The Jackson Chance Foundation was started by Carrie Meghie, a mother that lost her son Jackson last year due to a terminal illness. During Jackson’s stay at the Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago’s Streeterville neighborhood, Carrie noticed her most expensive out-of-pocket cost was parking. Because doctors cited the presence of parents and family as a crucial step in development, the high parking cost was a necessary expense the family had to overcome. In order to help families with children in the NICU at Lurie Children’s Hospital, Meghie started a nonprofit organization aimed at helping these families with a focus on parking and transportation costs.
Our group rallied around this foundation with a plan centered around four main objectives: a social media campaign, an e-bay donation drive where all proceeds would go to the foundation, a PayPal one-time donation page link, and attempting to link up the organization with expectant mothers through The Bump Club. Out of the four initial targets, three proved to be successful, while one others stalled out due to varying factors.
We decided on these targets due to the opportunity to raise a large sum without risking investment in overhead like venues, supplies, special auction items, or food for an event. Because we had no overhead, we settled on an initial goal of $900, which would cover 2 months of parking through a 24-7 parking pass the Jackson Chance Foundation supports. After one week, we were already at $600 raised for the project!
At the end, our group tallied $1,750 in donations. These donations mostly came from our eBay donations and individual donations on PayPal, which seemed to be very successful. Our efforts in tying the Jackson Chance Foundation to The Bump Club are not represented in the $1,700 in donations, but we found out late in the project that The Bump Club had set a date for their own event to benefit this organization. Although not represented in our financial results, we believe that this connection will be a residual victory for the Jackson Chance Foundation.
Conversely, the social media campaign was a missed opportunity. We tried numerous Facebook strategies such as wall posts, status updates, and even an event invitation, but didn’t seem to get any hits off of this strategy. Our posts may have been a little long and wordy, but we believed early on that we would have more success than we did in this category. If we were to start the project over again, we probably would have made this interaction with our networks more visual-based, so that it would be more attention-grabbing and more of a call-to-action.
In the end, we felt as though our project was a success. We nearly doubled our donation goal to the Jackson Chance Foundation, and we hope that we helped touch the lives of several families with our efforts. In addition, an anonymous donor matches any donation up to $45,000 given to the Jackson Chance Foundation. Due to this, our $1,750 will now double, and we feel that because of this and the Bump Club connection, our project’s net effect will be over $5,000.