Match day raises more than $200k

Home City News Match day raises more than $200k

Usually, the second floor of the Hillsdale County Community Foundation is pretty quiet. But on Oct. 18, the room became the site of the largest annual day of giving in Hillsdale County.

Throughout the day, 950 donors from all over Hillsdale County met with representatives from Hillsdale area nonprofits during the Hillsdale County Community Foundation’s third annual Match Day. The Foundation matched a portion of the $204,000 donations to each organization’s critical need.

“That is a lot of money to raise in one day,”  said Community Foundation Executive Director Sharon Bisher. “We like to say that it’s the biggest day of giving in Hillsdale County.”

This year’s event was the third annual Match Day hosted by the Community Foundation, and the last in the Foundation’s three-year commitment to the community to hold such an event.

Match Day is unique in that the Foundation allows donors to actually meet representatives of the organizations to which they give. This is an unusual, yet effective measure in cultivating relationships with donors. The strategy is especially useful for charities that usually only receive one-time gifts.

“We don’t have a donor base,” said Maxine Vanlerberg, director of the Hillsdale County Community Action Agency, an organization which benefited from Match Day, “[But] I did have some donors that repeated from last year.”

Several organizations ran their own marketing campaigns in addition to the campaign promoting Match Day produced by the Foundation.

“[Some agencies] were more successful, I think based on marketing,” Bisher said. “There were three agencies that did significantly better this year than they did in the past.”

Hillsdale County Community Action Agency, Hillsdale County Senior Services Center and Kimball Camp YMCA in Reading, Mich. saw the greatest increase in donations from last year.

This year was Kimball Camp’s second year to be involved with Match Day, according to the camp’s Executive Director Harold Campbell. The camp raised just under $14,000, not including matches from the Foundation.

“It’s been a godsend,” Campbell said. “We had a fire in May that burned down our infirmary.”

Most of the funds Kimball Camp raised from Match Day will be used toward rebuilding the camp infirmary, but the they also plan to put some money toward scholarships for campers.

Hillsdale’s Community Action Agency also raised more than $5,000 independent of Foundation matches.

According to Vanlerberg, the agency plans to use the funds raised to further its goal of helping the people of Hillsdale become more self-sufficient. Money will go toward unmet needs that the Agency usually experiences difficulty funding, such as buying gasoline for people to visit doctors or get to jobs until their first paycheck.

“I think it’s a wonderful thing that the Community Foundation does for the community,” Vanlerberg said. “I’m pleased that we can be a part of it.”