How Circle of Life Raised $1M+ Online While Expanding Compassionate Care

When your mission is to bring compassion and dignity to the most sensitive moments in life, your fundraising platform better make things easy—for donors and staff.

That’s exactly what Circle of Life needed as they expanded their services and launched a capital campaign for a new home-based care center.

Circle of Life + 4aGC at a glance

Here’s a snapshot of their online giving success with 4aGoodCause (and yes, there’s more heartwarming goodness below):

💰Total giving: $1,041,000+ online since 2017
🏢 Capital campaign results: $12.5 million for the new Joey Feek Center for Home-Based Care (all through community donations and the Mabee Foundation)
🕊️ Giving types: Memorial gifts, monthly giving, Angel Fund giving, and the capital campaign
🎉 Event integration: Even free and ticketed events are registered through 4aGC
📈 Fundraising growth: A reflection of a growing mission—and donor trust

We connected with Kelly Horrell, Development Manager at Circle of Life, to learn how they’ve used 4aGoodCause to fuel meaningful growth, simplify donor experiences, and ultimately bring more comfort and care to more families across Northwest Arkansas.

Kelly explained the last few years at Circle of Life have had the theme of growth.

And our team was happy to sit down with Kelly to hear about how the 4aGoodCause platform can support organizations with online giving as they expand into new service areas and fundraising goals.

As Kelly said, “[4aGC is] easy to use, it’s easy to understand… it was a no-brainer to run it all through [4aGoodCause].”

You can listen to Kelly’s whole interview here with Amanda Johnson of the 4aGC team, or read through the case study below:

How Circle of Life powered meaningful growth with online giving

The Mission

Circle of Life delivers hospice and compassionate care to families across Northwest Arkansas, wherever patients call home.

Since their founding in 1992, they’ve remained laser-focused on dignity, comfort, and compassion at the end of life.

As they’ve grown and expanded their services, now over 93% of those they serve live in private homes or long-term care settings (like nursing homes or assisted living centers).

They’re passionate about meeting the people they serve — and their families — where they are—literally and emotionally.

And Kelly feels the same way in how they connect with their donors, too.

“At this time for people, they have to make so many decisions,” explains Kelly.

Many donors to Circle of Life are giving in honor of a memorial or tribute, so it can be a sensitive time for their donor base.

“And there’s so much paperwork and things to do [during this time], and if [loved ones] want to give to Circle of Life, we want to make that as easy as it possibly can be.”

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The Challenge

As demand for services soared, Circle of Life faced a good problem: growth.

They needed more staff, more training, and a new facility to support their expanding home-based care program.

Enter the Joey Feek Center for Home-Based Care—a vital new hub for supply storage, staff training, and coordination.

That meant launching a $12.5 million capital campaign that would help them secure a $2 million Challenge grant from the J.E. & L.E. Mabee Foundation.

And that meant fundraising tools that wouldn’t create friction for donors or staff.

Plus, Circle of Life runs several fundraising programs that offer deep moments of connection and support for their community. So it’s imperative that the organization has a platform that can offer a seamless fundraising experience across all initiatives, including:

• Annual giving campaigns
• Memorial giving opportunities and matching gifts
• The Angles Paying It Forward membership program that supports needs and special wishes of Circle of Life families
• Annual events, like the Circle of Life Impact Celebration
• A growing monthly giving program
• The capital campaign for the Joey Feek Center for Home-Based Care

“Being able to do online donations for the capital campaign [with 4aGoodCause] made it so easy,” says Kelly. “Our donors already know what these [donation] pages look like. So it was a no-brainer to use it for the capital campaign to keep that continuity between all our giving pages.”

The Solution

When Kelly joined the Circle of Life team about 10 years ago, Circle of Life turned to 4aGoodCause to run all their online giving—from the recent capital campaign and memorial gifts to event RSVPs.

Circle of Life’s donor base can vary from 18 years old to over 100 years old, so offering multiple payment options through 4aGC that are simple for a variety of people is crucial.

