Joni and Friends grew 34% year over year on Giving Tuesday with Campaign Studio
Mission
To glorify God as we communicate the Gospel and mobilize the global church to evangelize, disciple, and serve people living with disability
Challenge
Create a special opportunity for giving during an important year-end fundraising period
Solution
Leverage Campaign Studio’s design flexibility to create a custom-branded and urgent Giving Tuesday campaign
“With Campaign Studio, we could quickly create our Giving Tuesday campaign and customize it exactly how we wanted without needing a developer to step in. That allowed our team to be more agile in our campaign creation and save us time waiting for input from other teams.”
– Amy Hurtado, Vice President, Marketing & Engagement
Giving Tuesday 2025 results*:
Raised 72%
above its ambitious goal
Raised 34%
more year over year
24% more gifts
year over year
10% increase
in conversion year over year
*Based on 2025 GoFundMe Pro data
Using Campaign Studio for the first time on Giving Tuesday
Every year from November 1 through December 31, Joni and Friends runs a campaign to spread Christmas hope. Through this year-end campaign, donors can contribute $250 to provide a pediatric wheelchair and a Bible in the recipient’s language. Giving Tuesday, one of the most important philanthropic days of the year, falls right in the middle of the campaign.
In 2024, the team had just started testing and seeing early success with Campaign Studio—GoFundMe Pro’s donation website builder. They decided to use it for their Giving Tuesday campaign, which, like the year-end Perfect Gift campaign, focused on the pediatric wheelchair, but introduced a unique individual’s story to set it apart. A generous gift match featured on the Studio campaign page meant that every dollar raised that day would be doubled.
Optimizing the donation flow from start to finish
When a supporter decided to make a gift, the Studio checkout process guided them through a few short steps and kept them on the same page. In addition, the Joni and Friends team mastered its donation follow-up strategy, which included personal touches and automated nudges that were easy to customize in Campaign Studio.
With its high-performing Studio campaign, Joni and Friends raised 121% more than the previous year—and grew its number of gifts by 37%! This proved the incredible impact of powerful storytelling, backed by technology that empowered donors to make contributions.
We found that the match was a really powerful motivator, but the ease of giving was what really set this campaign apart and led to the amazing success that we saw on Giving Tuesday.
Due to the success of 2024’s Giving Tuesday campaign, Joni and Friends went all-in with Campaign Studio, converting many standard donation pages into more visually appealing campaigns. Because of the design flexibility, campaigns can be created in-house without a designer. By duplicating a Studio campaign, the Joni and Friends team can create and customize it more quickly and easily while maintaining a consistent image and story across all channels.
Creating a consistent giving experience with Campaign Studio
In 2025, the Joni and Friends team took a very similar approach to the previous year, but turned the Perfect Gift campaign into the Shine The Light campaign, which put a message of hope and spiritual care front and center, while meeting the practical needs of wheelchair users. The campaign told the story of Scarlett, who received a custom-fitted wheelchair, and balanced the messaging between the one-day urgency of the match and the 2026 goal of delivering the 250,000th wheelchair from Joni and Friends.
Joni and Friends demonstrated a thoughtful and strategic approach to its Giving Tuesday campaign by optimizing the donor experience from start to finish. This included:
- Mobile-first design that ensured an optimal experience on all devices
- Offering donors the option to cover fees so the full gift amount went directly to the Joni and Friends mission
- A sticky donate button that followed visitors on the campaign page to encourage them to complete a gift (and improves conversion)
The second dedicated Giving Tuesday campaign was a major success for Joni and Friends, raising 72% above the goal and achieving a 34% year-over-year increase in dollars raised. This strong performance and year-over-year growth was also reflected in donors’ engagement, with 24% more gifts and a 10% increase in conversion from the previous year*.
*Results reflect the campaign strategy of Joni and Friends and may vary for other organizations.
Using source codes reduces the need for multiple campaigns and captures critical channel data, helping teams understand donor origins and make smarter decisions over time.
On the cusp of a major milestone
Joni and Friends is gearing up to celebrate the delivery of its 250,000th wheelchair in the spring. This milestone will be promoted through real-time storytelling on social media and celebrated at major donor events. This success underscores their unique, holistic approach to care, which includes custom-fitting every wheelchair and connecting recipients to local church communities through the Wheels for the World program.
Amy’s GoFundMe Pro tips:
- Use source codes to avoid creating a new campaign for every single use case. This allows for greater efficiency, and the data is critical for identifying which channels donors are coming from, which helps influence future decisions.
- Pay attention to and continuously improve the donor experience on mobile. Adding a sticky donate button that drops donors directly into the checkout flow was critical for our success.
