UGA Miracle: Our Hybrid Event, Fundraising Successes & More!
All Miracle Network Dance Marathon programs are expected to follow COVID-19 guidelines and the rules and regulations of their campus. If you are unsure, connect with your campus advisor and/or administrators.
Written by UGA Miracle 2020-2021 Executive Director, Allison Doherty, and Finance Director, Reece Baker:
Although COVID-19 forced UGA Miracle to operate in a heavily virtual setting, our fight for the kids did not waver in the slightest. After seeing the incredible joy and laughter at Dance Marathon, paired with the $1.427 million that we raised, it is evident that we were still able to safely continue making miracles for our hospital!
Our 26th annual Dance Marathon took place virtually on February 20th at 12:00 PM through February 21st at 2:12 PM. The event was streamed via Zoom Webinar, which was emailed to all participants who registered. Our 26.2-hour event included fun activities from color group wars and fundraising to family stories, live music, and so much more, all of which were enjoyed from the Zoom.
See our timeline and detailed plan of action here:
Staying Fundraising Focused:
Being that most of our in-person activities were going to be watch-party style, it was a concern that in-person participants wouldn’t have enough to do and would quickly get tired of the constant fundraising. However, that’s where our event being hybrid helped out because we already had to plan hours worth of engaging content for those that would be joining us virtually.
From the live stream links to participant guides to individual pages for things like virtual color group wars, all aspects of our event were centrally located on one website. The organization of our event allowed us to keep members engaged because they weren’t having to do extra work to find resources, they knew exactly where they had to go to find out what we were doing.
During the daytime, we made sure to break up fundraising with cause-connected moments like family stories, silly and fun activities like TikTok challenges, and entertaining moments like the concert we had at the end of day one. During the night hours, we wanted our members to completely take their brains off of fundraising with their donors asleep. Therefore, throughout the night we had fun content like a pageant, a cooking class, a Netflix party, Zumba, and more, which allowed people to take a break from a long day of raising money.
“We can’t hang out with our families in-person, we can’t have a full-capacity DM where a thousand people fill the room, we can’t do so many things because of the harsh realities of the pandemic–but we can come together for 26.2 hours and fundraise for our hospital and create miracles for these kids.”
Challenges We Faced:
Our biggest challenge for planning this event was figuring out the best way to educate and inform all of our members and participants on what to expect for DM2021. When shifting our event virtually for the first time ever, while also moving away from normal traditions, it was predicted that we would experience lower participation, confusion, technical difficulties, etc. To mitigate these issues, we came up with ways to not only equip our leadership team for the new format but also all those who planned to attend the event from a participant standpoint. We hosted required “All Participant DM Meetings” for everyone to join, where we ran through the entirety of the event from the timeline and activities, to the many ways that you could engage at home safely. See below for resources we used.
Fundraising in Action:
We showed our members how to pull lapsed donor reports from DonorDrive to find the emails of their donors, and from there shared a template with them that they could edit with specific information like which position they held, what year in miracle they were, how far away they were from their goal, etc. Since you cannot see the email of a Facebook Donor on DonorDrive, we encouraged people to look at their Facebook fundraisers to see who donated to them and to send them a direct Facebook message with the same template. We especially emphasized donors from the past year, but for those who have been in the organization for years, all-time donors also received emails. We encouraged this starting two weeks out from our marathon and saw tremendous success with an encouraging amount of revenue coming to our program before our event. See our end of year email templates here.
During the event, we had four planned pushes throughout the 26.2 hours:
- Push 1 @ 2:05 PM: Another Day, Another Dollar / $38 in 38 minutes
- *Push 2 @ 5:00 PM: Go The Distance / $98 in 98 minutes
- Push 3 @ 8:00 PM: ForTeleKids / $24 over the next hour/remainder of the night
- *Push 4 @ 9:30 AM: Champion Today / reach your goal by the end of DM!
- Push 5 @ 11:30AM (“Emergency”): Finish Strong / raise $26.2 in 26.2 minutes
*denotes dollar for dollar matching used during these pushes
Something we noticed in the past was that participants would wait until matching hours to raise money, which got the event off to a poor fundraising start. Therefore, this year we were strategic in finding other ways to match. While we did not have funds for another entire hour, during both Push 1 and Push 2 we announced that random Facebook donations would be matched. This encouraged people to post on Facebook during two comparatively low engagement times for fundraising, which also allowed us to still have the buzzword of matching, while not having to break the bank as we were able to use much smaller amounts for these pushes.
Going with the importance of Facebook, we wanted our members to get the most out of their Facebook fundraisers for DM. Many people do not see results anymore after a long year of simply making an update to their Facebook fundraiser. Therefore, we came up with tips and tricks to maximize your Facebook fundraiser while bumping it up in the algorithm. This included making a post sharing your fundraiser and tagging past Facebook donors, which allows all of their friends to see your fundraiser. We also included tagging friends, family, etc. in the comments of your DM post in order to give the post more engagement and so it would show up on other people’s feeds. Finally, and what proved most effective, was encouraging people to direct message their DM FB post to their friends list. Many times your friends may not see the posts you make on their feed, but they are guaranteed to get a notification if you send them a chat.
One thing that was crucial to our success was making adjustments at the end of day one of our event. While our total ended up blowing away our expectations, we did not see as much success on day one as we wanted. Some of these ideas included restructuring our initial pre-DM thank you email templates that were mentioned above. We tweaked these emails to be relevant to the day-of DM and encouraged members to send them to 5 donors on the morning of day two. Each exec member was also tasked to create a segmented texting plan for the morning, stewarding those who raised over $50 during the event already and encouraging those in the $0-$50 range to join our cause in our final hours. One key part of this texting plan was ending the texts with a question so people felt like they were being asked to respond.
Keeping Up with Our Participants:
To ensure participants were engaged and enjoying the event, we came up with fun ways to share the DM experience with them. We sent people “DM In A Box,” which was a branded package filled with miracle goodies from the event t-shirt and bib to our hospital band, Children’s merchandise, and so much more. We then encouraged users to tag @ugamiracle and share their box on social media. In addition, we had participants post videos performing the Morale Dance using the hashtag “#MoraleMania21.” We also asked people to send in videos of them and their friends participating in DM to a Dropbox we created for a chance to be featured in our event recap video.
To help prep participants for DM2021, we hosted a “Miracle Week” to countdown the final days leading up to Dance Marathon, including Miracle Monday, Trivia Tuesday, Why Wednesday, Throwback Thursday, and FTK Friday.
Overall, the biggest thing that we think worked for us this entire year was making our members feel supported, within each level of the organization. If your top leadership members are making sure they are keeping their Exec Teams happy, then those Exec members will pass that on to their leadership team, and then your leadership team can provide a good experience for your committee members, participants,and so on. Fundraising, our hospital, the kids – all of those things are very important, but you can’t lose sight of these college students who are taking time out of their four years to be a part of something special. If you don’t steward them and show them that you care, how can you expect them to care for our cause?
Written by UGA Miracle 2020-2021 Executive Director, Allison Doherty, and Finance Director, Reece Baker