A California-based nonprofit, Walk With Sally (WWS), provides free mentoring and community support for children experiencing trauma through a parent, guardian, or sibling's cancer journey. Like many nonprofits, WWS relies on a couple of key annual events for the bulk of their funding and as an opportunity to nurture donors for year-round giving.

However, WWS was frustrated with both the lackluster ROI of their annual event, a peer-to-peer fundraiser, and the post-event conversion rate of attendees into year-round supporters.

Various factors contributed to the event’s poor showing, like a disconnect between its “Bowl-a-thon” name and the powerful WWS mission. This made it difficult for future outreach to associate the event with WWS’s “mentoring friendships.”

Other issues included too-easy-to-earn prizes that failed to motivate attendees’ best fundraising efforts; unclear fundraising goals; and missed opportunities to keep newly introduced supporters engaged.

Walk With Sally had two primary questions we needed to answer:

• What steps can we take to make our annual event a greater financial success?
• How can we leverage event success to increase year-round support?