United Way Responds to Tragedy
Founded
1887
How we helped
Text-to-Donate
Online Giving
Donor Reporting
Segment
Social Advocacy
Size
Small
$526,755
total raised and counting
3,645
total gifts received from donors
$144.50
average gift size for event
“Without MobileCause, we wouldn’t have been able to raise over $500,000 for victims of the Virginia Beach Mass Shooting.”
– Kelsey Mohring, Senior Director, Resource Development & Marketing, United Way of South Hampton Roads
Challenge
On the afternoon of Friday, May 31, 2019, a disgruntled city employee of Virginia Beach fatally shot twelve and wounded four individuals in a mass shooting within the city’s municipal building. At 6 a.m. the next morning, the City of Virginia Beach contacted United Way of South Hampton Roads needing an online giving page and text-to-donate capabilities by 10am that day for national news features. United Way of South Hampton Roads had to work quickly if they were going to take advantage of the national news coverage for funding.
Solution
Fortunately, United Way of South Hampton Road’s Senior Director of Resource Development and Marketing, Kelsey Mohring, was already familiar with MobileCause. She worked diligently that morning to setup an online giving page and text-to-donate, “It would have been impossible to provide a text-to-donate link to the City of Virginia Beach. Because we have MobileCause, we were able to get a form and text-to-donate keyword and shortcode up and running in minutes.” Ultimately, Kelsey’s work paid off, as the text-to-donate feature and exposure on national news collected hundreds of thousands for the victims and their families.
Impact
United Way’s staff embedded the same online giving form on the City of Virginia Beach and other corporate sponsors’ websites. This made the entire campaign cohesive and easier to track funds. Kelsey found “it was really easy to export the data on a regular basis, so we could track donations, tell companies how much their employees raised, and feed the donor data into our CRM system.” By using their own MobileCause donation form they easily tracked results, captured new donors’ data and reported to each corporate sponsor their results. The ease of setting up the donation page, text-to-donate, and reporting helped United Way quickly collect funds for victims and their families.
What is DFS?
Our team of Digital Fundraising Strategists have experience in nonprofit management and are power users of MobileCause. Using best practices and extensive fundraising, marketing and communications experience, the team provides fully-integrated development and setup of your campaigns. Enabling you to spend your time executing programs and connecting with your constituents. We create and implement campaigns for you so you can focus on running your organization.
United Way of South Hampton Roads
United Way of South Hampton Roads: United Way of America has almost 1,200 local offices throughout the country. The South Hamptons Roads office provides services to the disadvantaged in the South Hampton Roads region of Virginia. Some of their services include community resources for veterans and active duty military members, community investments, and educational opportunities for children.
