HomeAid Georgia: Doubling Impact with Click & Pledge Peer-to-Peer Fundraising

We got the honor of speaking with Melissa Lowry of HomeAid Georgia - a longtime Click & Pledge customer. Their team used our peer-to-peer tools to far surpass their campaign goals. Check out what Melissa had to say about that campaign, why Click & Pledge is such a key partner, and what advice she has for other nonprofits preparing for a fundraising campaign.

About HomeAid Georgia

HomeAid Georgia's mission is to help people experiencing or at risk of homelessness build new lives through construction, community engagement, and education. We do that by building and renovating housing and facilities on behalf of other community nonprofit service providers — leveraging the building industry's resources to save those organizations about 30 to 50 percent of the total cost of construction projects.

Why Click & Pledge

What originally drew our organization to the platform is the fact that you had the best pricing and most options for a small nonprofit. We also love that it integrates with Salesforce — it definitely makes our day-to-day more efficient.

We use Click & Pledge for all our payment processing. In my role particularly, I rely on it heavily for the campaigns and forms to collect monetary donations for all of our fundraising efforts, including event registration. We've also invested in the Swiper1 to be able to collect real-time donations at events, which has helped us tremendously increase our fundraising numbers — capturing donations we may not have otherwise received. We definitely love the Swiper1.

Reimagining the Essentials Drive

One of HomeAid's community engagement initiatives is our annual Essentials Drive, which helps provide essential items to families experiencing or at risk of homelessness. Many parents are forced to choose between purchasing diapers and wipes or putting food on the table.

This year, we're celebrating our 25th anniversary, and we wanted to make an even bigger impact. Traditionally, we've asked our community partners and supporters to collect physical donations like diapers and wipes. But this year we completely reimagined the campaign into a peer-to-peer fundraising drive so we could purchase those items at wholesale pricing and maximize every dollar raised.

Setting Up the Peer-to-Peer Campaign

Using the peer-to-peer platform was completely new to us, and the whole team at Click & Pledge made it so easy and manageable — meeting with me several times and taking the time to really understand our goals and how we wanted the campaign structured.

Our goal was to recruit 25 company teams to each raise $2,500 over the course of a month, with a total collective fundraising goal of $65,000. It was important to us that each team have their own customizable fundraising page and link, while allowing all of their efforts to roll up into our main Essentials Drive campaign so we could track progress in real time.

The peer-to-peer platform gave us everything we needed. The functionality was amazing. We were able to execute the campaign. It was really user-friendly, and the platform worked seamlessly both within Click & Pledge and Salesforce.

Results: Doubling Our Impact

Using the platform, we actually surpassed our goal of $65,000 and doubled our impact. We were able to distribute over 509,000 baby essential items to families across Georgia.

Easy Enough for Everyone

Whenever you want to do a large fundraising campaign, it can be scary. You don't really want to be asking a lot of people for money, and when you're setting up individual pages, you're dealing with people who may not feel comfortable using them. But with Click & Pledge's peer-to-peer platform, it's very user-friendly. It really did make the whole process easy: collecting donations, customizing pages, personalizing them so it feels like it's coming from that company — not just a generic fundraising page.

I would say that anybody wanting to do a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign —it is definitely doable. Click & Pledge provides the tools to customize it and adapt to whatever your needs are.

Advice for Other Nonprofits

For any other nonprofits thinking about doing something of this magnitude who may kind of shy away: as long as you get out the mission, the stories, and what you're trying to accomplish, a lot of people will get behind you and want to help. It's just being able to get the message out there — and Click & Pledge makes it really easy to do that with the tools they provide.

Exceptional Support

Whenever you have an issue or need help, there's a human there to help you. Kate has been absolutely amazing — meeting with me several times to get this campaign to work the way we wanted, really listening to understand what I was trying to accomplish and helping me set it up to work the way we needed it to.

And not only meeting with Kate for training sessions — with live support, I'm able to just log into Zoom and get help right away, in real time. If something isn't working correctly for, say, our golf tournament form and I can't figure it out, I know I can go to that Zoom link and get helped immediately. I'm not waiting 24 hours or days to get the help I need.

HomeAid Georgia Recommendation

For anybody considering Click & Pledge: just do it. The platform has really adapted throughout the years with our needs as those needs have changed. There's always support. And if you want a platform that's going to cover almost all — if not all — the functionality you need, the customer support and the people at Click & Pledge alone will make all the difference.

That's one of the reasons we've stayed with Click & Pledge so long and will stick with them — because of the customer support, and because if there's something we want the platform to do that it's not doing yet, the team takes that into consideration and does everything to make it possible or work around it so we can still get the results we want.