Break the Cages: First steps towards fundraising

From zero to hen hero🐥
Our first year-end campaign in Serbia

In 2018th, when I attended my first CARE and listened to my first fundraising sessions, especially Jiri, I got caught up with all the possibilities. We were near the end of our Fur Free Serbia campaign. As the deadline for the fur ban got close, more tasks arrived and we didn't start implementing fundraising nor engagement in a deep, more structured way. We were small group of a few volunteers who won the fur ban, and what a hard work that was, I got to say!

It wasn't until years later, when I quit my job and started to work full time for the animals, that this idea will come up again in my mind and the opportunity will arise.

We saw the call for GiG academies and asked to join. A small team of 4, later 5 people, with big dreams and 0 (zero) knowledge :) But, there is a special Serbian word I have to teach you in order for this to make sense - INAT. This word would literally translate as "spite", but for Serbian people it arouses many emotions, it means we will do something against all odds.

For us, this was a breakthrough point, we just got infected with the GROWTH VIRUS 😱😁

Later on, Jiri came to Belgrade and we had a workshop to make sure every team member was on the same page and I can reflect now this was crucial for success.

I remember, just before Jiri came, he was telling me: "It will be hard, you know. It is a lot of work. You have your hobbies, your animals, other jobs - everything will be affected if you wanted to do in right, it will take a lot of time and energy, are you sure you can pull it through?" And of course, Serbian INAT came to light - of course we will!

The workshop was very useful to get everyone on the same page and to resolve any confusion. We got the support from Anima International and started to work with Dominika as our consultant and that is when we realized how much we don't know. And that is when we started to make significant progress.

The path 🛣️

What we initially had was 7714 very cold contacts from a previous website's petition which were never contacted before and strong social media presence. And, most important thing - INAT :)

Our plan was simple: do a pre-launch fundraising with close friends, family, employees, volunteers and cold contacts, release the investigation footage in order to collect leads and do a year-end fundraiser in order to get monthly donors and long-term support. So, lets follow our footsteps!

Pre-launch fundraiser (oct 17th-nov 6th)

The goal of this campaign was mainly to make some initial contact with potential donors and gather some funds to help us get started, so, single donations. 🚀 We had stated four phases where donors could see where their money goes and the idea of them becoming the first donors for the campaign was exclusive and tempting.

Of course I was shameless and decided a launch date to be my birthday 😂 So, for every person who asked me what I want for my birthday, I asked them to support my dream to fight for animals. Every team member made a list of people we were planning to contact on the launch date. We sent many messages and asked people to go to our new webpage to donate and support publishing investigation videos:

🌟🌟🌟 https://ukljucise.slomimokaveze.rs/ 🌟🌟🌟

We used onion method, we contacted the closest people first, and then the less close ones, etc. We contacted friends, employees, volunteers, and our cold contacts and we had some social media post.

We did have initial goal in mind in the first place, but since everything went great, we moved it several times. We raised 1995 euros from 109 donations. This really encouraged us to spread our wings and fly. It proved to us it can be done, even though with all the obstacles.

Campaign launch - new website + investigation release (dec 2nd-dec 20th)

We had footage from laying hen farm and were already building the website for the campaign. We decided to focus our campaign on all the supermarkets, which is rather unconventional approach, and called it "Supermarkets without cages". In Serbia, there is only one supermarket which is cage-free, and that is Lidl Serbia. Most of the supermarkets were ignorant and unresponsive to our attempts to establish contact with them, so we decided to combine engagement part and corporate outreach part and use this in order to catch their attention and start communication with them and it worked rather well! We managed to get meetings with most of the supermarkets and also, introduce people to this way of work, since corporate campaigning is very uncommon in Serbia.
I would like to emphasise that this is the first investigation published in Serbia. People's reactions were amazing and we got 13531 new leads during this campaign.

🌟🌟🌟 https://slomimokaveze.rs/ 🌟🌟🌟

Metrics

18 days

13531 new leads

12 emails sent

43 single donors (Donorbox) + 1 donor via bank transfer

BONUS - unique visits + leads per day! 👀✍️

From 13531 leads, 12263 came from social media. Out of that number, 2700 leads came from organic posts and 9563 from ads. We spent 3045 euros on ads. Our cost per lead for this campaign was 0,25 euros (amount spent/number of leads).

