How switching to Campaign Monitor and completing a key integration with Salesforce has helped the Cure Brain Cancer Foundation create near real-time engagement with subscribers and raise $1.6M (AUD) in a major campaign.
Cure Brain Cancer is the leading organization for brain cancer research, advocacy and awareness in Australia with a mission to unite the community to increase brain cancer survival and quality of life.
The patient-focused organization forges global collaborations, funds innovative research and brings world-class clinical trials to Australia to give children and adults with brain cancer access to new treatments faster. It relies heavily on email marketing to raise funds, engage its community, and promote its events.
From recruiting registrants to encouraging participants to thanking fundraisers, email plays an essential part of every communication throughout the entire event cycle. Since making the switch to Campaign Monitor from Mailchimp, email has become easier and more effective when executing campaigns for this huge event.
When making the decision to switch email service providers, Cure Brain Cancer took several factors into account when ultimately choosing Campaign Monitor:
“With the platform we were using before, everything was very manual,” said Alex Dobbing, Director of Fundraising and Development. “There was no sort of triggered automation to get our subscribers to keep engaging. We wanted to get more clever and make the most of building up our community.”
With a new more powerful tool, the nonprofit was able to increase the frequency, precision and relevance of its email campaigns including the Walk4BrainCancer event. And more automated customer journeys and triggered emails meant messaging was more personal and got sent right at the most opportune time to get subscribers to act.
Email was a big contributor to helping the organization meet its fundraising goal for the most recent edition of Walk4BrainCancer, beating its goal of $1.5 million with $1.65 million raised!
Build an email like this
Like many nonprofit organizations that rely heavily on big events to achieve their mission, Cure Brain Cancer had to adapt its strategy and get creative in the face of COVID-19. Given the circumstances, it moved to a virtual event encouraging participants to walk at their own time and pace.
While this meant the organization no longer had to plan and orchestrate multiple large-scale events, it came with its own challenges. Cure Brain Cancer wanted to preserve that sense of excitement, energy and community that came with being together while walking for a cause.
“Because it is virtual, we are having to create the community slightly different,” said Dobbing. “We’re using the word ‘you’ a lot more; it’s definitely a case of wanting people to still feel included and like they’re part of something bigger. Which can be quite difficult to do when it’s a virtual campaign. We’re sending more emails because of that, but also we wanted to be a little bit cleverer with our journeys and the way we automate engagement.”
Thanks to this adaptation, the organization has converted a huge obstacle into a new opportunity. The communications team is now able to recruit and engage participants that otherwise would have been unable or unwilling to join a physical event.
Campaign Monitor’s top-rated Salesforce email marketing integration streamlines email production for the Cure Brain Cancer Foundation and makes every email more impactful. The integration between these two powerful tools brings a suite of potent capabilities to Cure Brain Cancer, such as:
The integration makes creating emails and setting up campaigns faster and reduces the potential for human error. Because the platforms communicate and pass data back and forth seamlessly, it means the events and communications teams can stay focused on being creative and strategic.
Dobbing has the integration set to sync on an hourly basis, allowing the nonprofit to send timely, highly-personalized messages in near-real-time.
“Especially for our events, it means we can get our comms out in a very timely manner,” she said. “Before the integration, if someone signed up for an event, they might not get an email until the next day. That’s just not the kind of service that we want to provide—we want to say thank you for signing up, welcome, here’s what you need to do next immediately after they signup.”
Build an email like this
Empowered by the Salesforce integration, Cure Brain Cancer created a cross-channel participant journey for Walk4BrainCancer that generated astounding engagement rates.
The complex experience includes a multi-touch email series, invitations to join social media communities, fundraising reminders and tools, Zoom backgrounds, Facebook frames, fundraising incentives, and more.
The result: the number of inactive registrants plummeted. Nearly every person who signed up for the event raised some amount of money for the cause.
“Engagement has increased,” said Dobbing. “This year, less than 10 people signed up and didn’t raise anything out of 5000 registrants, normally it’s a couple hundred! And people raised more money per participant overall.”
Build an email like this
With our powerful yet easy-to-use tools, it's never been easier to make an impact with email marketing.
Try it for free