Palmetto Community Care sells nearly 1K additional tickets with Feathr

At nonprofits, there’s so much more at stake than money. But often the return on investment acts as a signal, pointing to the success marketing campaigns are having with a community.

Palmetto Community Care is an AIDS service organization whose funding primarily comes through government-sponsored grants. This is why their director of development and marketing, Richard Reams, is so focused on answering the questions around what’s working and what isn’t. Because better reporting leads to bigger grants, and bigger grants lead to greater impact.

You can hear how proud Richard is to be serving with Palmetto Community Care when he explains what sets their work apart: a comprehensive approach.

He said, “When we say it's wraparound care, it's literally everything. First, it’s prevention. But if prevention didn't work, and somebody receives a positive diagnosis in our facility, then we have peer navigators, medical staff, pharmacists, and mental health counselors who immediately meet with that person and begin providing service. And if they want, they can walk out that same day with their prescription.”

Gaining a panoramic view

“When I first came on, we weren't using marketing to drive regular donations,” Richard said. “And our event marketing was a variety of billboards, radio, social influencer partnerships, things like that.”

Their yearly event was doing well, but Richard wasn’t getting his questions answered about who their audience was composed of, or which campaigns were bringing in results.

Richard first heard about Feathr a few years back at a fundraising conference called AFP Icon. He started talking with his team about how the platform matched Palmetto Community Care’s needs, and not too long after, he realized it was exactly what he was looking for.

Richard said, “Not only did Feathr help replace our third-party contractors, but we now house everything in one place, leveraging the data that we have on various campaigns. We had multiple MailChimp accounts, multiple advertising accounts. And we were able to bring all that under one roof.”

Not only is this more cost and time effective for Richard and his team, but it’s also better at keeping their community’s personal health information private. Before Feathr, it took a lot of work to sync data between their multiple platforms.

One campaign Richard relies heavily on are tracked link campaigns, which allow him to pull any campaign into his Feathr reporting dashboard.

He said, “We do a lot of advertising on dating apps. And we're able to run a third-party tracked link campaign on Grindr and then run something more specific on Google. But then we can read them all in the Feathr dashboard and see how everything is performing and where we need to shift resources.”

Ad to promote awareness of Palmetto Community Care's clinics and services 

Not missing the trees for the forest

Now that they had a broad view of their marketing campaigns, it was time for them to zoom in on the people they were reaching.

Richard is up front that he may have a little too much fun in Feathr. Marketing doesn’t have to be boring spreadsheets and overediting tired phrases. When you begin to connect the dots with the people you’re engaging with, something shifts.

Richard said, “If you look at our Feathr account, you'll probably like, ‘man, that's a lot of segments.’ I kind of like to go in there and play around and see what's out there. You can target purchasers from previous years, or converters from previous years versus this year.”

But this audience segmentation isn’t just for the fun of it. Richard takes his learnings about what’s working and what isn’t and adjusts budgets and messages accordingly.

He said, “It's helpful to see what’s been successful and what hasn't been, but then also to create more segmented messages based on whatever somebody's behavior is online or how they interact with your various platforms.”

Beer for a good cause

“Charleston Beer Fest is an animal in and of itself,” Richard said. “We have 5,000 to 6,000 attendees every year, 300 volunteers, 60 breweries, 30 craft vendors, and 20 food trucks. So for marketing we run everything from searches to geofencing to meta retargeting, email mapping, you name it.”

This is Palmetto Community Care’s big opportunity during the year to tell their community the story of their work. They run year-round initiatives connecting with their audiences, but they can’t miss the chance to tell it from the loudspeakers, literally.

And their digital campaigns didn’t disappoint. Through Feathr email and ad campaigns, Richard and the team saw 989 additional ticket sales come in. But for Richard, that’s only half of the story. He’s always thinking about what the numbers are really saying.

Ad to drive registrations for Charleston Beer Fest 

Richard said, “And so the information that we've been able to consolidate in Feathr has done really well, not only helping us market, but also giving us data points. So it's not just the capability of the platform in terms of conversions. If you capture the data in the right way, you can leverage that data to in turn create more support, building an even bigger positive cycle.”

Taking it all to the next level

Every nonprofit has a slightly different strategy when it comes to funding. Some rely entirely on donations while others balance grants with ticket purchases. For Palmetto Community Care, funding comes primarily through grants, which is why effective reporting was their top line item.

But that doesn’t mean that that’s all he expected from a platform. Richard wanted to make the most of the tools he had on hand, and that meant taking their email strategy one step further.

He said, “The auto send and single send campaigns have been really helpful when you want to just email something based on behavior. ‘Thanks for giving, thanks for being interested, can we interest you in X, Y or Z?’ Things like that. They've been great.”

For Richard, all of this made it an easy decision when it came time to renew their Feathr license.

He said, “Using Feathr means having all of our data in one place versus spread across platforms. We also aren’t having to rely on someone else’s data anymore. When it comes to the festival marketing, we can actually see what platform performed best. And we create tracked links for our various partners, so we know what worked and what didn't. ”

“If marketing is important to what you're doing, then I would seriously consider making the investment in Feathr,” Richard said. “It saves time, it consolidates. I am my department, right? I don't have other people writing grants for me. I don't have other people helping me with marketing. I would have to have multiple other agencies or more staff to manage what I manage if I didn't have Feathr.”