Skin Cancer Fundraiser - Cause Marketing
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
In the early spring of this year, we took an idea for a marketing and fundraising project to Cheryl Clarkson, President & CEO of SkinHealth Centers. The idea was that SkinHealth would run a series of offers through getsugar and getsugar and SkinHealth would then donate a significant amount of the sales to a charity. We would market this through getsugar, SkinHealth, 3rd party advertising and PR. We thought this would be a terrific way to raise money and awareness for a great cause, help build the business of SkinHealth, and help build the awareness of getsugar.
Cheryl loved the idea and we got to work. Cheryl had lost her sister to skin cancer and since then has been very focused on raising money for skin cancer research. For example, SkinHealth has donated a percentage of sales from all their skin care products to skin cancer research. We thought it was important to find a local skin cancer charity to work with and Cheryl agreed so she reached out to Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center and they were delighted to be the charitable recipient.
We launched the first promotion on May 30, 2007 with SkinHealth sending an email to their email list. The first offer was a choice of three services, all significantly discounted. On the day of the SkinHealth email, we did $290 in total sales, raising $125. The next day, getsugar sent out its first Dedicated Email about the special promotion. We generated $1,958 in sales that day raising $925 in donations.
Over the next month, getsugar spent $2,750 on dedicated emails to the Stuff@Night email list, Shecky's Boston email list, Boston Magazine email list, The Phoenix email list and the Boston Event Guide email list. As would be expected, we saw significant spikes in the number of visitors to the landing page as well as in sales. Using the same creative, we could then see how each list did relative to each other and the results are below:
getsugar Dedicated on 5/31/2007
(4443 sent, 2619 opens (59%), 431 click-thrus)
Stuff@Night Dedicated on 6/5/2007
(2822 sent, 690 opens (24%), 86 click-thrus)
Shecky's Boston Dedicated on 6/6/2007
(results not available)
Boston Magazine 411 Dedicated on 6/11/2007
(21808 sent, 3318 opens (15%), 354 click-thrus)
The Phoenix Dedicated on 6/12/2007
(8092 sent, 1013 opens (13%), 89 click-thrus)
Boston Event Guide Partial Dedicated on 6/26/07
(2260 sent, 596 opens (26%), 123 click-thrus)
Summary of Results
The fundraiser has been seen by over 12,000 unique people.
To date, getsugar has sold $11,398 of SkinHealth services to 117 people and together we have raised $4,400 for Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center.
getsugar has devoted over $2,000 in web development, $2,000 in advertising inventory, $2,750 in paid advertising through third party dedicated emails and $285 in credit card processing fees for a total contribution of over $7030. We have also enjoyed working with SkinHealth and the people at Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center including Dr. Arthur Sober and Dr. Tsao.
If you are interested in learning more about this fundraising project or are interested in seeing how getsugar can help your business or charity in a similar way, please contact Ben Tregoe at btregoe at getsugar dot com.