Donor communication for organizations without a marketing staff
Causeflow Campaigns builds the website, the giving page, and the email list that reach the people who moved away, then runs three months of marketing aimed at the one date on your calendar that already has money attached. We report in dollars raised and gifts received. Not followers.
The people already on your list
Direct mail. The newspaper. The church bulletin. A phone call from a board member who has known the family for forty years.
These are not outdated tools. For people who already know your organization, they are the most effective ones available, and you should keep every one of them.
Everyone who isn't
Not one of those channels reaches the person who grew up there, graduated in 1998, and now lives three states away — or the family who moved for work, or the donor who gave twice and then dropped off.
That person would very likely give if they were asked and could see what you have built. Right now there is no way for them to do either.
For most organizations, the people connected to the work outnumber the people currently on the list, and it isn't close. That group is the single largest untapped source of giving on the table, and almost nobody is asking them.
The gap
None of that is a failure of effort. It's a missing capability — and it's a fixable one.
How it works
Two weeks. We review what you already own — site, giving page, list, social presence, last year's appeal — against the next dated fundraising moment on your calendar.
You get written findings and a plan, whether or not you hire us for anything else.
Credited in full toward a campaignWebsite, campaign page, online giving, email list, and tracking. Accounts opened in your organization's name, under your EIN and your bank account.
Built once, owned by you permanently, whether or not the marketing continues.
Live within one week of approvalThree months of social and email paced to a deadline instead of spread evenly across the calendar — light warm-up, heavy through the close, follow-through afterward.
Monthly reporting, and a written playbook you keep and can run yourself next year.
Ends when the term endsPrograms
Every engagement is priced against the size of the moment it's built around — not by an hourly rate, and not by the number of posts. Build-plus-campaign work generally lands between $6,000 and $12,000, with a paid-in-full discount and an installment schedule both available. The audit tells you your number before you commit to anything.
Capital campaigns, rebrands, and multi-year strategic work are scoped separately. Advertising budget, when a board wants it, is spent on your own ad account at cost — we add no markup and receive none of it.
What's included
Photography, printing and postage, domain and hosting fees, payment processing fees, and grant writing are not included. We'll tell you what each of those costs before you commit to anything.
Division of labor
Keeping that boundary explicit protects both sides — and it's the reason we can quote a fixed price instead of an open-ended retainer.
What comes off your plate
What stays with you
We never hold or touch donated funds. Giving accounts are opened in your organization's name, under your EIN, deposited to your bank account.
Results
A larger audience that gives nothing has not moved your organization anywhere. If a number can't be connected to a dollar or a donor, it doesn't go in the report.
One honest caveat: we don't control the ask, the match, or the gift processing, so we don't promise a dollar figure. What we're accountable for is that the right people knew, understood, and had an easy way to give. For a first-year email list built from nothing, 50 to 200 addresses is a normal and useful starting point — and it compounds every year after.
Fit
A match, a giving day, a gala, an anniversary, a capital deadline. Something with a date and a number. Campaigns need a reason to end; open-ended appeals raise very little.
Alumni, former residents, lapsed donors, second-home owners, families who moved for work. People with a real connection to the place who are no longer reachable by anything you currently own.
If someone on payroll already writes the appeals and runs the accounts, you don't need us. If it's the executive director doing it at nine at night, you do.
Why this exists
This started on the board side of the table, not in an agency.
Which is why the scope is written the way it is: fixed price, stated exclusions, and a two-business-day approval window — the things a board actually argues about.
The problem is one you already recognize. Everyone in the room agrees the organization should be reaching people who moved away. Nobody has the time, the tools, or the budget to do it, so it goes in the minutes again and nothing happens.
Agencies aren't built for organizations this size. The good ones cost more than the campaign raises. The rest sell a strategy deck and leave the execution to a communications staff you don't have. Either way the work doesn't get done, and money that was sitting there stays sitting there.
What Causeflow does is deliberately narrow: build the missing infrastructure, run one campaign properly around a date that already matters, hand you a playbook, and get out of the way. Productized on purpose — that's how the price stays inside what a small organization can approve and the scope stays short enough for a board to read in one sitting.
None of which you have to take on faith. That's what the audit is for. Two weeks, $750, written findings, and a plan you keep whether or not you hire us for anything else.
FAQ
Because a free call is a sales pitch and both of us know it. The audit is real work — a written review of what you have, what's missing, and what to do about it before your next deadline. If you never hire us for anything else, you still leave with a plan you can hand to a volunteer. And if you do move forward, the $750 comes off the build. That's a smaller commitment than most boards need to approve, and it lets you see the quality of the work before the real decision.
Because the right number depends on the size of the moment you're building around. A foundation running a $100,000 match and a chamber running a $6,000 banquet need different amounts of work, and quoting them the same figure would be wrong in both directions.
The audit price is fixed and public at $750 so there's no ambiguity about the first step. Your build-and-campaign number comes back with the audit findings, in writing, before you commit to anything. Most fall between $6,000 and $12,000.
Sometimes not. The audit answers this honestly. What usually fails isn't the site — it's that there's no way to give on it, no way to join a list, and no page built to be the destination for a campaign. If your existing site can carry those, we'll say so and quote you less.
You do, permanently. Domain, hosting, giving account, and email platform are opened in your organization's name, under your EIN, with your board holding the credentials. The email list is exported and handed to you at the end of any engagement. Nothing is held hostage if you stop working with us.
No. Gifts go directly from the donor to your processor to your bank account. We set the account up and test it; we're never a party to the transaction and we never have withdrawal access. Receipts carry your EIN and your acknowledgment language.
The first campaign is an introduction, so a meaningful share of the value shows up later. Expect a modest email list — 50 to 200 addresses is normal from a standing start — a measurable lift in gifts from people who were not already giving, and a permanent piece of infrastructure that costs nothing to keep. Year two typically outperforms year one substantially, because the list and the audience carry over and the deadline is already familiar.
Anyone who quotes you a dollar figure in advance is guessing.
Not at all — it's good governance and you should get them. The proposal is written to be read side by side with anything else on the table, with scope, timeline, price, and exclusions all stated plainly. Ask the other bidders for the same and the comparison gets easy.
The engagement ends. There's no automatic renewal and no rolling commitment. You get a final report and a written playbook detailing what ran, when, and what worked, so next year can be run in-house. If the board wants us to keep going, the Standing Retainer is there at a flat monthly rate — but nothing in the campaign depends on it.
No. Everything is designed to work organically, because most of the reach that matters comes from content being shared by hand into alumni groups and community groups. If your board does want paid reach, roughly $1,500 across a three-month campaign is a reasonable starting point, weighted heavily toward the final ten days. That money is spent on your own ad account, billed to your card, at cost. We add no markup and receive none of it.
No. It's a genuinely different discipline and you'll get better results from someone who does only that. We'll happily point you toward options.
Anywhere in the country. The work is remote and the pattern travels — a small organization with a dated fundraising moment and an audience that moved away looks much the same in Ohio, Montana, Georgia, or upstate New York. Everything runs through email and shared documents, and no travel is required or billed.
What matters is the shape of your situation, not the map.
Start here
Send the audit request and we'll come back within two business days with what it would cover for your organization and what it would cost. If your next fundraising moment is close enough that we can't do it justice, we'll tell you that instead.
$750, delivered in two weeks, credited in full toward a build if you move forward. No call required at any point unless you want one.