Since 1995, GreenHouse Child Advocacy and Sexual Assault Center has been protecting children, victims, and caregivers in their Georgia community. 

Tragically, mishandled system responses to child abuse and sexual assault can be more traumatizing than the abuse itself. That’s where GreenHouse comes in, providing trauma-informed, sensitive first responses to victims and their caregivers or partners.

Climbing buildings, helping families

It’s an important mission, and it’s one GreenHouse’s community has come together to support. For three years in a row, GreenHouse has held an exciting annual fundraising event with Over The Edge (OTE). OTE’s unique, exciting urban rappelling events typically generate a 300% return for nonprofits — after all, who doesn’t want to climb a skyscraper for a good cause? 

But as exciting as these events are, they’re no small feat for organizers, requiring cooperation from multiple parties and plenty of promotion within the community. 

That’s why Chris Berryman, GreenHouse’s Director of Marketing and Development, knew he’d need all the support he could get. 

Chris joined the GreenHouse team only shortly before the third iteration of its event with Over The Edge. He knew he had a big job on his hands — settling into a new leadership role is demanding enough, not to mention pulling off a complex, participatory fundraising event involving multiple partners! 

An intuitive digital fundraising platform

That’s why Chris chose FundRazr and decided to work one-on-one with Shannon, one of our crowdfunding strategists.

It takes a great tool to bring an event like this to life. For GreenHouse, FundRazr was the perfect solution. “I appreciated the intuitive nature of it,” Chris says. “Even if Shannon didn’t exactly cover something, I still figured it out how to do it, because we’d talked about something else that was similar.” 

FundRazr was the perfect match for GreenHouse’s unique needs — namely, a complex event that an ordinary crowdfunding platform couldn’t handle. “We could bring all three partners [FundRazr, GreenHouse, and Over The Edge] together within the platform, which was great,” Chris explains. 

But the event is nothing without participants, which makes promotion and marketing crucially important. Chris found that FundRazr helped there, too. “Sharing on social media felt easy and intuitive,” he says. 

FundRazr also provided GreenHouse with data that would help them improve their event in the future — but in an accessible, user-friendly way. “The data FundRazr collects is complex, but the way you go at it is simple,” Chris says. “It’s a very thorough tool that collects massive amounts of data, but provides the user with very simple experience, generating reports that mean different things to different people.”

Strategic crowdfunding support

FundRazr gave Chris the tools he needed to run the event. But it’s Shannon’s assistance that helped him truly make the most of it. He credits her one-on-one crowdfunding strategic support with helping him pull off this challenging task, and make the event a success without putting undue stress on the Greenhouse or Over The Edge teams. 

“Shannon went above and beyond on multiple occasions,” Chris shares. “She took quite a bit of time to teach me how to use FundRazr. She took large issues and whittled them down to the root causes to solve them — while teaching me how to solve it myself, if it came up again.” 

For example, some of the participants signed up for the challenge with their own names, rather than under GreenHouse. Shannon not only fixed the issue, but made sure Chris understood how to do it in the future, should the problem arise again. 

“Shannon didn’t just direct me to the help page,” Chris says. “She’d take the time to explain and talk me through it, then send over the help pages as a follow-up.”

Set up for success

For Chris, the personalized support he received from FundRazr was a crucial factor in the event’s success. “To me, Shannon was the sole face of Fundrazr, and she represented it flawlessly with intelligence, patience, grace, and humor,” he says. “Often, she took what I viewed as an insurmountable behemoth and turned it into lots of a-ha moments. I’d find myself saying, oh…now I get it, or that totally makes sense now.”

Even though Chris was brand-new on the job, GreenHouse couldn’t afford for their event with Over The Edge to be anything but a resounding success. It takes money for them to do their important work of helping abuse victims in a gentle, trauma-informed way, and an exciting community event like this to raise that money. 

But Chris knew that with the right crowdfunding platform and a bit of extra support, he’d be able to pull off that challenge. Here at FundRazr, we’re so glad that we could help him along the way.