Matching Funds Miracle: $121,000 in just 5 days for Dearborn’s Al-Huda Masjid
This boomer community just schooled us all on how to beat Coronavirus for your masjid fundraising
Ramadan fundraisers are a critical lifeline for our mosques — but there’s still hope
Coronavirus (or more accurately COVID-19) is wreaking havoc left and right — including our beloved fundraising dinner!
Or maybe not so beloved? 🤷♂️
Ok, you may not love your mosque’s or local charity’s fundraising dinner. Mediocre food, lock the doors, run out of condensed milk for the tea, and hold you hostage until they’re able to squeeze every last dollar from you!
But actually they really need your help.
It’s hard running a mosque, paying all the bills, keeping the lights on and fixing those forever leaky faucets in the wudhu area.
And Ramadan and the fundraising dinners before & during this holy month provide crucial cash to keep these organizations running.
So what can they do now with coronavirus throwing everything into quarantine?
Online fundraising can even work for boomers
Sure, they can do online fundraising, but that’s for young folk who can make fancy videos, coordinate social media campaigns, get famous Muslim celebrities to tweet it out, etc.
What about the boomers?
Well, the soon-to-open Al-Huda Mosque in Dearborn, Michigan just schooled us all. They’ve raised over $150,000 online and counting, most in just 5 days!
How’d they do it?
- Beautifully designed campaign ❌
- Fancy video ❌
- Social media celebrity ❌
- Advanced analytics ❌
- Held people hostage during taraweeh/jumuah ❌ (to the best of our knowledge!)
- Matching funds ✅✅✅
The POWER of the match: 20x donations
This was Al-Huda’s second LaunchGood campaign. In 2019 they ran a campaign that they prepared really hard for.
They actually had a beautifully designed campaign with a fancy video.
And all it raised was $7,407.
That’s less than 5% of what they’ve raised this time.
The primary difference: $100,000 matching funds challenge.
That’s right — telling your donors “we need your help to unlock $100,000!” will do miracles for activating them.
Research teaches us people hate to lose more than they love to win. To let $100,000 escape is gut-wrenching, so your community feels the need to step up and secure those funds!
How to find $100,000 or so in matching funds?
Seems simple, right? Get a bunch of money as a matching funds challenge, and raise a bunch more.
Of course the hard part is finding $100,000 or so in matching funds to begin with.
It’s simple, but definitely not easy.
But often every community has a few mega-donors within it. You can’t be shy. Go and ask if they’d be willing to do this. Or if they couldn’t do $100,000, maybe they could split it with 1 or 2 or even 5 others?
And show them this campaign. Show them you’re not just taking their money, but doubling its value by offering it as a challenge. You’ll do all the work, you just need a big fat carrot to incentivize the donors.
Add in the pressure of a TIGHT deadline
Not only did Al-Huda have the chance to unlock a $100,000 matching challenge, they added a deadline of just 1 week.
The truth is, you don’t need a long time to fundraise online. Whatever you raise in 30 days you probably could’ve raised in 7 days — or in the case of Al-Huda it took just 5 days!
We humans need deadlines. We love to procrastinate, so when there’s a tight deadline it actually moves us to action.
3 final lessons: Passionate volunteers, WhatsApp & Sincerity
There are 3 more lessons we learnt from Al-Huda’s super successful LaunchGood campaign:
- Passionate volunteers — As we’ve talked about elsewhere, it starts with the team. Even with the great incentive of the $100,000 match, if Al-Huda didn’t have a dedicated team to spread the word, nobody would’ve even heard of the match.
- Activate the WhatsApp networks — Just about every Muslim seems to be on WhatsApp, so Al-Huda invested almost all their efforts into WhatsApp word-of-mouth. Constantly forwarding messages and updates, to both groups and individuals, made sure there was a thorough saturation of the message. You need to touch donors 7 times before they really give.
- Sincerity — I am fortunate to live in Dearborn and know some of the people behind Al-Huda Islamic Association. They’re incredibly sincere and selfless and have dedicated their lives and wealth to Islam and their community. The results ultimately lay with Allah, but our sincerity shines through and brings barakah (blessings) to our work and wealth and community, inshallah!
