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The Connecticut Project Action Fund
The Connecticut Project Action Fund (TCPAF) unites communities, ideas, and resources to create tangible outcomes for lower-income and asset-limited residents in Connecticut. By mobilizing people, partners, and resources, they advance the economic, child care, and housing interests of low-income families. TCPAF drives time-bound, results-oriented campaigns in collaboration with low-income individuals, community groups, and advocacy organizations.
Nonprofit Tech Shop
Nonprofit Tech Shop specializes in helping nonprofits transform their marketing and constituent engagement with best-in-class technology. When TCPAF approached Nonprofit Tech Shop, it was clear that a comprehensive approach was necessary to achieve their ambitious goals of driving political and social change in Connecticut. Here’s how Nonprofit Tech Shop helped TCPAF make a tangible impact through strategic marketing, targeted direct mail, comprehensive HubSpot implementation, and a custom app development.
Solution 1: Omni-Channel Marketing
Marketing Strategies: Driving Awareness and Action
Nonprofit Tech Shop developed highly tailored digital marketing campaigns to help TCPAF activate Connecticut residents and drive political and social change.
For a new organization like TCPAF, building name recognition and raising awareness are crucial for gaining traction and credibility in the community. By integrating a suite of data tools into HubSpot, Nonprofit Tech shop enabled the Action Fund to leverage detailed insights and create a comprehensive database of Connecticut residents.
This approach allowed TCP to adapt and tailor their marketing messaging for better engagement, achieving:
Solution 1
- Enhanced Community Engagement: Targeted ads and personalized outreach resulted in a 25% increase in local chapter signups, accelerating grassroots efforts across the state.
- Effective Legislative Influence: Over 2,000 personalized messages were sent to state legislators during a campaign calling for the delay in implementation of a new kindergarten eligibility law that would hurt working families and squeeze educators.
- Improved Data Collection: Engaging online content such as quizzes and blogs helped gather actionable insights, enabling TCPAF to understand and address community concerns more effectively while collecting the data that would help them later personalize and segment campaigns even further.
- Layered Audience Targeting: By integrating demographic information, voter data, and more into HubSpot, Nonprofit Tech Shop ensured that the Action Fund's ad spend was focused on groups identified as ripe for activation. This included retargeting strategies, custom ad flows for users interested in specific thematic issues, and precise audience segmentation to maximize impact and efficiency.
Solution 2: Hyper-Targeted Direct Mail
Direct Mail Campaigns: Bridging the Digital Divide
Nonprofit Tech Shop developed highly tailored digital marketing campaigns to help TCPAF activate Connecticut residents and drive political and social change. For a new organization like the Action Fund, building name recognition and raising awareness are crucial for gaining traction and credibility in the community. By integrating a suite of data tools into HubSpot, Nonprofit Tech Shop enabled TCPAF to leverage detailed insights and create a comprehensive database of Connecticut residents. This approach allowed TCP to adapt and tailor their marketing messaging for better engagement, achieving:
Solution 1
- Reach Underserved Audiences: Direct mail provided a tangible connection to low-income residents who may not have internet access, delivering crucial information directly to their homes.
- Enhance Field Operations: Coordinated mailings boosted the effectiveness of TCPAF’s door-to-door canvassing efforts, priming audiences for in-person interactions. Action Fund canvassers reported that in areas targeted by direct mail they were significantly more well received than in those areas that had not been “warmed up” by direct mail.
“Digital advertising is great, but it doesn’t always connect with certain segments of the population that we really need to reach. With direct mail, we could get pretty targeted around where people live and around the different strategic audiences that we knew we wanted to mobilize.”
Solution 1
- Streamline Communications: Centralized data management enabled efficient tracking and evaluation of constituent interactions. With HubSpot as the receptacle for constituent information from various data sources (such as L2 voter data) and communication personalization tools such as Kickbox SMS integrated seamlessly, TCPAF was able to personalize and segment outreach with more granularity than ever before.
- Automate Workflows: Automated processes reduced the manual workload on the Action Fund's small staff, allowing them to focus on strategic initiatives instead of toggling between tools. Form fills got automated responses, tasks were scheduled and assigned for team members based on specific triggers (eg. new sign-ups or event participation), and data entry and updates were automated.
- Enhance Data Insights: Consolidating data from tools that used to be siloed gave the TCPAF team a holistic view of constituent engagement, informing future campaign strategies.
Focus on New/Mode
New/Mode is a critical tool in TCPAF’s HubSpot implementation, playing a key role in mobilizing and engaging supporters. Here’s how New/Mode fits into the overall strategy:
Engagement and Advocacy
New/Mode is used to facilitate constituent engagement through tools like petitions, form submissions, and advocacy actions. By integrating New/Mode with HubSpot, TCPAF can capture and manage supporter interactions and actions directly within their CRM.
Data Synchronization
Integration with New/Mode ensures that data on supporter actions—such as petitions signed or messages sent to legislators—is seamlessly synchronized with TCPAF’s HubSpot CRM. This allows the Action Fund to track supporter engagement and follow up with personalized communication based on their advocacy activities.
Campaign Optimization
The insights gathered from New/Mode interactions are used to refine and optimize marketing campaigns. By analyzing supporter behavior and feedback, TCPAF can tailor their outreach and advocacy efforts to be more effective and targeted.
Overall, New/Mode enhances TCPAF's ability to engage supporters and drive advocacy actions, while HubSpot centralizes and streamlines this data for better campaign management and strategic decision-making.
Solution 4: Custom Canvassing App
Developing a Custom Canvassing App to Boost Grassroots Mobilization
Advocacy organizations like The Connecticut Project Action Fund often struggle with integrating effective canvassing strategies with robust data management and targeted marketing initiatives. TCPAF faced inefficiencies due to manual processes and disjointed systems. The main challenge was that they didn't have a unified system to synchronize field activities with data analytics and marketing campaigns. Simply put, Ecanvasser wasn't cutting it.
Nonprofit Tech Shop developed a custom canvassing app integrated with HubSpot to solve this problem, with the app using L2 voter data to guide canvassers as they log interactions in-app, with results automatically syncing to HubSpot. Custom lifecycle stages, objects, properties, workflows, and marketing tools now streamline handoffs between the TCPAF canvassing and marketing teams, a handoff (with subsequent marketing automation) that most advocacy organizations can only dream of.
Tailored functionalities for different users and robust offline capabilities ensured uninterrupted operations no matter if a canvasser was back at the office or out in the field. This efficiency allowed TCPAF canvassing teams to cover more ground, engage with more residents, and collect data more effectively, significantly boosting their field operations.