Cure Childhood Cancer Case Study

Even among nonprofit organizations, there’s an element of competition. Though serving worthy, even harrowing, causes, professionals like Mark apply great intention and skill to marketing and driving traffic to their websites to ultimately raise awareness and attract donations.

In the case of Cure, they serve families wherever they reside across the country. Their mission is somewhat different than larger, more well-known organizations like St. Jude Hospital.
No organization leverages partnerships like a nonprofit. Every grant, individual donor, or sponsorship is hard-sought and earned. Each dollar must do the work of three dollars.

Mark’s challenge was finding the right marketing partner.

For several years, Cure relied on a large web hosting company. For most of that time, they found the service less than ideal and non-conducive to their success.

Mark found himself in a real bind. He’s excellent at creating content for the website, newsletters, and social media, but he knows his technical limits. And he knows his financial limitations.

“I can do some content changes and build pages, but there are some things I cannot do. We can’t afford to bring someone on full-time to handle support. Our previous provider did not offer technical support or assistance without sizable upcharges.”

A solution simply had to be found. With over half of Cure’s donations made online, they cannot risk going a single day without a healthy, functioning website.

“Under our last service provider, our site went down for an entire day. It was a complete scramble! Donations are our lifeblood, and people have short attention spans. If our website loads slowly or goes down, site visitors won’t wait. They’ll go elsewhere.”

Competition is a reality, even among nonprofit organizations providing an immense public good.

“A challenge for us is that larger organizations spend more than we can on digital marketing, and we can’t match them. They can spend more dollars that impact their SEO. It’s a challenge to spend all of our Google Ad Grant (an all-or-nothing free advertising program for nonprofits) due to their stipulations.”

Cure could not afford to leave Google ad dollars on the table. Per Google rules, they’d risk losing out on some of the $10,000 monthly grant funds if not used entirely.

A more robust optimization plan using some creativity and best practices could help in this situation, but Mark’s service provider, at the time, provided zero assistance getting his organization there.

He knew it was time for a change.