BEST PIVOT CAMPAIGN OR INITIATIVE

Team

Kelsey Hake

Laura Francis-Forman

Georgie Kershaw

Canteen

Canteen Shop 2021

Finalist

Sponsored by:

Sarah Rossiter

John Friedsam

Elevate Fundraising

The critical fundraising challenge faced throughout 2020-2021 was the pandemic, particularly when the Delta variant took hold. Canteen’s flagship campaign National Bandanna Day (NBD) was first held in 1994. Traditionally, NBD supporters would order bandanna merchandise boxes and sell to their communities. Due to some strategic research, changes were made to the 2020 campaign to ensure further sustainability while navigating the challenges incurred by COVID-19.

An online P2P fundraising campaign, a giving day, and a small e-commerce channel were introduced to supplement merchandise sales. As expected, there was a massive drop in merchandise box sales due to restrictions and school closures. However, there was some success with the P2P and giving day and the e-commerce channel.

With COVID-19 continuing it was decided to further develop the ecommerce channel to enable bandanna sales direct to the supporters, reducing the reliance on face-to-face fundraising and merchandise box sales. Online orders were fulfilled by a handful of volunteers and staff from the basement of the Canteen office. In starting to develop the new strategy in 2020 and introducing Canteen facemasks, we saw sales grow significantly to $460k for the year. Then in 2021, focusing in on the strategy and developing a new e-commerce website, sales grew to $1.2M for the year.