Of the 200 Feeding America foodbanks across the country, 10 are in North and South Carolina. As an advocate to raise awareness around food inequities in these states, Feeding the Carolinas was developed as a 501c(3), state association of these Feeding America foodbanks. A portion of Feeding the Carolinas work goes toward raising resources (financial and human capital) and providing disaster relief and support.
Recently, we spoke with Mike Darrow, executive director of Feeding the Carolinas, about the organization’s Legal Feeding Frenzy campaign.
Learn how this two-person organization was able to triple their annual event’s fundraising goal by using peer-to-peer fundraising techniques.
What is the background on the Legal Feeding Frenzy campaign?
The Legal Feeding Frenzy campaign was in motion prior to Mike coming on board in 2018. He soon learned that North Carolina’s Attorney General’s office was a big supporter of this annual campaign. They have been phenomenal at rallying the legal community to see who could raise the most money and volunteer the most hours, etc. to support food banks.
During the initial years of this campaign, money raised was processed through a designated food bank’s online donation platform. While donors were able to identify where they wanted their funds to go, it proved to be a challenge because the funds were first processed through the hosting foodbank and then allocated later. It was a lot of additional work for the designated food bank.
Mike felt that this needed to be a role that Feeding the Carolinas should take on. It alleviated stress from individual foodbanks and could make for a more seamless process.
“I reached out to my members and asked, ‘what online fundraising platforms are you using?’ and Inter-Faith Food Shuttle uses 4aGoodCause—and they were singing the praises of it.”
The Legal Feeding Frenzy is built around fundraising teams and because of that, they all need to have their own fundraising pages—not only the law firm itself, those with multiple locations across the states, those wanting individual fundraising pages for each site, etc.
As Mike got into the 4aGoodCause platform, he loved the ability to provide:
- Individual (or team) fundraising pages
- The thermometer for a visual to see how far you were away from your goal(s)
- Videos for individual pages
- A leaderboard to show which teams and individuals are in the lead
In all, Feeding the Carolinas created about 70 different fundraising pages for its 2020 Legal Feeding Frenzy campaign. This was a great way to get many groups of individuals involved in raising money.
So, just how successful was it?
To put things into perspective, the 2020 campaign launched in March—right in the middle of the global pandemic—with a goal of $50,000. As the world shifted, in-person events and work sites shut down and specific food necessary toiletries became scarce, it was anyone’s guess how successful they would be in the midst of a pandemic.
The good news? Feeding the Carolinas shattered their goal and ended up raising $150,000 in one month’s time.
While they found that lawyers couldn’t volunteer their time (due to COVID-19) and food as much as they did in the past, they stepped up and made financial contributions. During our interview, Mike mentioned, “Because we had that platform—because we had 4aGoodCause and the fundraising pages—it was seamless. We went to totally virtual instantly.”
How did the competition factor play into your campaign’s success?
According to Mike, being able to see the status of funds raised on the firms’ pages, team pages, etc., made it fun from a competition standpoint. They also used social media to get everyone involved, provided awards and gave attorneys and firms incentives for spreading the word.
What was the process in getting this P2P campaign set up?
To their credit, Feeding the Carolinas had each firm register for the competition and from there, they created their individual fundraising pages. Because templates were pre-set, this was easy to do in a matter of minutes. While they could have individuals and firms create their own pages, Feeding the Carolinas chose to create them on their behalf so they could keep naming conventions consistent. It also gave them a great touchpoint – a nice marketing tool – to connect with teams and firms once their pages were ready. They used this as an opportunity to talk them through goals and provide additional ideas for successful fundraising.
Feeding the Carolinas established a great rapport with the Attorney Generals Office, the North Carlina Bar Association and the young lawyers groups—they made sure these partner organizations and advocates had the right information to be successful in getting everyone involved. Establishing co-chairs at each of these organizations also helped in this peer-to-peer process.
Feeding the Carolinas just completed their 2021 Legal Feeding Frenzy campaign. This year was even more successful, raising more than $200,000 for hunger relief!
We are grateful to Feeding the Carolinas for using the 4aGoodCause platform and tools to make their annual P2P fundraising campaign a success.
For more insight, tips and advice on what continues to make this annual campaign successful, view the full interview with Mike of Feeding the Carolinas.
Interview with Mike Darrow of Feeding the Carolinas (24 minutes)
