Each family that enters the doors of the RMH isn’t simply provided a place to stay. Instead, what they’re really given is a series of precious moments with their critically ill child while undergoing medical treatment. That’s why we created a program called “Gift a Moment”. Through this program, people could donate a simple moment to one of the 73 families staying in the 73 rooms of the House for as little as $18—like reading a favorite bedtime story, building couch cushion forts, learning to ride a bike, etc. Each of these moments was a favorite moment chosen by each of the 73 children and their families, staying in the House.

This allowed us to, not only educate the audience on what the House actually does for families, but it also helped quantify what each donor's small donation actually goes to, and which family it actually helps.

Using the crowdfunding platform, GoFundMe, we created 73 individual funding projects—each was a favourite moment of an actual child staying at the House. Each one had a fund goal of only a few dollars (unlike other funding projects on GoFundMe). So, all it took was one donation from one person to meet the fund goal of each child’s moment.

We launched all 73 moments at the same time. Working with GoFundMe, we were able to display them all on one page, so all the 73 moments could be seen together without having to scroll through other GoFundMe projects.

To drive traffic to the page, we developed and shared a video on Facebook to introduce Gift a Moment. We also used GoFundMe’s social tools to share each of our 73 individual moments on social media. A press release was developed for the campaign, which was submitted to local and trade media.

By creating 73 individual fundraisers on GoFundMe, it helped Ronald McDonald House BC receive a lot of attention throughout the province, with news outlets like CTV and 28 radio stations across BC reporting on it. Although not finished with our five-week campaign, the results have already surpassed expectations. With no paid media support, the fund goal amount of all the 73 moments combined have already been met. Even though this combined fund goal was small, it was the objective of the campaign. We wanted to show how little was needed to meet the fund goal of each individual moment, and did this by using GoFundMe differently than how all other fundraisers have used the platform.