Luke Jakoywa

Founder and Director of Sheepcare Community Centre

Who He Is:

Luke Jakoywa is the Founder + Director of Sheepcare Community Centre, located in Nairobi, Kenya. A life-changing encounter with children in his neighborhood affected by HIV/AIDS led him and other community leaders to start Sheepcare Community Centre in 2002. Sheepcare helps alleviate poverty by providing quality education, access to health care, water, and sanitation services. In Luke’s eyes, true change comes not only from access to resources but by believing that growth is possible for, and within, all of us.

 
Sheepcare Community Centre is a Kenyan nonprofit on a mission to help disadvantaged communities—particularly children—get access to quality education, health care, and more.

A recent graduate of the GlobalGiving Accelerator, Sheepcare was able to attract 551 donors to its fundraiser in Kenya in just 31 days—a new record!

Sheepcare Founder and Director Luke Jakoya shared five steps he thinks all nonprofit leaders can take to achieve crowdfunding success in Kenya and beyond:

Step 1

Gain support from within your organization

Support starts from inside of your organization. I started by explaining the crowdfunding goal to my organization, and I made sure to highlight the benefit of becoming successful crowdfunders. Once they understood the goal, there was a shared responsibility to reach it. This meant that identifying our donor base and fundraising outreach was now a group effort.

Step 2

Create a list of potential donors

Each person in my organization made a list of people that they know. The list consisted of close friends and relatives, mentee/mentor relationships, acquaintances, and previous supporters. This is how our first list of potential donors was created.

Step 3

Develop an outreach plan

Our initial outreach consisted of a group text message to all potential donors. This initial text was a brief alert that gave them an explanation of the upcoming opportunity to help a child in need. This created an online community in which our donors could interact.

After the initial outreach in the group chat, everyone was tasked with reaching out to each person in their network. We would either do this over text, phone, or in person, with more personal communication methods such as a phone call being favored. We only sent emails when contacting previous fundraising supporters from outside of Kenya. Furthermore, we asked each potential supporter to spread our message with their network.

Step 4

Build a donor community

Our online donor community existed in a WhatsApp group. After we added our initial donor base to the group chat, we saw supporters adding their own network to the group. This was essential for growing our donor base. Whenever there was a new donation, I would post the person’s name in the group chat to thank them. I would also ask others in the group chat to thank them. Not only did donors feel appreciated, but once people in the group saw that others were donating, they, too, wanted to donate.

Step 5

Share powerful messaging

We used these tactics to make our messaging to donors stand out:

• Emphasized important events: We kept our donors informed by letting them know when the campaign started and how many days were remaining. For Bonus Day and the final day of the campaign, we scheduled hourly content to be posted on our social media platform.
• Used available data: We used the Accelerator leaderboard to our advantage. We looked at the numbers and realized that we were ranked #1 for the most number of unique donors. We took a screenshot of our position to show that we were in first place among the 705 competitors. This positive and success-filled message inspired our donors to continue giving in order to sustain our #1 position.
• Leveraged local giving options through GlobalGiving: GlobalGiving has a partnership with M-Changa, a popular mobile giving platform in Kenya. This made donating convenient for our Kenyan supporters. Additionally, M-Changa does not require a minimum donation amount. This made it easy to engage our donor base since they only needed to donate 10 Kenyan Shillings to count as a supporter. Essentially, donors only needed a phone and a minimum of 10 Kenyan Shilling to support us, which was key to us ranking #1 for attracting the highest number of unique donors during the Accelerator.