Dear Jack Foundation turned fans into repeat fundraisers and surpassed its goals on GoFundMe Pro
Mission
To provide impactful programs benefiting adolescents and young adults diagnosed with cancer and their families to improve their quality of life from treatment to survivorship
Challenge
Nurture lasting relationships with peer-to-peer fundraisers, so they stay engaged, feel inspired, and come back year after year
Solution
Facilitate friendly competition among supporters with GoFundMe Pro’s peer-to-peer fundraising platform, mobilizing Dear Jack Foundation to raise more year over year
“Back when we first started our foray into peer-to-peer fundraising, we needed a platform that gave us the ability to set up teams and to make it easy for them to fundraise on our behalf. GoFundMe Pro provided that for us.”
– Susan Wandishin, Senior Director of Operations
Raise Your Voice fundraising challenge results*:
Achieved 109%
of the overall fundraising goal
$1,275 raised
per active fundraiser, on average
18 active
fundraising teams
*Based on 2025 GoFundMe Pro data and Dear Jack Foundation-provided data
Cultivating a loyal fundraising community
Dear Jack Foundation’s annual Raise Your Voice peer-to-peer fundraising challenge has become a powerful source of support, heavily powered by repeat fundraisers. While many supporters initially connect with the organization through its founder, musician Andrew McMahon, Raise Your Voice has successfully transitioned many of them into dedicated mission advocates.
The strongest teams are often led by repeat fundraisers who return year after year, having been nurtured through Dear Jack’s:
- Community-building: The nonprofit facilitates a social media group where fundraisers crowdsource ideas and support one another, fostering an environment where individuals cheer for the grand total as much as they do for their own success.
- Focus on impact: Dear Jack’s team shares exactly where all fundraising dollars go, ensuring donors and fundraisers know how many wishes or retreats they have funded.
- Powerful matches: By securing matches in advance, the organization effectively rallied and inspired participation, a significant factor in helping fundraisers exceed their goals.
Centralizing competition and communication
GoFundMe Pro’s peer-to-peer fundraising technology provides a one-stop shop for participants, offering a central hub that allows each individual and team to:
- Create personalized pages: Fundraisers can easily set up and customize their individual fundraising pages to tell their personal story.
- Track progress: Fundraisers can view their personal and team totals, as well as performance metrics, to track their progress toward their goal.
- Engage in competition: The leaderboard functionality lets fundraisers see how they measure up against other individuals and teams, fueling friendly competition that makes challenges so successful.
The ability to have a one-stop shop where people can see how much they’ve raised as an individual or a team and compare to other individuals and teams, alongside the running total, is super helpful not only for our team but all fundraisers.
18 teams participated in the Raise Your Voice challenge, and each individual fundraiser raised an average of $1,275, helping Dear Jack Foundation reach 109% of its goal. This incredible example of community fundraising will help:
- Grant more wishes through LifeList, which offers hope and support to young adults who are receiving treatment for a life-threatening cancer diagnosis.
- More young adult cancer survivors attend Breathe Now retreats, which provide a unique opportunity to heal through yoga, meditation, and therapeutic conversations.
Getting louder in 2026
Dear Jack Foundation is focused on continued growth and support for its community. Their plans include advancing Raise Your Voice and applying lessons learned from the previous year to refine their fundraising challenges, making them cleaner and more automated, thereby improving the experience for their dedicated volunteers*.
*Results reflect Dear Jack Foundation’s campaign strategy and may vary for other organizations.
Ryna’s GoFundMe Pro tip:
- Go beyond asking for money and provide your fundraisers with real stories of impact they can use in their own outreach. When they connect the act of fundraising to tangible outcomes, they feel valued, and the motivation to raise more is exponentially higher.
