Nonprofits partner with students to run fundraising campaigns

Let's call April Donate-To-Your-Local-Nonprofit Month. That would be appropriate, at least, for eleven central Upper Peninsula nonprofit programs. They've partnered up with a marketing class at Northern Michigan University to run crowdfunding campaigns on Indiegogo throughout the month of April.

 

And if they all reach their goals, it'll mean more than $30,000 raised for the local organizations, which include the Great Lakes Center for Youth Development, the Upper Peninsula Animal Welfare Shelter, the Marquette County YMCA, and the Marquette-Alger College Access Network.

 

For the students, in professor Dipankar Rai's advertising and sales promotions class, it's turning out to be a beneficial experience, too.

 

"It's been challenging, but we've been learning every step of the way," says Shelby Guilbault, a student working on a campaign for the U.P. Volunteer Network. The marketing students have focused on social media to get the word out, creating and running Facebook and Twitter accounts for each campaign. Each campaign's content was created by the students, including videos, with help from their partner organizations.

 

Guilbault's been working on the "Connect the U.P." campaign, which hopes to raise $3,000 for the U.P. Volunteer Network to help maintain its online database, which matches volunteers to organizations and has been grant-funded in the past.

 

Another group is running the Marquette Alger College Access Network College Coaches campaign, raising money to help match mentors with at-risk high school students from Marquette Alternative High School, with the goal of helping the students pursue post-high school career training.

 

The Amazing Yoopers campaign is helping the Great Lakes Center for Youth Development create and run a website that will publicize stories of amazing people from the U.P.--and another GLCYD campaign, "Together We Can Change Lives," focuses on funding the youth organizations that the center supports.

 

The campaigns range from specific requests like the database to general fundraising for an organization, like at UPAWS. 

 

"We have two groups raising donations toward the general fund, one for our emergency medical fund and one for our community spay/neuter fund," says Melanie Bell, a UPAWS volunteer. "These funding groups were chosen because they are funds that we are constantly trying to increase for operations at UPAWS."

 

The two general funding campaigns are called "Help NMU Students Help Animals," which aims to raise money for the shelter's general needs and is hosting a benefit show for the shelter March 28 if you're more inclined to support the cause in person, and "Pay the Pooch People," which aims to help UPAWS make up some of its employee expenses.

 

The emergency surgery fund is called the Pink Lady Foundation, and provides emergency medical care for pets at the shelter when needed. Then, the "Love is a Four-Legged Word" campaign will help support the shelter's spay and neuter community fund, which helps local pet owners spay and neuter their pets.

 

The use of social media was a good fit for the animal shelter, which has seen a lot of success with Facebook networking in the past, says Bell. The staff there also has had success with crowdfunding in the past, through a site called FirstGiving designed for charities. 

 

That’s not the case for all of the nonprofits involved--it's a new experience for the Great Lakes Center for Youth Development, says Jordan Smeltzer, who is managing one of the center's Indiegogo campaigns for the class. 

 

"The organization GLCYD has never tried crowdfunding before, because they often rely on local donors to help support their many different initiatives," Smeltzer says.  

 

The choice of Indiegogo as a fundraising platform was made by the class, as a tool that could be easily applied to a variety of reasons to raise money. In fact, it's more commonly associated with business startups, or creative projects like movies or books. Supporters get different rewards for different levels of support, delivered at the end of the campaign.

 

"The fact that crowdfunding is oftentimes associated with start-ups/products that members can expect to use after a successfully funded campaign, this is where the challenge lies for us," says Smeltzer. "We are trying to motivate users to support a cause that is located in a very specific region."

 

They're doing that by offering rewards to Indiegogo supporters that are targeted to each campaign--like the family passes to the Marquette Maritime Museum available as part of the GLCYD campaign, or the puppy chow offered up from the UPAWS emergency surgery fund campaign.

 

And there are plenty of campaigns and rewards to choose from, including three others benefiting the YMCA of Marquette. 

 

One is the "Preserve Youth" summer camp project, which is raising funds for the Marquette Youth and Family Center's summer programs for low-income kids, many of whom couldn't attend on their own. Another is "Project Rock," which also is located at the center and offers school-aged kids the chance to learn to play musical instruments. The money raised on Indiegogo would purchase instruments for the program. Finally, the "Help the Wheels On the Bus Go Round," campaign is raising funds for field trips at the family center.

All the campaigns are using flexible funding, meaning that the organization gets however much is raised, even if the final goal isn't met.

 

So whether you're interested in supporting kids or pets--and really, who isn't?--the fundraising campaigns are offering an easy way to get involved this month and help out one or more of your local nonprofits.