Conner Prairie
Days of Giving: A fundraising campaign that elevated nostalgia into action
Conner Prairie, Indiana’s first Smithsonian affiliate and home to over 340,000 visitors a year, relies on donor support to fund two-thirds of its daily programming. In 2024, Big Sea partnered with Conner Prairie through the Wavemaker Grant to reimagine their annual Days of Giving campaign: raise $40,000 for the Mission Impact Fund, grow their donor base, and make a case for giving that went beyond a transaction.
The challenge
Conner Prairie is beloved. But beloved doesn’t always translate to funded.
Many guests assumed ticket sales covered operational costs — undercutting the urgency to give. Leadership knew their donor base had room to grow, particularly among younger, first-time supporters.
The added complexity: Days of Giving needed to share the calendar with Jupiter Flights Festival. Rather than compete for attention, we decided to use it.
Our Strategy
The insight driving this campaign: Conner Prairie donors aren’t giving to a nonprofit. They’re giving back to a place that shaped them.
We leaned into emotion, memory, and experience. Our creative strategy framed Conner Prairie as a place where Hoosiers don’t just visit—they grow up, give back, and come home again.
Our creative strategy framed Conner Prairie as a multi-generational memory maker and positioned Days of Giving as an invitation to pass that experience forward. “Give Them the Gift of Experience” connected individual donations to moments donors already carried with them:
- A first-time field trip
- A treetop adventure
- A spooky hayride
- The warmth of a summer evening in Prairietown
By tapping into these core memories, we inspired donors to imagine the impact of their gifts on the next generation.
Our strategy in action
We built a fully integrated campaign around a single creative platform: “Give Them…” — Give them a first field trip. Give them a treetop adventure. Give them the ride of a lifetime.
Every channel reinforced that idea. A four-part email nurture series moved donors from awareness to urgency, A/B testing subject lines and visuals at each stage. Text message nudges landed during peak giving windows. Direct mail postcards featuring festival imagery and QR codes brought the campaign into donors’ homes in a tangible, keepable format.
At the Jupiter Flights Festival, we showed up in person. A gratitude postcard coloring activity, an interactive “Making Dreams Soar” display, and raffle incentives turned foot traffic into donor conversations, meeting supporters exactly where the magic of Conner Prairie was already happening.
Throughout every touchpoint, the creative stayed warm, nostalgic, and specific: animal encounters, STEM workshops, historic re-enactments. Not a generic ask; a personal one.
The campaign didn’t just hit its goal. It unlocked one.
The numbers tell the story. A fundraising campaign built on memory and emotion delivered measurable impact across every channel.
$40000+
The campaign hit its fundraising goal for the Mission Impact Fund, providing critical support for programming that ticket revenue alone can’t cover.
$15000
Reaching the goal unlocked a full matching gift — multiplying donor impact and rewarding the community’s generosity.
50%+
Average open rate across the four-part email nurture series. For context, nonprofit email benchmarks typically sit around 26%.
