Abbott House

Challenge

The Abbott House is a non-profit organization offering residential treatment and foster services for youth across the state of South Dakota. The Abbott House approached the RSA team looking for a brand new website that would bring them up-to-date with current website design trends. In addition to a new website the Abbott House was also looking for creative ideas to bring top-of-mind awareness to their organization as well as reach more potential donors and increase their annual fundraising.

The Abbott House had recently expanded into the western part of the state and needed to establish a presence to interact with people in western South Dakota wanting to donate to their cause as well as find qualified employees to work as foster parents and Youth Engagement Specialists.

Analysis

The Abbott House provides life-changing services and care for troubled youth in South Dakota. In addition to their residential treatment they also operate over ten foster homes in the state for children ages 10-17. After children graduate from the foster program they are able to live in independent living that allows them to learn how to budget and live on their own, while still receiving the support they need from the Abbott House. In order to continue offering their life-changing services, the Abbott House relies solely on fundraisers and private donations. This means that educating the public on the work they do was imperative to this campaign. The first step of raising top-of-mind awareness for the Abbott House was the design and development of a new website.

Featuring custom-written content developed by the talented content writers at RSA, Abbott House’s new website maintains a consistent balance in inspiring prospective donors to support Abbott House’s mission, while also informing those in need of their services about how welcoming and supportive Abbott House is for adolescents in the state of South Dakota. Seamlessly integrating key donation software from BlackBaud, Abbott House’s new website is equipped to handle the inevitable growth in support for their efforts over the next several years. Better yet, this new website is easily maintained by the Abbott House team who had previously struggled to update their website using their previous web hosting agency/content management system. With the unrelenting support of RSA’s web team and the straightforward, user-friendliness of our PageFramer content management system (CMS), Abbott House is adequately prepared for a fruitful future, with a stunning website to boot.

Strategy

In order to increase fundraising dollars and donations the most important aspect of the new website was making the donation process as seamless as possible. The Abbott House website was integrated with BlackBaud to allow website users to easily and safely make a donation to the Abbott House. Website users are able to make a single gift or sign up to give a monthly pledge. In addition to regular donations, the Abbott House also has a variety of fundraisers throughout the year to increase monetary donations. Through prominent homepage pop-over’s and designated pages containing information about each fundraiser and a seamless donation process, we have been able to increase fundraising dollars for the Abbott House.

Like many other businesses, the Abbott House was also having difficulty finding qualified employees. To help qualified job seekers connect with the Abbott House we started running an employment campaign on Facebook.

Results

The RSA team has been working with the Abbott House for a little over a year and we have already seen some amazing progress. The Abbott House has reached or exceeded all fundraising goals as well as increased their donor list. In the first quarter of launching the website the Abbott House had over 5,000 users visit their website with almost 3,000 of those users coming from their Facebook page. In 2022 over 200 people have clicked on the donation button and over 50 people have filled out an employment form.

The employment campaign on Facebook also performed extremely well. During the 3 month campaign our employment ads gathered over 100,000 impressions and over 7,000 visits to the website and The Abbott House filled all of their open foster parent positions!