Maddie's Fund Lowered Costs, Saved Time, and Improved Member Engagement

This case study is a summary of the customer story Maddie’s Fund shared at Super Forum 2024.

Maddie’s Fund wanted to get their teams (marketing, grants, education, community, research) working more collaboratively toward specific goals. They initially hired developers to build a custom solution but quickly realized how difficult, time-consuming, and expensive that was to create and maintain. So, they sought out a community platform to replace their custom solution, looking for something that could host all their content and provide members with a dedicated space.

They chose Higher Logic Thrive Platform because it offered them a whole suite of features and functionality (for online community, marketing, and more!) to help make their work easier, while saving them because it brings together multiple functions into one tool. Even better: Higher Logic integrates with their Learning Management System (CommPartners – Elevate).

Maddie’s Fund used their migration to Higher Logic Thrive to support a fundamental shift to putting their community, forums, and groups at the center of all member programming.

Events and education: All events – like webcasts, monthly meetings, etc. – now originate in the community. Those events are then linked outside to their websites and in their emails so that everything always comes back to the desired page in the community. They have a sub-navigation set up on the community that leads to educational opportunities.

Polls and interests: They added a poll pop-up where, when a member responds to a poll, they receive a follow-up sending them to related discussion threads they might be interested in on community forum.

New opportunities for engagement: They run weekly community conversations, which average about 200 live attendees and over 5,000 registrants.  For these they create a custom event page in their community and share a thread on the forum after the event with resources from the call as well as a space for Q&A with guest speakers. They also offer a monthly grant giveaway of up to $5,000 for live or on-demand users who access the giveaway form and entry link in a discussion thread on the forum.

Partnership Opportunities: They use the community to showcase partnerships, said Charlotte Otero, Community Strategist at Maddie’s Fund: “We encourage partners to link to the forum and at conferences, we have assets that always points back to the community. And we recently purchased the Component Management Package, which will let us launch multiple communities for a new partner organization. It’s great that the tool has so many features to help support multiple initiatives.”

Their goal is to maximize Higher Logic’s capabilities to have content start and end in the community. With the new strategy, the organization saw a 53% increase in total views and average views per month from 2022 to 2023 of the community conversations custom page, and a 73% increase in average users per month.

Then there’s Maddie’s University, the non-profit’s LMS on CommPartners Elevate. With the help of a robust integration between Elevate and Higher Logic Thrive:

SSO: Members can log into the community and LMS with the same login, making it easier for them to engage with both. If users sign up to take courses in Maddie’s University, they’re automatically added to the community.

Easy navigation: Members can easily take courses and click over to the community to see related discussions – going back and forth as needed.

Connecting members with relevant resources: When education programs are launched, Maddie’s University creates an accompanying discussion thread and uses the marketing tools in Higher Logic Thrive Platform to invite members who follow related topics in the community or have taken related courses to check out the new offering.

Collaboration with experts: Learners can collaborate with the instructor and each other in communities during and after the class. Some instructors even use the community to have students submit homework.

Maddie’s Fund knows their audience has very little free time because they work so many hours in shelters, so this streamlined setup allows them to give their members an easy, one-stop-shop for everything they need.

A community’s success revolves around encouraging member engagement. It’s also a great platform for organizations to source and generate useful content for members. Maddie’s fund uses all the tools available to them through Higher Logic Thrive Platform to do both!

Webcast Contests: One way Maddie’s Fund encourages engagement is through prize programs associated with their Webcasts. Webcast presenters who have a prize to offer can ask people in the community to reply to a discussion thread with a pitch for why their organization should win their prize (for example, one Webcast host offered a prize drawing for a Live Trap which is used to catch community cats in order to spay & neuter them). One such thread got Maddie’s Fund over 90 comments and remains its fourth top discussion thread of all time.

Resource Drives: Maddie’s Fund runs a “resource drive” to help populate their resource library. They invite users to share resources or ask others about about a resource they’re looking for. Members who participate are entered for a chance to win a $50 gift card. They included highlights for their resource drive in the organization’s monthly marketing newsletter (sent out through Higher Logic Thrive Platform’s marketing tools). The result: they’ve collected a ton of resources that are now available in easy-to-share folders in their community resource library.

Quarterly Grant Challenges: Maddie’s Fund also started running their quarterly grant challenges through their communities. They can now create dedicated communities in the platform to help members participating in these challenges collaborate and access resources related to the challenge goals. This has helped the Maddie’s Fund’s grants team reduce the time spent responding to the same questions about the challenge over and over.

Looking at community engagement data over time, Maddie’s Fund can see that their efforts are working! After moving to Higher Logic Thrive Platform, they’ve seen the number of community posts and contributors steadily increasing.

Maddie’s Fund^® is a family foundation established in 1994 by Dave and Cheryl Duffield and is the fulfillment of a promise to their inspirational dog, Maddie. She provided them much joy for over ten years and continues to inspire them today.

The Foundation has awarded over $287.5 million in grants toward increased community collaborations and live outcomes, pioneering shelter medicine education and establishing foster care as a standard across the U.S.

Maddie’s Fund proudly offers the industry a national voice, important funding opportunities for bold ideas, learning resources and access to collaborate and share innovative solutions. The Foundation invests its resources in a commitment to keeping pets and people together, creating a safety net of care for animals in need and operating within a culture of inclusiveness and humility.