From 13531 leads

Year-end campaign/Year-start campaign (jan 1st-jan 14th)

This is when the things got rough 😅 The team was already exhausted from the previous campaigns with no days off, and it took a toll a bit on us. Christmas in Serbia is on 7th of January and Serbian New Year is on 13th of January, since the majority of the country is Orthodox Christians, so we moved our campaign a bit later than everyone else. This allowed us to have some rest, but also to use the holidays for our campaign. We were extraordinary lucky to have a possibility for matching donations from a generous donor and this helped us very much. We got matching donations via a friend organizations who recommended us to a donor who wanted to amplify their impact. The system was that the donation for the first month of every monthly donor would be doubled.

🌟🌟🌟 https://herojikoka.slomimokaveze.rs/ 🌟🌟🌟

Metrics

14 days

9 emails sent

83 new monthly donors:
30 from PayPal

53 from bank transfer
(our goal was 30 ❤️‍🔥)

7 Single donors

The graph above shows number of monthly donors gained during our year-end campaign. These numbers include both PayPal and bank transfer donations.

At the moment, we have 27 people on a recurring plan through PayPal. From bank transfer donations, 16 people have consistently donated every month so far, but many others have donated for two or three months, or sometimes make a larger payment to cover a month they previously skipped.
There are 32 people on the monthly reminder list, excluding those who said they don’t want to be included and those whose email addresses we don’t have.

The strategy ✨

⭐ From this part on, we will look more closely into our year-end campaign ⭐

We decided to focus exclusively on monthly donors in our year-end campaign. Our communication was focused on people becoming hen heros. Monthly donations were presented as the most effective way to help the hens. We used user-oriented language. Sometimes it was hard to translate many of the recommendations to Serbian language, but we managed to give our own mark. Our goal was to reach 30 donors, but we exceeded that goal which made us super-proud!

A tiny bit of reflecting ✨

Soooo, some things worked perfectly and some need more polishing, so I will just do an overview of them.

✨Worked well ✨✅

Emails - worked well ✅

During the period of our Year-End campaign, we have sent 9 emails in total. This was our first campaign focusing solely on monthly donors. We were aware this is not common in Serbia, but we were eager to try it out and we succeeded 🥳🥰 We thought nobody in Serbia will become a monthly donor for laying hens, but people made us proud! There was a small amount of negative emails, but the majority of a response was positive! In the beginning we were sending private messages to our friends and family asking them to become monthly donors in order to show people there are others joining and that this campaign is progressing.

🙊We had a small obstacle here: some sentences sound pretty cool in English, but are hard to translate into Serbian. For example, in Serbian, there are multiple translations for word YOU. It can be translated as informal or as formal addressing, but also as singular or plural. We had to decide which will we use in order to create better engagement from our audience and stay warm and professional enough. In Serbian language, addressing is different for different genders, so we also had to make a decision. We decided to include female and male gender in our communication (as these categories are based on the language differences, not how somebody sees themselves). This was a big debate for us, but the decisions we made turned out pretty good 😁

Here is a screenshot of our statistics for year-end campaign:

Our most successful email can be found here. It got us 5 new donors and it was the one which was send after an email which went by mistake, with "Test email" as a subject. It's open rate was second best, just after our launching email.

* The emails themselves generated more monthly donors, but the tracking wasn't working perfectly 🥲

Telefundraising - worked well ✅

Before our campaign started, we weren't very eager to do telefundraising. We had very limited resources, we are a small team, we thought people wouldn't like us calling them on the phone, etc... But, a necessity pushed us towards this decision 😅 People in Serbia are not used to these kind of campaigns and lots of them were hesitant because of the displayed currency is not Serbian currency (RSD), but euros (EUR). They were sending us emails and messages with their concerns expressed. So, we figured out we have to call them and make that more personal contact and explain them the situation. And, this proved to be the most valuable step in our year-end campaign 🥳🥳🥳 People were very receptive and actually happy that we called them - the community response was actually amazing! People were supportive, encouraging and kind, which filled us with so much energy. 🥰

⏱️ Duration: 2nd-6th of January (not for the whole day)

👥 Our target group: single donors from our pre-launch and investigation release campaigns (we didn't have enough time to call all of them).