“That’s just being helpful and being there for our donors… It makes us thoughtful toward our donors. We understand that not everybody gives the same way.”

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4aGC platform made it easy for Circle of Life to:

• Accept donations online via a variety of payment methods, even for large gifts
• Track campaign totals and donor behavior in real-time
• Set up, manage, and grow a monthly giving program
• Register attendees for free events and collect emails

As Kelly put it, “It’s so easy, you just follow the template that’s there. It’s almost foolproof. It’s just immediate. For someone who is not an IT professional, I can do [set up fundraising and donation pages] and I feel accomplished when I do. And it also looks good.”

“We even use 4aGC for our events that have no cost. There’s no charge for it, but we’re still able to run registration through 4aGoodCause. We can gather their names and emails through 4aGC and tweak the platform to make it work for us.”

With 4aGoodCause, Circle of Life has raised over $1.5M in online giving since 2017.

Since starting with 4aGC in 2017, Circle of Life has increased its annual online giving by a whopping 179% by 2024. And even if you look at just the last 5 years alone, the organization’s annual online giving increased by 111% from 2020 to 2024.

Most importantly, they met (and even slightly exceeded) their fundraising goals for the Joey Feek Center, through community donations, Mabee Foundation grants, and challenge grant support — and their digital donor base continues to grow.

They also have a growing base of monthly givers.

Kelly has been incorporating messaging in her annual campaigns to educate memorial givers about Circle of Life’s monthly giving program and how donors can offer support throughout the year, and they’ve seen growth in their monthly recurring donors.

Internally, the team uses 4aGC every day.

“We run reports every day when we enter in donations into our database.” And the platform empowers even non-techies: “It’s so easy, it’s almost foolproof.”

Top fundraising tips from Circle of Life

Our team asked Kelly what she’s learned from all this growth and what she and her team will take with her into future fundraising practices.

“Through capital campaigns, it’s the people who already give to your organization that will give those big gifts… It’s not new people. It might be some new people, but the majority of them you already have as donors,” Kelly shared.

“And it’s okay to ask them for those larger gifts. They may say no, and that’s okay, but a lot of times, they say yes because it means so much to them.”

Kelly encourages teams that are newer to fundraising to start with the people who already support your organization — start with those who receive your newsletter and your volunteers.

Throughout our conversation with Kelly, she also mentioned a few practical things that have helped her team succeed with online fundraising:

• Simple, donor-friendly giving pages: Having donation pages that are familiar in style across your campaigns, along with being easy to use for a variety of donors, is important. Regarding using 4aGC’s fundraising pages, Kelly mentioned “there’s no way you can mess up on [them].”
• Personalized support: Circle of Life has benefitted from having fundraising platform support on standby to tackle tricky moments and make things easier. “I love how Ronald comes to us with ideas and says, ‘Did you know you can do this?'”
• Flexible functionality: Having one tool that solves multiple needs, from capital campaigns to free event registration, is a must for a busy, growing organization.
• Data visibility: “It’s easy to see how much has been given through each of the campaigns.”

Kelly also found it incredibly encouraging that so many people wanted to give to support Circle of Life’s larger campaign, and their team learned that their organization is truly held in high regard in their community.

And that’s one of the biggest wins.

What’s next

Circle of Life continues to build on its momentum, engaging supporters through giving circles, events, and expanding their services.

With 4aGoodCause as a partner, they’re scaling their growth with home-grown generosity.

Kelly explained that she’s excited about the new 4aGC monthly donor upgrade feature, which she plans to implement at the start of next year as she continues to grow giving programs across Circle of Life.

Want to launch a high-performing campaign like Circle of Life? Schedule a demo of 4aGoodCause and we’ll show you how.

If you’re not ready for a demo — but would love to see more real stories of nonprofit successes and unique, tested fundraising tips — sign up for the 4aGC Newsletter.