Silver Surfers raise 38% more online

Today's post is a fantastic case study about how the so-called silver surfers can use the power of the internet to raise money,  put together by the glamorous Becs:

Christian Aid’s ‘silver surfer’ open day

The problem

Christian Aid performed a detailed analysis of their 2006 events and found that the event ‘In the footsteps of Moses’, a trek through the Egyptian Sinai desert, had not generated any income online.

The reason for this became clear when it was discovered that the age range of the participants for this event was between fifty and seventy.  Alison Gregory from Christian Aid said:

This core audience wasn’t completely familiar with the internet and we wanted to let them know all that the internet has to offer in terms of online sponsorship.

The solution

Rather than write these fundraisers off as internet fundraising ‘lost causes’, Christian Aid decided that it needed to provide them with more help than usual, and chose to invite all fourteen of their next Sinai Desert trekkers to an interactive open day at the charity’s central office.

Alison explains:

It was really easy to set up. We just included an online sponsorship session in our information morning for participants, which we do anyway as part of our communications strategy. At this session we talk about the work Christian Aid does and we all get to meet each other and then we discuss the logistics of the trip with them.

Ten out of the fourteen people we invited came – at the end we did a thirty minute session with them where we gave them lots of fundraising tips, talked about online sponsorship and demonstrated how easy it is to set up a Justgiving fundraising page.

The result

Alison reports that this particular trek raised £60,000 of which £23,000 (even excluding Gift Aid) came in online, which wouldn’t have been raised otherwise:

It was great for us because it meant that people were emailing their pages to relatives and friends all over the world, and not only getting more sponsorship but raising our profile by writing about Christian Aid in their emails

Thanks very much to Alison and Christian Aid for sharing their story, not to mention all you keen silver surfer fundraisers out there!!!

And for an extra special example, here's our very talented designer Kai showing his Gran how to make a donation online:

Showing gran how to use Justgiving.com from Kai Chan Vong on Vimeo.