🤓 Our effort: a training session with telefundraising expert from GIG (Martina Neradova), two employees calling people for 5 days for 3-4 hours a day.

📞 How many were called: 63 people

✅ Agreed to donate: 23 people

❌ Refused to donate: 16 people

😶 Did not respond: 24 people

Matching donations - worked well ✅

Having a matching donations fund helped us a lot! A generous donor gave us a fund for matching donations. Our system was that the first month of monthly donations is matched. We communicated this on the website, via social media, newsletter and telefundraising. Lots of people were unfamiliar with this system, so, for some, we needed to explain further, but that wasn't a problem for us. People were interested and motivated and I know this improved number of donors and amount of money donated. We cannot say to what extension in the decision making process matching donations took part, but we can definitely say people were curious about this system and some even told us that motivated them to become monthly donors. We raised €877.26, which means it was doubled to €1,754.52.

Social Media - worked okay ☑️ - due to impossible tracking, they might worked much better, but we cannot know

Regarding Social Media, we already had strong organic reach and interactions with our audience. However, tracking donations coming from SoMe proved extremely difficult. People often shared our bank details privately with others, so we believe some donations came from social media, but we can not know for sure.

During this campaign, we experienced technical issues with our Meta ad account, which prevented us from uploading existing leads and using them as a custom audience. This is typically the best audience for fundraising campaigns.

Given these limitations, we ran three ads, targeting:

1. Facebook engagers

2. Instagram engagers

3. Advantage+ audience

Despite our usual excellent organic reach and high engagement on regular and lead-generation posts, organic posts asking for donations did not reach the same performance levels. This way we learned that the strong organic content is a valuable foundation, but trust needed for donations is built over a much longer period of time and significantly more through the mailing list than through social media.

The initial ad sets did not generate any donors and were turned off after spending 200 euros.

We then switched to urgency ads, targeted at Advantage+ audience, which were making results. We got several donation inquiries in our inbox which converted to at least 3 donations that we attribute to urgency ads.

So via Social Media, we received:

3 people who contacted us via DMs asking for bank details and made the payment
1 from the urgency ads
3 donations via link in bio

In total, we can confidently attribute 7 donations to Social Media.

We spent 442 euros on ads during the campaign.

😶Worked poorly😶❎

Payment processing - worked poorly ❎

So, we started with our research for the most suitable services for engagement in general. Important thing to emphasise here is that Serbia is not part of the EU and many of the services which are widely spread in the EU are not available in Serbia as well. The search was very thorough and exhausting, especially for the payment system. In the end, we settled for Donorbox, which is okay, but far from perfect for us. Serbia's currency is Serbian Dinar (RSD) which is not supported by Donorbox, which made many people hesitate. We got in touch with Stripe and PayPal which are the services connected to Donorbox and asked them to implement the usage of RSD in our payments, but we were declined by PayPal, and Stripe is still not available in Serbia. This led to many people asking us to pay the donations directly to the bank, which was more complicated for us and made tracking donations very tricky. We are now in the proccess of testing a new payment sistem and it would hopefully sort out the trouble, then we plan to switch to a new payment system in total.

Donations tracking - worked poorly ❎

I cannot emphasize how important it is to have proper tracking system implemented. And, the sad thing is that you realize how important it is, just after you finish your campaign 😅 This allows you to track every investment and see how valuable it is, if you should invest more or less into something, was it worth it, etc. For us this was especially hard for several reasons:

For the first few days our UTMs weren't properly logged by Donorbox - we needed 3 days to fix this 🥲
People were writing to us via social media and emails to send them our bank account details in order for them to make a payment and then they would send this to their friends and family as well, which made impossible for us to track. We still did because we didn't want to loose potential donors, but we are aware this approach has it cons as well.
We haven't agreed to a system of creating UTM links between platforms and that became a mess very soon - a simple table with a system helps a lot, especially when working in teams.
A big problem for us is that most of Serbian banks don't allow reccuring payments and when someone contacted us and asked usto be a donor via bank transfer, we would ask them if they want to become monthly donors and, if yes, every month we would send them a reminder. This system is far away from perfect, it takes a lot of energy and people have to make effort for every payment, but it was better than nothing, for people who refused to use Donorbox. Some people would skip a month and then do a double payment the next one, so it is hard to track which donor is single and which is monthly.

