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Year End Donations Fund Running Water

Case Study

Year-End Fundraising

USA Basketball Foundation

Harnessing the power, influence, and global reach of USA Basketball to advance society through a lifetime commitment to communities, players, families, coaches, and fans.

The Challenge

The USA Basketball Foundation (USABF) leverages the sport to improve the well-being of youth, women, and minorities, both physically and mentally.
 
Besides camps, clinics, and open gyms, Colorado-based USABF also offers mentoring and event scholarships to young women who are interested in a sports career.
 
Fielding a team of one, USABF faced a notable capacity constraint for their year-end fundraising. This included a need to develop campaign strategy and drive execution.
 
This constraint also made it a challenge to coordinate with stakeholders at USA Basketball to acquire marketing assets including story, photo, and video content.

 

So when USABF engaged with CauseMic, they had three questions for us:

  • What can we develop as a year-end theme to carry us into 2024, which also happens to be an Olympics year?
  • How can we gather the right stories while “right-sizing” our campaign?
  • How can we find new donors to support our ongoing efforts?

 

Our Solution

With the benefit of CauseMic being treated as a trusted extension of their team:

  • We partnered with USABF to produce the “Developing Champions” core messaging, for not only year-end use but also 2024 efforts ahead of the Paris Olympics.
  • We reached out to client-supplied names for interviews and to gather assets for marketing content.
  • We wrote and designed emails and a direct mail piece to optimize USABF’s “Developing Champions” efforts.
  • To find new donors, we partnered with USA Basketball staff to communicate using various email lists within their organization; plus, we updated USA Basketball’s main website with Giving Tuesday and Year-End banner ad appeals.

The Results

26%

increase in new donors in the final two months of the year

The entire year-end goal was surpassed within the same week as Giving Tuesday (a 36% increase year-over-year)

* Most of this was raised during June 2023 in spite of (a) the U.S. debt-ceiling talks creating greater economic uncertainty, and (b) following a year when nonprofit spending online was down 4% year over year

“Year-end fundraising can be completely unpredictable and challenging for many non-profits, but for the USA Basketball Foundation this was our best year to date; and that had a lot to do with the support, collaboration, and insight received from the CauseMic crew (huge shoutout to Andrew, Karla, Abby, and Franny—the Dream Team!).

I am extremely thankful for our partnership and look forward to generating more revenue so that the USAB Foundation can continue to positively impact the lives of the communities we serve.”

Jennifer Lynne Williams
Chief Development Officer

How we can help you maximize year-end fundraising

Whether year-end or year-round, successful fundraising campaigns start with an actionable plan. Whatever your constraints, we can help plan and execute yours!  

A collage of CauseMic leadership