Year Giving Campaign

Carousel30 helped the Trust for the National Mall capitalize on the holiday season and operated a highly successful email and social media fundraising campaign.

The Trust for the National Mall is the official non-profit partner of the National Park Service and is dedicated to preserving, restoring and improving the National Mall in Washington, DC.

Objective
For the 2011 giving season, Carousel30 worked with the Trust to create a compelling end of year giving campaign that encouraged new and returning donors to contribute to the nonprofit’s cause – restoring the monuments and memorials of America’s National Mall. For this year's campaign, the Trust had a great story to tell. In August, a 5.8 magnitude earthquake struck DC and closed the Washington Monument from the public indefinitely due to damages.

Steps Taken
The campaign drew attention to the urgent need to repair this damage by displaying powerful imagery of cracks in the Washington Monument.

We started with a fundamental understanding of when the Trust's audience likes to donate and how to best frame the message to engage them. We also understood how frequently the Trust needed to reach out with targeted email blasts to generate good response and conversion rates.

The Trust released three focused messages during the campaign:

• “Join the campaign for the National Mall this holiday season” – Dec. 12
• “Last minute ways to say happy holidays” – Dec. 23
• “2011 tax benefits of supporting the Trust” – Dec. 30

Our team developed the campaign theme, branding and graphics, HTML email and social media recommendations, as well as provided tracking mechanisms for evaluation.

Measuring Success
The 2011 End of Year Giving campaign was a success, and key performance results in comparison to 2010 include:

• 30% increase in funds donated
• 100% increase in high dollar donations
• 68% increase in average donation amount
• 268% increase in website traffic
• 274% increase in unique website visitors
• 259% increase in website pageviews