10x matching campaign results

For one week last month, our friends at Tencent offered to 10x match any new donation to the Universal Fund and any increase in existing donations. This was a new kind of campaign for us because we'd never offered more than 2x matching, and we'd never asked existing Universal Fund members to increase their monthly donations. Here's what happened:

This campaign took off from the moment we launched, raising a total of $320,140! It was incredible watching all the donations come in and seeing how eager donors were to share this campaign.

We were hesitant to present our existing Universal Fund donors with the opportunity to increase their donations because they are already doing so much. But we were blown away by their generosity and willingness to give even more.

In addition to encouraging existing Universal Fund donors to increase their monthly donations, the 10x matching offer was a powerful incentive for people to join with monthly donations (both those who'd supported a Watsi patient in the past, and those who hadn't).

We promoted this campaign using email, social media, and Hacker News. Email and referral traffic were the biggest drivers of traffic to the landing page.

We assumed that email would be the top channel, so when we saw all that referral traffic we looked at what sites were doing the lion's share of the referring.

The Hacker News community, tweets from people like Paul Graham, Bridgit Mendler, Alexis Ohanian, and Ron Conway, and the dozens of people who shared the campaign using our hashtag #10xForGood helped extend the reach of this campaign far beyond the users in our email database.

Thanks to everyone who shared and participated, especially the 382 donors whose donations helped fund healthcare for 500 patients!

Even more exciting is that given that the lifetime value of a Universal Fund donor is $1,000, we expect this 7 day campaign alone to ultimately generate about $670,126* for patients like Norma.

*$382,000 in recurring donations + $288,126 in initial matching funds