How Chamber of Mothers Raised $61,852 in 17 days

Two women cheering. One has a megaphone

$61,852 raised in 17 days. 

That is what my client, Chamber of Mothers, achieved with their recent Mother's Day Campaign. 

Chamber of Mothers is a national nonprofit organization uniting mothers as advocates for paid family leave, maternal health and affordable child care for all American mothers. 

To say they are a dream client is an understatement 😍

Today, I want to walk you through how this small, but mighty team raised $61,852 in just 17 days. 

First, context is everything. Here are some rough stats about the organization. 

  • Less than 3 years old

  • All volunteer team

  • Instagram following: 65k

  • Email list 7k

Next, just like when you go to paint a room, most of the hard work happens in the prep work

We kicked off planning for the Mother's Day campaign in March of 2024 for a April 30th launch - roughly 8 weeks for the warm up phase. 

As the campaign strategist and email copywriter for Chamber of Mothers - I'm lucky because they are already a content machine producing 5-6 posts to their Instagram and LinkedIn profile + two plus emails every week. This means they don't have to do what I call, "Climb up from the bottom of the hill." They are already halfway up - which is really helpful. 

Like in any warm-up phase I have two goals:

  1. Get people to engage with the content and

  2. Grow the audience. 

The Warm Up Phase (Weeks 1-7)

For Chamber of Mother's warm up phase - we launched a two engagement pieces: a Spotify Rage Playlist for Moms and a Mother's Day Gift Guide.

To create the playlist, I sourced a list of songs from moms that they like to play when they feel like screaming into a pillow. Spotify makes it super easy to set this up (for free!). From there, I set up an opt-in page in Mailchimp and a simple email automation series once someone signed up as a new subscriber. 

The playlist was an easy and fun thing to share across social pages and to our our email list. 

To create the Mother's Day gift guide - we took a two pronged approach. I asked the leadership team what they really wanted for Mother's Day and then we also used it as an opportunity to reach out to mom influencers. This was a great way to open the door and start a relationship with some new people in a way that wasn't asking them for anything too hard (eg: money). 

Both engagement pieces had high engagement rates and we converted hundred of new subscribers.

The other big thing we worked on in the warm-up phase was securing a $30k match donor. After some outreach, the company Baked by Melissa became our official partner. It also influenced our campaign theme to be: Mothers deserve to have their (cup)cake and eat it too.

The Campaign (Weeks 8-9)

We decided to run a two week campaign (in 2023 we did 7 days) this year that included:

  • A hard copy appeal

  • 7 email blasts to the entire list

  • Social posts

  • Personalized outreach by peer-fundraisers

The main ask:

For all pieces of content - storytelling was a centerpiece. We told stories of individual mothers who had been directly impacted by their lack of paid family leave, maternal health, or affordable childcare. We also told stories about moms not needing to choose between one benefit over the other - that they deserve to have it all. We also told stories about how this work will take all of us - which was the perfect invitation to join us.

In the end, here were the results:

  • 238 gifts

  • $61,852 raised

  • $114 average gift size

  • 98% of gifts were made online

  • 61% of revenue came from off-line gifts

Post-Campaign (Week 10+)

Now that the campaign has wrapped, we’ve welcomed an onboard all new donors via a thank you note and a new donor welcome sequence.

Additionally, we have sent hand-written notes and a sticker that says “The Mothers Will Save Us All” too all donors we have a physical address for.

From here, and over the summer - donors will continue to receive our ongoing communication and messages of impact. We also plan to run a mini campaign to all of the donors who gave $1k or less to join the monthly giving program The Matriarchy.

The plan is to keep folks warm over the next 6 months in preparation for the end-of-year giving season.

Lessons learned:

Overall, the campaign was a success - meeting and exceeding it’s goal.

✅ Emails work. Every single time we sent an email - donations came in. Period.

❌ While we met our goal, it was close. For the end-of-year campaign coming up in December, I will insist that they lean on their local chapters to participate as peer-fundraisers.

✅ Stories work - 1:1 storytelling where the reader can see themselves in your message - this is what worked best.

✅ Having a match donor was a motivating incentive for donors to be able to unlock 2x the impact.

❌ Chamber of Mothers has a decent list size, but it currently doesn’t have a ton of segmentation built out. For the future, I could see tweaking the messages by location to be really effective

❌ Retention of 2023 donors to 2024 donors was low, but we are still investigating the numbers. One hypothesis is because in 2023 we asked for monthly donors (who are still giving) vs. one-time donors.

✅ While we didn’t get a lot of checks, I know the hard copy appeal reinforced the ask to our donors. Next time I will put a unique tracking code on the remit envelope so we can see which gifts came from people snapping a photo on their phone and making a gift online by way of the hard copy appeal.


What do you think? Have any questions about running your next fundraising campaign?

With Out in the Boons, you get both the team to make the plan and do 90% of the work for you. Win-win.