How The Love Quilt Project Saves 13 Hours Weekly with Keela Automation

Cause Area

Human Services

Tools Used

Automation, Communications, Fundraising Insights

Number of Contacts

2,500

Key Metrics

Using Keela, The Love Quilt Project has successfully re-engaged past donors, become more efficient as a team, and raised a record number of donations.

13 hours

Time saved weekly using Keela Automation

$50,000

Raised from one campaign via Keela Forms

1,100

New Contacts added within 6 months of using Keela

68.5%

Email Response Rate

How Keela Supports The Love Quilt Project

Donor Communications and Engagement

The Love Quilt Project successfully re-engaged past donors, doubled the size of its mailing list, and improved its email open rate using Keela’s donor communications tools.

Operational Efficiency

Using Keela Automation, the nonprofit’s team saves 13 hours each week that would have been spent on manual, mundane tasks, including writing emails, sending out donation receipts, and following up on tasks.

Relationship Development

The Love Quilt Project team uses Keela’s fundraising insights to filter and segment donors who are most likely to contribute to a campaign and deepen their relationship with donors in that segment.

Skills Development

The Love Quilt Project team leverages Keela’s webinars, knowledge base, and resources to learn sector-wide best practices, upskill themselves and gain the expertise needed to meet their goals.

Challenge

Re-engage Past Donors to Raise More Funds in a timely, cost-efficient manner.

The Love Quilt Project is a nonprofit committed to supporting orphaned, vulnerable American and South African children, many of whom are affected by HIV/AIDS, through the gift of a quilt and access to quality education.

A child standing in front of a quilt hung on a wall

During the pandemic, the organizations suffered a significant setback in their fundraising efforts. As restrictions were lifted, they needed a strategy and tool to re-engage donors and streamline their work.

Gretchen Ginnerty was inspired to start The Love Quilt Project after going on a trip with her family and church members to the Masiphumelele township of South Africa in 2011. Together, they worked on building a foster home for young orphans in the community. They also created quilts as gifts for the children, and sewn into each quilt were messages of love from the church’s Sunday School classes.

“Our South African partners encouraged us to carry on the mission, and thus The Love Quilt Project was formed. Since then, over 6,000 American school children have sent messages of love, and over 400 South African children have received quilts.”
— Gretchen Ginnerty, President of the Love Quilt Project

To keep making an impact, The Love Quilt Project relies heavily on the contributions of donors, sponsors, and volunteers. But the team was dealt a blow when the pandemic came along. Due to border closures, the quilts with messages of love embroidered on them couldn’t be delivered to the children, and the donations needed to fund their education decreased.

As things returned to normal, the team recognized that they had to come back stronger. They hired a marketing firm, Reingold Inc., who introduced them to Keela’s fundraising and donor communication tools. Since then, they’ve experienced significant success in their efforts to re-engage past donors and automate their operations.

Solution and Results

The Love Quilt Project successfully re-engaged past donors and raised a record $50,000 in fundraising revenue using Keela’s fundraising, donor communications, and Automation tools.

As pandemic restrictions were lifted, The Love Quilt Project team had to adjust their fundraising and operations. They needed to win back past donors and do so in a faster, more efficient manner.

In 2021, the nonprofit started using Keela’s donor communication tools and automation features to create email workflows that reminded donors of the impact of their previous contributions and encouraged them to contribute again. These tools helped the Love Quilt team to communicate at scale and steward the donors promptly through a re-engagement pipeline.

With Keela’s fundraising insights, the team could filter the database and preselect contacts who were most likely to give again to a specific campaign. They focused their re-engagement efforts on these prospects and saved much time and resources. Through their outreach, the team was also able to build better connections with major donors and corporate sponsors; and their re-engagement efforts resulted in a 68.5% email response rate.

“The biggest success we have had, because of our outreach via Keela, has been the connections with two major corporations. Both of these firms are taking up a large portion of our quilt manufacturing and assisting us in developing a retail line that will provide us with the much-needed financial support we require to stay afloat.”

President of the Love Quilt Project poses with children wrapped in quilts

Even more, the nonprofit doubled the size of its mailing list within its first few months of using Keela. And since launching its newsletter in October 2021, the team has seen a 40% email open rate. This is mainly because the team did a great job nurturing its contacts using Keela’s donor communications tools over time.

Since it began using Keela Automation, The Love Quilt Project team has saved 13 hours each week that would have been spent writing emails and sharing receipts and forms. Now, they can automatically share thank you notes, send donors their receipts right after each contribution and nudge their audience to sign up for events, campaigns, and programs.

In November 2021, when the organization was ready to resume sending quilts and donations to the South African community, the team used Keela to set up its Giving Tuesday and End of Year fundraising campaign. They added Keela Form to their website and created workflows to encourage existing contacts to donate and steward new donors to become long-term supporters.

As a result, the team successfully raised a record $50,000 in fundraising revenue. Before then, they had never raised this many donations from one campaign.

Looking Ahead

The Love Quilt Project team will explore Keela’s Premium Care, Webinars, and educational resources to upskill themselves and improve donor engagement efforts.

Thanks to its re-engagement efforts and decision to use Keela, the Love Quilt Project team is now back and set to share more good tidings with South African children. They hope to keep leveraging Keela’s Premium Care, Webinars, and educational resources to learn how they maximize their usage of the tools and achieve their long-term objectives.

“I do not believe we are using Keela to its full capacity. Some of our team members are using the ‘to do’ task, but we are still learning how to streamline it better. We all need more training and know that we need to use more of your webinars. Overall, using Keela has been a positive experience and really has positioned us for success.”

As they prepare for their next batch of quilts to be delivered in August 2022, the team is exploring the idea of developing ‘Relief Quilts’ to be shared locally in the United States. They will also use Keela’s donor communications tools and automation feature to ensure their donors are engaged and prepared to contribute to the next campaign.

You can learn more about The Love Quilt Projects’ impact here.

Re-engage Lapsed Donors using Keela Automation

Like The Love Quilt Project, your nonprofit can rekindle past donor relationships, retain more existing donors and save time and money while doing so.

Keela Automation is perfect for setting up email campaigns and workflows that will scale your communications, steward your contacts, and convert them to recurring donors and long-term supporters. Time is precious; find out how you can start communicating with the right donors today.

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