How The Children’s Haven Raised $13,000 With One Peer-to-Peer Fundraiser

The Children’s Haven is committed to promoting the health and happiness of children impacted by abuse and neglect. The organization, which serves children in foster care, offers programs designed to increase children’s safety and improve their educational, social and emotional functioning.

The organization began in 1993 with a small group of volunteers. Now, The Children’s Haven has nine staff members and 140 volunteers that serve 350-400 children annually. With this kind of growth, The Children’s Haven recognizes the value of tools like Network for Good’s donor management system in successful fundraising.

Healthy Competition Made Easy With QR Codes and Peer-to-Peer Fundraising

Each fall, The Children’s Haven hosts a sCAREcrows for Kids fundraiser, where people purchase “plots” at a local retail area and design kid-friendly scarecrows to display on them.  Using Network for Good’s  ticketing function made it easy for the organization to communicate with participants before, during, and after the fundraiser while raising record-setting funds. “It was super easy to communicate with them  and send them correspondence,” The Children’s Haven’s Director, Marcie Carter, said. “Some even added donations at their time of purchase!”

The Children’s Haven used our all-in-one software to email each person after they purchased a plot to thank them. They shared the opportunity to use our system’s peer-to-peer capability to get votes for their creative scarecrow display.

Each person could create a unique QR code for their display that took users straight to a corresponding Network for Good fundraising page to vote and donate to the cause. Each dollar donated equaled one vote. The contest winners were announced at a barbecue and beer festival on Halloween.

In the end, the winner raised $8,000, and the organizations acquired several hundred new donors through the fundraiser. According to Marcie, using Network for Good’s professional and transparent platform made their fundraising easier and more effective:

“It made it really easy for us to collect donations there and easy for people to give. And it was really hands-off…administratively, super easy. All we did was create the event page for selling tickets, the correspondence that would follow, and then making it available for them to set up their own peer-to-peer. And then we just encourage fundraising with healthy competition. We’re really impressed with how easy it made this kind of funding.”

This year, The Children’s Haven’s leaders anticipate easily raising $20,000 from their sCAREcrows for Kids event. And with the support of Network for Good, there’s no telling how high that number will go in the future.

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Photo courtesy of Cherokee Children’s Haven

Published: October 26, 2021