Political situation - worked terribly ❌

I cannot talk about or year-end campaign and not mentioning our extremely unstable political situation at the time. We had political protests daily for more than a year. People were on the streets, police response was harsh and violent. Police brutality was happening daily. This affected us a lot, from chronic stress, to uncertainty and social media flooded with content regarding protests.

We were hesitant if it is at all the right time to publish our investigation and do a year-end campaign. People were focused on the protests and much bigger tragedy which happened (16 people were killed and that is why the protests started). I asked many international friends for advice, but wasn't 100% satisfied with the answers. After all, who could understand such a drastic amount of human rights violations which is happening daily, except us who are going through it?

So, we decided to take a risk and do everything according to the plan. It was very tricky to estimate the most appropriate tone and level of communication. We relied mostly on our gut feeling and were following the events daily. If there was a need, we would sometimes postpone publishing something. In the end, we believed in our campaign and what we fight for. So, we didn't get a backlash, thanks to careful planning and believing in what we do is right.

We could have found so many reasons why not: everyone were stressed out, nothing is stable, people have bigger issues now. But, we only needed one reason for why YES: hens needed us. We believed anything we did couldn't make situation worse, just better, and we were right, we succeeded.

Lessons learned

Even though I hate reflecting (not my best trait as a leader 😅), I know it is super valuable, so I am happy to share all of our learnings here (mostly because of myself, because I know I wouldn't do this detailed if I wasn't writing this deep dive 😆)

🌟 YOU NEED MORE TIME THAN YOU THINK!

We had SO MANY delays. Doing a first year-end campaign seems easy until you want to do it properly 😂 Then all the details appear and you want to do everything right. And that takes a lot of time. With the website especially there will always be delays and malfunctions, so be prepared to work on them - year-end campaign doesn't last for the whole year. I like to see it as a sprint - but for an experienced athlete, a sprint is much more that those 100m or 200m. It is years and months of preparation, dedication and effort. That is a year-end campaign for us.

🌟 Have a plan, clear roles and responsibilities.

When do we publish and what? Who decides on the emails, SoMe content, on the budget? Who brings up the initiatives and ideas, who is responsible to make sure we are on the right track? What if somebody gets sick? All of these seem very intuitive and that they come naturally, BUT when there is a gap, it is much harder to notice it if there is nobody responsible.

🌟 Adapt, react and be responsive.

Listen to the feedback from the community and react to it. Build trust and supporters. Those are real people you should show up for, just like in real life. If people have concerns, address them, if they are happy, share the happiness, if they are communicative, respond to their emails. Just like you would do with people in your own life. For example, during one of the campaigns, we got a few emails where people show their concern if we are legit and we decided to send an email to tell them a bit more about our team in order to build more trust, even though we were aware this is normal and expected in the early stages of fundraising. This email performed really well, people were responsive and sending positive feedbacks. So, it worked!

🌟 Trust your gut.

There are rules, but then there is bending the rules as well 😆 But, you are allowed to bend the rules just after you know them very well, not beforehand. Every culture is different, every campaign is different and if you have a feeling - it is there for a reason. Bring that feeling to awareness and understand it better so you can react better. You know your audience the best, so just follow that feeling. Of course, there are some things which are proven to work in every country, like user-oriented language. If you want to try out something new, just test and evaluate, I have a feeling is not enough to make a fact. Telefundraising was an example for us, we had a feeling people would build more trust if we speak with them and that it will bring us more donors, and it did! We got 23 donors from telefundraising.

🌟 Be very particular about reporting, evaluating and reflecting.

