Building a Partner Marketing Machine:
Raising $12M In Planned Gifts for ACLU
Situation: Giving Docs generates planned giving dollars for charities through an innovative estate planning platform. At the time, the product was still in its beta phase. It had shown promising results in a few free campaigns, raising impressive funds for charities, but the platform was plagued with bugs and had no proven business model. While we had a handful of leads, we had yet to secure a paying client and the ones who were interested didn’t know what to do once they had access to the platform.
Task: As CMO, I identified an opportunity we had with the ACLU as the key to unlocking further company potential. I recognized that if we could stabilize the platform, secure a partnership with ACLU, and successfully launch a planned giving campaign with them, this achievement would provide a precedent, best practices, and case study that could be leveraged to secure and launch with subsequent clients.
Action:
Initial Outreach: Initiated a meeting with the Head of Planned Giving from ACLU for a needs analysis and discussion of potential partnership.
Negotiation: Negotiated a deal contingent on our ability to rectify the platform's technical issues and implement new features as per Mohammad's specifications.
Feature Identification: Leveraged my background in software architecture to collaborate with Mohammad on outlining the desired features.
Implementation: Worked closely with our CTO to design, plan, and implement these features, along with resolving existing bugs and making language adjustments.
Campaign Strategy: Connected with the ACLU Marketing Team to devise a comprehensive campaign strategy encompassing drip email, social media, and direct mail, directing users towards an ACLU-integrated Giving Docs landing page.
User Engagement: Our internal marketing team and CTO incorporated into this campaign, in-app-activity-based email prompts targeting users at various stages of account creation and planned gift commitments.
Launch: After six months of focused platform enhancements and six weeks of campaign preparation, we satisfied all of Mohammad's initial requirements, paving the way for a successful campaign launch.
Result: In the first six weeks post-launch, we raised $8 million in planned gifts for ACLU, followed by an additional $4 million over the subsequent six weeks. Moreover, this success story helped us standardize our partner marketing strategy into a scalable system. With this improved platform and proven campaign templates, Giving Docs was able to secure deals with and launch partner marketing campaigns for it’s next ten clients, codify it’s business model and establish itself as a trusted, capable player in the industry. This success drove a round of fundraising with with they hired a full time team to grow new client sales and partner marketing teams.
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