Local YMCA finds 163k potential donors & program participants with Feathr

One of the most challenging aspects of nonprofit marketing is that the work never seems to end and there are multiple marketing focuses that overlap. For small and midsize organizations, marketers are asked to do everything — often at the same time. 

For the YMCA of Metropolitan Fort Worth (the Y), memberships may take priority as the summer approaches and people start hunting for a pool, or during the first few weeks of the year when they’ve committed to hitting the gym a bit more. But as nonprofits rely on donations throughout the year, fundraising must sustain the lion’s share of focus.

This is why Christy Jones, chief strategy & marketing officer at the Y, is committed to a broad range of channels and methods for connecting with her diverse local community.

Christy said, “I love that we can integrate things like geofencing our competitors. We can use email mapping for people who we consider prospects. They've come, they've tried the Y for free, they've participated. It’s about communicating through the right channels at the right time.”

From all over the place to all under one roof

Christy had previously been running a wide range of marketing campaigns. From social media to print advertising, she had her hands in everything.

“What we had been doing before was a self-managed process across multiple channels,” she said. “That included social media promotion, paid ads, but the digital was all through established ad buys — like through the newspaper or a magazine.”

She wanted to pull it all together and get a bigger lift out of digital, combining her campaigns so that they could build synergy together. And she wanted to make sure that the people who landed on her website were served ads across the web.

She said, “The thing that we found was so attractive with Feathr is it allowed us to put all of those pieces under one roof and see how those customers were working through our funnel.”

But as important as the ease of use and the added synergy through more aligned campaigns was the newfound ability to learn the nuances about her audience members — something she couldn’t do as effectively through print.

Christy said, “Now we could have that data at our fingertips — without having to go to multiple areas and source it and track it through. So we can connect the dots and say it's because of this or that. We were looking to answer the questions around what messages, what images, what tools are people responding to at a higher rate.”

Starting with the basics

A lot of people think of the Y as a gym. And so even though nearly everyone knows where their local Y is, they often have misconceptions around what it’s up to and what it has to offer them.

Christy has been in the industry for a while, so she knows the value of patience. It takes communities time to come around to new ideas — especially when the new idea is about something they thought was old news.

She said, “You can’t tell everybody everything all at once. It was really about segmenting. But instead of segmenting our people, we were segmenting our message and starting with, ‘this is who we are and this is why you should care.’”

Picking up the pace

One of Y’s bigger annual events is their turkey trot where they bring the community together to have fun outside. And every registration goes to support YMCA scholarships, which make it possible for everyone to join their local Y.

Before COVID, the trot numbers remained steady between 5,000 and 7,000 runners. Now that COVID was over and people were ready to get back out there, she wanted to make a bigger splash.

She said, “I’ll jump straight to the metrics. We saw almost 13,000 runners this year. That wasn’t all from digital, but it was more of a combination of all our campaigns running together.”

This was precisely Christy’s hope: to bring new audiences to the Y, helping them have healthy fun outside while educating them about the impact the Y is making in their community.

She said, “A lot of the awareness campaigns were trying to break that mold. We aren’t only a swim and gym facility. We’re building a community and we’re helping people meet their health and life goals. And we have free or low-cost resources to help people manage diabetes, high blood pressure, and Parkinson's.”

Learning and evolving

After asking the community to rethink what they knew about the Y, Christy shifted gears to listen in on how the community responded.

So much of marketing is about messaging. Finding the right words can make all the difference. But how do you know what’s connecting and what’s a miss? For Christy, it’s all about listening to the response.

She said, “Last year we tested childcare versus after school, and we found that childcare was pulling in the wrong audience, primarily the under-four group, which we already had a large group of. So we made an intentional decision not to use childcare in any of our messaging and instead focus on after school and out of school.”

Another big insight was around financial assistance. Everyone is looking for a deal. They don’t want to sacrifice quality, but they really don’t want to overpay.

“Our upcoming campaigns were born out of some of the things that we saw people relating to,” Christy said.

“When we served messages that focused on financial assistance, people were responding positively. Because our goal is to ensure no child is going home alone, we wanted to lean in on what connected to the target audience: affordability. We have scholarships.”

Finding the right words has helped the Y find and engage their community. And these simple online connections can have a tremendous impact in the real world.

She said, “So now when they search after school programs in Ridglea Hills, they see the Y. And that’s very much thanks to these ads and the keyword tools that we run today that we weren't running before.”

It’s time to jump in

For Christy, taking her digital campaigns to the next level was a big win. But the decision to try something new wasn’t easy for everyone.

She said, “I would encourage my peers not to approach this as a YMCA or “this is how we do it” mindset.

Sometimes we come into things and we're like, ‘well, we know X, Y, Z.’ Instead, come in curious with problems that you want to see addressed. And don't shy away from saying you don’t know enough just yet. The answers come in the process.”

It isn’t always easy gaining buy-in, and there is a time commitment to any new process, but one thing was obvious for Christy:

“We couldn't keep doing the same thing, right? The definition of insanity: keep doing the same thing, expecting a different outcome. And so we needed to take some risks.”