CASE STUDY
Story Telling, Sustainers, and Strategy:
Equality Florida Scales Up with 4Site Interactive Studios and EveryAction
About
Equality Florida is the largest civil rights organization dedicated to securing full equality for Florida's lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community. Through lobbying, grassroots organizing, education, and coalition building, they are changing Florida so that no one suffers harassment or discrimination on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity or expression. Over the course of their 25-year history, Equality Florida has been the backstop in Tallahassee for nearly all anti-LGBTQ bills sweeping the country. Under their watch, statewide LGBTQ nondiscrimination protections were secured, marriage equality was won in Florida, the ban on gay and lesbian adoption has been repealed, and more than 200 local pro-equality policies throughout the state have been passed.
4Site Interactive Studios, an EveryAction partner, has been providing creative digital services to the nonprofit and small business community in Washington, DC since 2001. Since that time, their team has brought hundreds of organizations online and provided them with ongoing strategy, support, and content creation services.
Equality Florida and 4Site were connected through Progressive Multiplier, an intermediary that works to shift the progressive movement toward scale, self-determination, and sustainability by creating high-leverage investment opportunities for philanthropy to strengthen the independent financial position of movement groups.
Background
Equality Florida operates a vibrant range of programs, from digital advocacy, to fundraising, to field organizing, in order to advance their mission—and they made the move to EveryAction in 2018 in order to unify all of those program activities in one place. Connecting their CRM, or constituent relationship manager, to VAN has allowed Equality Florida’s communications, operations, and development teams to work with their field team to ensure a seamless connection between their work on the ground and their work online. This gives Equality Florida the power to target the right supporters, with the right messages, at the right time, all depending on their engagement history.
Brittany Link, Communications Director, Equality Florida
“One thing we love so much about EveryAction is the ability to connect our CRM with different mobilization tools. With all of our advocate, volunteer, and donor information in one place, we have the power to target different messages to different people based on their overall history with us, and all of our programs can make a deeper impact.”
Prior to their collaboration with 4Site, the challenges Equality Florida faced were similar to the ones faced by many other nonprofits who want to get the most out of their platform as they scale up: they needed ways to weave storytelling into more aspects of their programming; spend less time administering technology; and fundraise strategically and sustainably for their future. It was in consultation with Progressive Multiplier that Equality Florida identified a specific, high-impact need that required a sophisticated solution: the redesign of their donation forms. Having the financial grant and strategic support of Progressive Multiplier allowed them to collaborate with 4Site on this project.
Storytelling and design
As Communications Director Brittany Link put it, “the design of our donation forms as they were, weren't quite matching the overall fundraising goals that Equality Florida had, or our understanding of how change is created.” Equality Florida understands that storytelling is key to changing hearts and minds, and it belongs in every communication opportunity—which means they needed pages and forms that used vibrant imagery, on-brand colors, and smooth navigation.
Multi-year funding for longer-lasting impact
In order to have the resources to create impact for years to come, Equality Florida’s development team needed to run a range of campaigns, expand their giving options beyond the one-time credit card gift, and offer donors straightforward ways to invest in the future of the organization.
Efficient digital tools saving staff time
Without a web developer on staff, different team members across Equality Florida’s communications, development, and advocacy departments needed the ability to create and use different branded forms and pages for their specific purposes—and they needed to be able to do so quickly.
Instead of choosing to make smaller, case-by-case changes, Equality Florida worked with 4Site to audit their digital communications and fundraising channels. Thanks to this partnership, Equality Florida was able to invest heavily in strategic changes that would help them build supporter relationships and ensure a seamless engagement experience for everyone who wants to be a part of their work.
Bryan Casler, 4Site Studios
“EveryAction is a super-fast product to get up and running on and have really effective results[…] A consultant who has that experience to bring the additional features and enhancements can help save a lot of time and be even more effective, more quickly.”
Objectives
In order to overcome the challenges they were facing, Equality Florida decided to embark on a redesign project to meet three main objectives:
- Create a beautiful, on-brand supporter experience across digital properties that would inspire confidence in donors and make it easy for them to support Equality Florida.
- Grow their multi-year fundraising capabilities by redesigning pages to support an expanded range of giving options.
- Reduce staff time spent managing their website and forms in the back end and allow them to quickly create the assets they needed for a wide range of purposes.
4Site and Equality Florida not only changed the look of their existing pages but also considered how to strategically save the organization time and help them meet their long-term fundraising goals.
Initiatives
After a discovery process to learn about all the ways Equality Florida could capitalize on their EveryAction instance’s ability to scale and grow with their customization needs, 4Site and Equality Florida worked together on specific strategies to make the most of their EveryAction tools and meet their three main goals.
Beautiful, on-brand supporter experiences
Equality Florida wanted to harness the power of imagery to tell the story of their work—and 4Site knew that speeding up their page load times would help capture and keep supporters’ attention. 4Site also ensured that the new templates were optimized to be mobile responsive, so anyone on any screen could see the page as it was meant to be seen. The new templates’ easy navigation tools like accordion menus and ability to jump to a call-to-action also mean that supporters can make a gift without scrolling down a long page or missing the donate button. Lastly, 4Site ensured that Equality Florida’s brand, colors, and appearance were consistent across their custom templates, which means that now, no matter which digital channel serves as a supporter’s point of entry, they can rest assured that they’ve found the organization they were looking for.
Save staff time
The new custom templates were not only beautiful, on-brand, and optimized to give supporters a positive experience, but also helped staff spend more of their time on the strategic parts of their work instead of administering technology. EveryAction’s flexibility and capacity for customization gave 4Site the ability to design a range of templates, and Equality Florida’s teams can now apply different themes to their forms for different purposes—all without needing to do any coding themselves.
Fundraising for the future
Equality Florida needed ways to help them diversify their fundraising in order to raise money for the mission sustainably for years to come. 4Site redesigned their forms to expand their giving options and promote monthly-first giving, their Legacy of Equality society, and digital ad fundraising programs, all with a smooth and clear experience for the user.
Expanding their giving options didn’t stop there, though. Thanks to the flexibility that comes with EveryAction’s preferred payment processor, Paragon, Equality Florida was able to add new giving options for their donors, like PayPal for digital ads and EFT for sustainers. These additions mean Equality Florida now has more ways to accept their supporters’ generosity, which will help them advance their mission now and into the future.
Brittany Link, Communications Director, Equality Florida
“The support that EveryAction provides has been really, really helpful. The support team is always available and always responds really quickly to us. We needed help not just on the back end work with 4Site, but to set up different payment options on the donation forms and some of the other tweaking that we were doing, and the team's always really helpful.”
Results
With their redesigned tools in place, Equality Florida has already seen strong returns on investment for their project with 4Site:
During a particularly difficult legislative session, Equality Florida has seen nearly double the rate of conversion on their homepage donation form—going from a 16 percent conversion rate to 29 percent, with an average gift increasing slightly from $52 to $56.
At least half of all digital donations now come in via PayPal rather than via credit card. Sustainers can also now choose to give via EFT, which saves donors time by eliminating the need to update credit card information and closes potential gaps in giving.
Slashed staff time spent on creating the right forms for the right occasions—an array of easy-to-use templates means that now Equality Florida can harness the power of EveryAction forms for their specific purpose in just minutes, all while ensuring that the data they collect rolls up into their CRM.
Want to see it for yourself?
Contact us to learn how a powerful, unified CRM, flexible forms, and a wide range of donation options can help your organization run efficient, optimized programs to engage more supporters and make a deeper impact.
