Matching Donations and Prize Money

Matching Donations and Prize Money

Overview

Matching donations and prize money are donations that the client has raised or received from donors before the campaign started.

It is a way to INSPIRE and MOTIVATE your community to open their hearts and wallets to your cause. Matching donors will be CATALYSTS for more and larger donations.

If you are still working on getting your matching donors together or if you want to know about strategies for the future, here is important information.

Definitions

Matching donations are approximately 50% or more of the goal the client has raised pre-campaign in order to "match" each donation that comes in and motivate donors. When the client has not raised enough matching donations, they are still able to accept large donations before the campaign and be exempt from the typical platform fee. By launching an accelerator round, you can match donations for a short amount of time. Alternatively, you can use "Prize Money," which is an extra bonus you receive from major donors upon hitting a predetermined goal.


Criteria

In order to add the Prize Money into the campaign without paying the CauseMatch fee, the following criteria must be met:
  1. The client HAS INFORMED CauseMatch via the CAMPAIGN MANAGER that they will be implementing the prize money strategy and THE EXACT AMOUNT at least 7 DAYS in advance of the campaign’s start and returned this signed contract.
  2. There is no matching already being used on the campaign. Prize money cannot be used together with matching.
  3. The prize money is clearly listed on the campaign page before the soft launch. For example, under the header or body banner, text that reads: “When we reach $50k, a generous donor has agreed to donate $5k. When we reach $75k, another generous donor has agreed to donate $7k.” See an example HERE.
  4. The prize money amount CANNOT exceed 30% of the total amount raised.
  5. When the client enters the prize money from the dashboard (as offline donations), the client must write in the “internal comments” field that these/this donation/s are “prize money.” That way the accounting department will know not to charge the CauseMatchfee on these offline donations.
  6. The offline donation MUST BE TITLED - PRIZE MONEY. It cannot be an individual donor's name.
CauseMatch will take their full fee if any of these criteria are not met.

Bonus Round

These terms refer to the Bonus Round as well. Any Prize Money that is used for the Bonus Round must be reported BEFORE the Bonus Round is reached. 

Please feel free to speak with your Campaign Manager or Sales if you would like to discuss the criteria and if you have large donations pre-campaign you would like to include.

Letter Template to Solicit a Matching Donor
Dear {NAME}},
I hope that you are doing well.

Thank you again for your generous support of {{ORGANIZATION}}. {{Explain the impact they have made}} 

{{explain the need to continue doing your work}} e.g. To fight back we must continue to fight media bias, inform the public, and share the censored that women around the world face. To this end, we are hosting the world’s second annual Censored Women’s Film Festival.

I know you are particularly passionate about {{ORG}}  and I know you’ll do everything you can to {{your work’s mission}}. I’m writing to you to invite you to play a very special role in our upcoming campaign.

We are gathering a select group of supporters who can help us build a matching grant fund. {{Explain your goal and value to the org}} e.g. We have never done something like this before, but the potential to dramatically expand the support of {{ORG}} is tremendous.

We want to build a matching grant of at least $50,000. With these matching funds of $50,000, you will mobilize thousands of supporters to educate and promote unity.  

To see more statistics about the amplified impact you can make as a matching donors, please see this document LINK. 

This is a unique opportunity to grow our cause, but we need your support to make it possible.

Will you contribute $5,000 or more and stand up as a leader in the fight to {{problem your organization works to combat}}?

Please let me know if this special opportunity and matching grant program is of interest and we can make time to discuss further.

Best,
Signature

Examples
You can see some examples of how matching works below:

1:1 Campaign = x2 MATCH

2:1 Campaign = x3 MATCH

3:1 Campaign = x4 MATCH




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