Every spring the World Concern team is hard at working preparing for the annual Free Them 5K charity walk. It’s an event that raises money to prevent human trafficking and the exploitation of women and children. For 6 consecutive years, the event has grown in both size and the amount of money raised, despite regulations that limited the number of participants.

Face to Face With New Event Challenges

In 2014, World Concern ran into an unforeseeable roadback. The city put a cap on the number of people allowed to participant in the event. World Concern would no longer be able to grow the event’s size and would have to re-focus their efforts on fundraising if they wanted to continue achieving year over year growth.

In the past, World Concern had prompted participants to create peer-to-peer fundraising pages upon registration. Asking people to take an additional step after registering for the event was not ideal and World Concern had to do a lot of individual follow up to ask people to complete their fundraising pages.

Fewer Participants Raise More Money

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The release of Classy’s combined registration with fundraising pages could not have come at a better time. This new featured allowed World Concern to automatically create a peer-to-peer fundraising page for participants upon registration. World Concern was also able to pre-create the content on the pages and lay in generic text and event photos.

The automatic creation of fundraising pages was exactly what World Concern needed to overcome the restrictions the city put on the event size. They found that if supporters had a fundraising page created for them, they were much more likely to start fundraising.

Proof Is in the Numbers

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Fewer event attendees raised more money and World Concern saw a 26.81% year over year increase in the number of the online donations received. Most importantly, they acquired 1,745 new donors through peer-to-peer fundraising in two years. These are new contacts that they can build relationships with and reach out to for support in the future.

To learn more about how World Concern has grown the Free Them 5K charity run, download the full story.

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