Mustard Seed: Leveraging Social Media to Maximize Year-End Fundraising

The Mustard Seed Calgary is an inner city mission that supports homeless people in Calgary. They help rebuild lives, by offering basic food, shelter, and clothing, along with employment support and spiritual guidance.

HMA has worked closely with The Mustard Seed on their Annual Giving Program to help retain, develop, and grow donor support.

The Challenge

The Mustard Seed was celebrating their 30-year anniversary in 2014. With increased media in Calgary around homelessness, it was a perfect opportunity for The Mustard Seed to engage as many people as possible to give a helping hand to those in need in their community during the holiday season.

The Solution

With plans already in place for an integrated Holiday Campaign including direct mail, email, an online landing page, and social media, HMA helped The Mustard Seed reach new heights with the 30 Days of Giving Hope Campaign. This initiative spanned from November 25th to December 24th and encouraged everyone in Calgary to do One Thing for someone in need. The campaign was developed to help build awareness by encouraging people to drop off urgently needed items, make a generous donation, volunteer their time, or share photos of a simple act of kindness.

In addition to direct mail, we utilized a combination of emails, infographics, and frequent Twitter and Facebook posts using the hashtag #givehopeyyc. All of these activities helped to create a buzz in the community, and encouraged people to support The Mustard Seed in any way they could.

The Results

The 30 Days of Giving Hope campaign was extremely successful both in garnering attention, and in raising money. Here are a few quick facts about the social media success of the campaign:

• Over 2 million impressions of the #givehopeyyc hashtag.
• More than 1,500 people retweeted or shared the message to do One Thing to help someone in need, sharing it with their own personal networks and encouraging their own friends and family to get involved.
• Followers on Twitter and Facebook increased by more than 10%.

Most importantly, The Mustard Seed increased the awareness of homelessness in Calgary and raised lots of money to help support those in need. With the help of many generous members of the community, Christmas was a little bit brighter for many more people in 2014.