How NCAN turned donor tips into their own ad budget

Most people have never heard of neuroendocrine cancer. Raising awareness of it, and supporting the patients and caregivers living with it, is exactly the mission the Neuroendocrine Cancer Awareness Network (NCAN) was built around.

It's a big mission for a small team. NCAN runs with four people on staff, and over the past year they've worked to build something deliberate: a marketing and fundraising system that runs largely on its own, so a small team can show up like a much bigger one.

From ad hoc to intentional

NCAN's early days, like a lot of nonprofits, were built on instinct rather than infrastructure. "We came in and we were kind of like, hey, we’ve got to help some people. And that's how we became a nonprofit," says Bob Wahmann, co-founder and Director of Development at NCAN. "Same with marketing. We were mainly just like okay, let's send out an email."

That worked, for a while. But sending a blast to everyone on a list – regardless of whether they'd opened the last ten emails or never engaged at all – isn’t an effective strategy longer term. "People do give you a little bit of slack when you’re a nonprofit," Bob says. "They don't want to kick you out right now and block you, but they don't necessarily want to hear from you all the time. And even on the cost side of things, at some point there’s a high cost to sending out 50,000 messages, ads, whatever it might happen to be, to people who don't want to hear from you."

When their existing email platform stopped keeping pace with what NCAN needed, the team went looking for something built to do more than send. They wanted to see who was actually engaging – who was visiting the donation page and leaving without giving, who was opening every email versus ignoring all of them – and act on that instead of guessing.

That search led them to Feathr.

Reaching a generation that's never heard of you

One of NCAN's most meaningful wins this year came from a tent at Warp Tour, a touring rock festival that drew roughly 30,000 attendees to its Washington, D.C. stop. NCAN had a presence in the festival's nonprofit area and gave out close to 4,000 promotional items.

The real work happened after the festival ended. NCAN geofenced the event and followed up with targeted campaigns to the people who'd walked through – a generation that overwhelmingly hasn't heard of neuroendocrine cancer simply because of how rare and easy to overlook it is at a young age. The campaign generated several hundred responses.

"We're trying to reach a generation that has never heard of neuroendocrine cancer," Bob says. "The fact that we were able to reach some people who said, 'Gee, you know what… I have that, or I know somebody who does,' and bring them in to be interested in learning more about it – that is huge. I think that's something we would probably never be able to assimilate without a platform like Feathr."

Letting donor tips do double duty

NCAN added Feathr Fundraising once their email and advertising were already up and running, and the difference it made was immediate – not just in donations, but in what those donations could fund next.

Unlike most fundraising platforms, when a donor adds an optional tip at checkout, Feathr routes that tip back to the nonprofit as credits for future advertising rather than keeping it. For a small team stretching every dollar, that distinction landed hard. "We've used other platforms before, and it is great to get that direct donation," says Mike Wahmann, Director of Brand Content and Media. "But the fact that Feathr gives us that added benefit where it also feeds our marketing efforts – that is insane. When people hear about that being a feature, they can’t believe it."

So far, NCAN has earned enough in growth credits to fund roughly $1,300 in additional advertising, and they put it to work on something highly specific: geofencing campaigns aimed at reaching patients where they're most likely to be. "It can be hard to find new patients. With Feathr, we are able to geofence areas where patients might go, and the ads are a little creative so that patients are more likely to respond to them. Getting directly in front of people where they are has been a big help for us."

Designing campaigns around how people actually move

What NCAN has been building toward is a system organized around where someone actually is in their relationship with the organization. Not a single list, but a series of distinct paths.

One campaign automates NCAN's monthly support group meetings for patients and caregivers: capturing every sign-up, sending the secure meeting link automatically, and following up afterward to ask about the next session. Automating that one recurring touchpoint means NCAN no longer loses people simply because no one had a free hour to follow up.

The next campaign in progress is more ambitious: a multi-tiered donor structure that treats first-time donors, recurring monthly donors, and major donors as the distinct audiences they are, each with messaging built for where they actually are in the relationship. "Those are all different categories of people," Bob says. "With the right messaging and automations in place, our fundraising will be much more cohesive – much less ad hoc."

And it's the kind of structure that compounds. Build the logic once for one audience, and each one gets faster to stand up.

What's ahead

NCAN's team is candid that the system is still growing alongside them. Their kickoff fundraising campaign proved the model works; what they're building now is the repeatable version of it, with new flights, deeper donor segmentation, and next on the list – closer integration with Feathr’s Meta advertising tools to reach supporters directly on the social platforms where NCAN's audience already spends time.

For an organization racing to put a name to a disease most people have never heard of, that kind of foundation – automated, segmented, and built to grow – matters just as much as any single campaign.

Looking ahead to the fall giving season, Mike put it simply: "Once we get all these parts and pieces in place, it's going to be big. It's a really good thing."