Numbers, tables, statistics... Have all of this prepared ahead, you won't regret it. Only when I started to go into depth with this deep dive is when I realized how many gaps there were in our reporting system - but only then is when I realized how much it can be improved and how I can improve myself. For example, we had "evaluation" listed in our roadmap, but no clear path or rules on how to do it, so this is the most detailed evaluation we actually did and I am grateful for that😁

🌟Be creative and bold.

Yes, we have a lot of room for improvement from this campaign. But, we also have lots of learnings. We tried many things and saw what works and what doesn't. We didn't step back from obstacles, but saw them as opportunities for learning. This might sound like it was writen by AI, but I swear it wasn't 😆 What I mean by this is that we had the courage to do all of the three campaigns in short period of time by small team and we succeeded. We went in all or nothing with all the INAT we had 😁

🌟 Try new approaches and test results!

If we personally don't like some type of communication, it doesn't mean others won't as well. User-oriented language didn't come naturally for us and we were a bit skeptical, but we tested it and the results are really amazing. We have a strong and engaged community now thanks to it. We took some time to get used to using graphics, urgency content, etc, but it paid off.

Go more into depth here ⬇️

Pre-launch fundraiser

🌟🌟🌟 https://ukljucise.slomimokaveze.rs/ 🌟🌟🌟

🏆Best performing emails:
https://mailchi.mp/vegezajednica/sada-je-pravo-vreme-da-se-pridrui
https://mailchi.mp/vegezajednica/pokrenuli-ste-neto-sjajno-bravo-18255576

🌟 Best peforming SoMe posts:
https://www.instagram.com/reels/DRcdA8iCG9k/ (organic)

Campaign launch - new website + investigation release

🌟🌟🌟 https://slomimokaveze.rs/ 🌟🌟🌟

🏆Best performing emails:
https://mailchi.mp/vegezajednica/kampanja-je-upravo-lansirana-ovo-je-momenat-koji-smo-svi-ekali-potpii-peticiju-18256413
https://mailchi.mp/vegezajednica/kampanja-je-upravo-lansirana-ovo-je-momenat-koji-smo-svi-ekali-potpii-peticiju
https://mailchi.mp/vegezajednica/vano-objavljen-snimak-sa-srpske-farme-koka-nosilja

🌟 Best performing SoMe posts:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DR2CqWCDCJl/?igsh=czBpYzFscXptZ25r (organic)
https://www.instagram.com/reels/DR90phJDGEb/ (boosted)
https://www.instagram.com/p/DSNgsp6F5Fk/?igsh=MWVoc28xaWQydWRmcA%3D%3D (boosted)
https://www.instagram.com/reels/DSUw0LXiGXl/ (organic)

Year-end campaign

🌟🌟🌟 https://herojikoka.slomimokaveze.rs/ 🌟🌟🌟

🏆Best performing emails:
https://mailchi.mp/vegezajednica/bolji-ivot-koka-poinje-s-tobom-18256985
https://mailchi.mp/vegezajednica/test-mejl-18257031
https://us20.campaign-archive.com/?u=500f3d8dcc66d25ad41de2d43&id=8e6489229e

🌟 Best performing SoMe posts:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DS5JUR3F11j/?igsh=eGV0eG5lMW1iMXVh (organic)

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From zero to hen hero🐥Our first year-end campaign in Serbia

The path 🛣️

Pre-launch fundraiser (oct 17th-nov 6th)

Campaign launch - new website + investigation release (dec 2nd-dec 20th)

Metrics

Year-end campaign/Year-start campaign (jan 1st-jan 14th)

Metrics

The strategy ✨

A tiny bit of reflecting ✨

✨Worked well ✨✅

Emails - worked well ✅

Telefundraising - worked well ✅

Matching donations - worked well ✅

Social Media - worked okay ☑️ - due to impossible tracking, they might worked much better, but we cannot know

😶Worked poorly😶❎

Payment processing - worked poorly ❎

Donations tracking - worked poorly ❎

Political situation - worked terribly ❌

Lessons learned

Go more into depth here ⬇️

Pre-launch fundraiser

From zero to hen hero🐥
Our first year-end campaign in Serbia