Alpha Grand Rapids’ Walk for Life Event Reaches 122% of Fundraising Goal With Bloomerang
About
Alpha Grand Rapids has been serving Grand Rapids, Michigan since 1985. Originally, they were Alpha Women’s Center of Grand Rapids and services focused mainly on serving women.
The organization acts as a pregnancy center guiding women through unexpected or crisis pregnancies. Alpha Grand Rapids also offers its clients free pregnancy tests, STD testing, ultrasounds, and long-term care consisting of pregnancy education and parenting classes, English as a second language classes, and a GED completion program. Most of their clients are women living in poverty or women who don’t speak English as a first language.
In the last couple of years, Alpha Grand Rapids has expanded its services and started on the process of creating Alpha Men’s Center. This service expansion will allow the organization to serve whole families in their community with more individualized care for clients regardless of gender.
The challenge
Alpha Grand Rapids hosts an annual fundraising event called Walk for Life. They used a fundraising platform specifically designed for pregnancy centers, but its tools made online giving difficult. This led to donors giving cash and checks the day of the event, or making pledges that often went unfulfilled. As Kalie Bunce, Marketing Director of Alpha Grand Rapids, put it, manual processing led to “a lot of chaos and extra work.”
The software company they were working with lacked important functionality (like the ability to add their branding elements to the donation form). With Alpha Grand Rapids’ fast rate of growth, Kalie noticed they were quickly outpacing the capabilities of that software. They switched their donor database to Bloomerang and followed Bloomerang’s recommendation that they try Qgiv for their online fundraising.
The solution
Kalie reached out to Qgiv for a product demo and the sales team showed her a different level of functionality than what she’d had with her previous fundraising software. Kalie loved that Qgiv’s donation forms were customizable to match Alpha Grand Rapids’ website. “All the different things that Qgiv allows us to do have helped us look more professional, promote ourselves better, and give our participants a better experience as they’re fundraising for us.”
Qgiv helped spread the word about the Walk for Life event with the ability to send outbound emails to their constituents and text links to their event website using Mobile Suite. The addition of a mobile-optimized website also helped because their old event page was not mobile friendly. Kalie also found greater success through the personalized attention Qgiv’s Customer Success Managers offer.
“I feel like Afton is my best friend around walk time, because I know I can always call her up, we can talk through stuff, she can jump in and show me how things work. It just makes it that much more motivating to push this event out and get it started. She offers new ideas so we can keep working at making the event better. It feels great to actually have the support to do that,” Kalie said.
The results
Alpha Grand Rapids went from raising 25% of their Walk for Life funds online to almost 99% of funds raised online thanks to the transition to Qgiv. This year, the event saw an amazing 325 attendees and raised more than it ever had: $61,143.18. That’s 122% of their goal! The organization attributes the growth in participation and fundraising dollars to Qgiv’s ease of use, the ability to create event-specific branding to increase recognition of the Walk for Life, and improved communication with the email and text fundraising tools offered by Qgiv. “The Walk for Life not only met, but exceeded its fundraising goal, and I really do feel like that had a lot to do with Qgiv and having fundraising software that worked and looked nice and made people want to take this event seriously,” Kalie said.
Now, Alpha Grand Rapids can easily spread the word about their event to constituents using Qgiv’s email and text tools. The event went from attracting a traditionally older crowd to bringing in younger families. Qgiv was the starting point of spreading the word and making the landing page for the event look good. Before, they didn’t have the option to include a video or pictures on their event page. Those options are what sell the event now. “It makes people want to get involved, so that’s been a huge thing for helping us grow our attendance, which then grows our funds raised.”
“The Walk for Life not only met, but exceeded its fundraising goal and I really do feel like that had a lot to do with Qgiv and having fundraising software that worked and looked nice and made people want to take this event seriously. It makes people want to get involved, so that’s been a huge thing for helping us grow our attendance, which then grows our funds raised.”
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