How Backpack Buddies Raised 60% More Annual Revenue using Fundraising KIT

With one in five children in British Columbia (BC) living below the poverty line, the province has one of the highest child poverty rates. More than 163,000 children in BC experience food security and don’t have enough to eat outside school days. 

Longtime BC residents, Emily-Anne and Joanne, recognized this need in 2012. Together, they started Backpack Buddies—a nonprofit that supports children from inner city school districts in Vancouver, BC, with bags of food on the weekend. 

Challenge

For the better part of a decade, the Backpack Buddies team has been supplying backpacks filled with food items to over 4,000 children each weekend. This was until the pandemic threatened to halt their progress and goodwill abruptly. As more children began studying from home, the weekend child hunger gap became a 7-day hunger gap, and more funds were needed to supply even more backpacks to more children.

With school closures, changes in working conditions, and public health restrictions, the team had to figure out how to work efficiently and raise more money to meet the increasing demand for their services. They needed to apply a targeted fundraising approach to their Back-to-School campaign to better secure more and larger contributions.

Solution

Understanding the stakes at hand, Emily-Anne and the Backpack Buddies team turned to Fundraising KIT’s suite of data-driven tools to gather specific insights about their existing donors. External donor prospect research would have cost them more time and money than they could afford, but with KIT, they could easily identify lapsed or active donors who would be ideal for their Back-to-School campaign. 

Using KIT’s Donor Score, the team ranked existing contacts based on their historical levels of engagement. Knowing that Donor Score factors in the average total amount of donations the contact makes each year, the number of years that they’ve been a donor, and whether their average donation amount has increased organization in the past year made the Backpack Buddies team confident in these rankings. 

Next, the team segmented their most engaged donors into a list and used KIT’s Campaign Recommendations to ensure that these contacts were ideal prospects for the Back-to-School campaign. The team sent personalized fundraising appeals to encourage these prospects to give and increase their contributions to meet rising demands. 

They didn’t stop there. Since these contacts were among their most engaged donors, the team used KIT’s Likelihood to Recur insights to determine how likely these contacts were to become recurring donors. They encouraged donors with a higher chance of becoming recurring donors to join their monthly giving program.

Results

Backpack Buddies’ decision to use Fundraising KIT’s tools and insights proved to be very timely, cost-efficient, and ultimately impactful. The team raised a record campaign revenue of $150,000 and expanded their fundraising revenue stream by securing 200 new recurring donors.

“By focusing on donors who are most likely to give, [Fundraising KIT] allowed us not to have to worry about excessive, unsuccessful donor communications, [that’s] one less thing to worry about.”

Emily-Anne King, Vice-President & Co-Founder of Backpack Buddies

Despite the pandemic, the nonprofit saw a 60% increase in its annual revenue to mark one of its best fiscal years in recent times. The team has since expanded its reach to Vancouver Island to supply more backpacks to more children in inner-city schools. They continue to use KIT’s data-driven tools to make better decisions, target more donors and raise more funds.

Find More Major and Recurring Donors within Your Database

Fundraising KIT is a data-driven toolkit that helps nonprofits raise more for their cause. By Integrating KIT with your nonprofit database, you can identify supporters ready to give, segment donors for targeted communications, and track fundraising progress, all while saving time and resources to increase revenue.