When organizations want to make a difference, gaining new supporters is paramount.
However, attracting would-be supporters is extremely time-consuming and expensive, as most people are already supporting an average of 4.5 charities and working longer hours in work-from-home roles.
Care2’s member network solves these acquisition challenges by making it easy to find the right potential supporters and cost-efficiently getting them involved. Based in Redwood City, California, Care2 helps over 2,500 activism-based brands, organizations, and nonprofits garner support for the causes they care about.
Care2 helps raise attention and support for a wide range of issues, from pushing Netflix to declare new policies that guarantee male and female actors are paid equally, to stopping the killing of urban foxes in London's Paddington Station.
According to Senior Growth Marketing Manager Maya Austen, clients come to Care2 with specific goals in mind.
“They may want to grow their customer or supporter bases, drive comments, start letter-writing campaigns, or increase signature counts on petition campaigns. We help them reach their goals and create lasting impact by tailoring our services to meet their needs through permission-based outreach to our millions of like-minded members,” states Austen.
Care2 next disrupts lead generation for activism-based businesses by helping clients achieve all of the goals listed above through performance-based pricing.
With Care2, out are the old ways of supporter acquisition. Instead of risking spend upfront by taking out an ad in the local paper, community newsletter, or by purchasing a local TV spot, worthy causes can now grow efficiently through performance-based supporter acquisition.
Essentially, Care2 effectively scales organizations at rates they’re comfortable with, paying only for supporters delivered.
As we’ve seen throughout our time at Everflow, this type of performance-based lead generation works for virtually every type of business, no matter what state the economy is in. Thus, when Care2’s Growth and Retention Team brought their internal affiliate program to Everflow in August 2021, we knew it would scale quickly through the amplification tools inside the Everflow platform.
This dramatic rise in performance led to 70% YoY program growth in year one with Everflow, and 94% YoY in year two.
So, how did the Care2 affiliate program achieve this massive level of growth in such a short time period?
Let’s dive into the rapid rise of the Care2 affiliate program by examining the foundation for its success: the adoption of the Everflow partner marketing platform.
Adding Structural Support To A Proprietary Program
On the surface, using a proprietary platform for an affiliate program seems like a smart financial decision. After all, you don’t have to pay a monthly fee to a platform vendor and are in total control of the tech.
In practice, however, managing your program on an internal platform can severely block the growth of your program. At Everflow, we see the impact of proprietary platforms often, with tech issues that are slow to fix (and take expensive engineering resources), the need for supplemental solutions to fill in service gaps, and not having the infrastructure to scale when the opportunity strikes.
Though their program was progressing, the team at Care2 knew they could be scaling their lead generation campaigns a lot faster.
Therefore, they began setting up the program for expedited growth through the following structural solutions inside of Everflow:
Payment processing through Tipalti allowed Care2 to collect affiliate tax info, pay affiliates, and invoice clients through a built-in integration.
Simple campaign setup and optimization tools enabled them to quickly create, test, and scale client CPA campaigns.
Custom partner dashboards helped Care2 affiliates stay on top of their efforts, manage their earnings, and easily pick up new campaigns.
“Switching to Everflow enabled our partners to see their performance in real-time, thereby empowering them to optimize their own campaigns and also better implement the strategic actions we recommend that they take,” states Austen.
Structural program improvements were just the beginning for Care2, as the team next began tracking events to keep quality leads moving quickly through the funnel.
Utilizing Events To Drive A Stronger Pipeline
Working with hundreds of activism-based organizations, the team at Care2 knew the value that momentum played a large role in sparking activism. Therefore, they studied their lead generation campaigns and looked for key areas where potential bottlenecks may occur. Care2 then began adding events to their campaigns, to ensure lead momentum is never lost.
Unlike typical performance-based metrics such as clicks, impressions, and sales, events are fully customizable data points (at least in Everflow) that allow you to monitor basically anything that is important to your campaigns.
For example, clients at Everflow track a wide range of events, ranging from newsletter signups, to upsells, to repeat purchases, to even market-qualified leads.
At Care2, event optimization consisted of tracking key stages in the acquisition process.
Using Everflow’s Event Reports, Care2 was able to fully examine the funnel for all of their campaigns and use event data (such as first-time signature collection) to optimize their campaigns and dive into affiliate performance.
Combined with consistent testing, event tracking played a major role in strengthening Care2 campaigns:
Within the first six months of Everflow, the Care2 affiliate program generated hundreds of thousands of new users for cause-based organizations in their network, setting the new standard for gaining support for vital causes.
Tracking advanced metrics like events is useless, however, if you’re not able to use new data to gain insights to optimize program performance.
Care2 became frequent users of Everflow’s analytic suites, allowing them to see exactly what works and what doesn’t for their program, and easily make necessary adjustments in platform.
Unlocking Insights Through Accessible, Deeper Data
Each day, Care2 has easy access to valuable program data.
Once logged into their dashboard, the team instantly sees metrics that they care about, automatically displayed.
Revenue, partner performance, profit, clicks, and more are shown to quickly bring everyone up to speed. Beyond the main dashboard, scheduled reports keep the entire team informed on what matters.
Reports such as overall month-to-date offer performance, overall performance vs. previous month, and SMS campaign performance are sent to key Care2 team members each month.
In addition to scheduled reports, team members can quickly build custom reports to view performance by partner placement, event, daily performance, offer performance, revenue, or on any key data point that matters to them.
The team at Care2 are big fans of creating these custom Flex reports, allowing them to see what matters and make adjustments to immediately boost performance.
Care2’s affiliate partners love to dive into data as well. “As soon as our partners got access to their own customized dashboards, they became more equipped with the data needed to test and scale their campaigns,” adds Austen.
Though access to advanced platform features and deeper data is vital for program growth, success rarely occurs in a vacuum. Thus, the team at Care2 utilizes the support of Everflow’s Customer Success team to continue to scale their program.
Getting The Support Needed For Scale
Senior Growth Marketing Manager
Smarter affiliate platforms like Everflow can set up any program to scale. However, platform support is crucial to achieve any sort of meaningful growth.
First off, every program will need some sort of onboarding. For Care2, this meant working with Everflow to set up their campaign and payout structure, advise on affiliate recruitment, and provide the team with full platform training.
Once everything was set up, Care2 began receiving quarterly program reviews from the Everflow Customer Success team, including personalized performance improvement recommendations and insights based on industry best practices.
Care2 can conveniently connect to Everflow via email or live chat when needed, allowing for quick answers from an Everflow team member in their time zone.
“Support from Everflow has been huge for our program, allowing us to discuss campaign strategy, get answers ASAP, and continue to optimize our program offerings,” states Austen.
The Care2 program isn't slowing down anytime soon either.
According to Austen, Everflow’s platform and support helped them garner nearly six million signatures for client campaigns last year.
What’s Next For Care2?
Tony Cohn
Director Of Customer Marketing, Everflow
Along with a brilliant solution offering, having a sound structural setup, the ability to track events, quick access to deeper data, and strong support have put Care2 in a position to continue to expand their program.
Currently, Care2 is bringing in major players in the affiliate space for revenue share and Co-Reg offers. Austen created additional partner resources, such as Promo Toolkit and Writer’s Toolkit to support high-volume growth. Beyond improving their affiliate program, Care2 recently launched another type of program on Everflow:
“We built out an influencer program at Care2 and are excited to be bringing domestic and international influencers onto our affiliate program. We are focused on growing and scaling the program over the next year with Everflow, as well as refining the quality of our leads” adds Austen.
If the influencer program rises as fast as their affiliate program, Care2 will pave another new path to leveraging technology to achieve good.
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