Founded in 1945 with the creation of the CARE Package®, CARE is a leading humanitarian organization fighting global poverty. Seventy-five years after CARE’s founding, the COVID-19 pandemic presented us with a once-in-a-generation challenge. It is the first time in our lifetime that we faced a crisis that impacted all of us, fundamentally changed our lives, and threatened to reverse decades of progress toward ending poverty and hunger.
To combat this crisis, CARE created the CARE Crisis Response Campaign, the largest in our organization’s history, with a goal of raising $100 million to impact 100 million people in 100 countries around the world. The CARE 2020 Impact Awards event was focused on this critical campaign.
Beginning in 2018, the CARE Impact Awards Dinner was a fundraising event hosted in our founding city of New York. In 2020, CARE cancelled the in-person dinner and program, completely re-inventing the CARE Impact Awards as a virtual experience, bringing together people from around the world to support those in crisis, and to celebrate the contributions of women and girls.
The goal was to create a mission-aligned virtual CARE experience that raised $1 million and served as a public facing opportunity to present the CARE Crisis Response Campaign and honor activists, politicians, philanthropists, and leaders.
Storytelling: the CARE 2020 Virtual Impact Awards was a global storytelling journey about the work CARE is doing all over the world to combat COVID-19 and to prevent its impacts on health and safety, food security and especially its impact on women and girls. We wanted to showcase our work in communities in the U.S. and around the world to stop the spread of the virus, to make sure that communities have the essentials they need to live, and the activist partners who, through their voices, strength, and resilience, show the world that they care.
Fundraising: we invited participants to join us in this challenge to raise emergency funds to combat the crisis, which included a live fund a need with an auctioneer.
Attention-getting announcements: CARE used the Impact Awards to announce the start of its work to combat hunger and increasing poverty in the United States for the first time in our history. We also showcased the re-introduction of the CARE Package, a CARE original we are bringing back to offer donors the opportunity to help here at home and around the world.
Engagement with guests: During the live event, guests were delighted to have surprise table-side visits from celebrities, including: Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, Kimberly Williams-Paisley and Brad Paisley, Bellamy Young, Holland Roden, and Michelle Williams, among others.
Fundraising: in a year of unprecedented disasters, CARE raised $1.6M via the event for the CARE Crisis Response Campaign and celebrated those delivering real impact at home and abroad.
Attendance: against all odds, the CARE Impact Awards had 4,200 live viewers with over 65,000 replays. Overall, there were more than 1.7B media impressions.
Interactions: there were almost 5,000 social media engagements, with a reach of 338,195 and total social impressions at 51M. These metrics met our goals of showcasing CARE’s work to a global audience, making a point through media impressions that CARE is still doing this important work with an eye toward COVID-19 crisis response, and raising critical, life-saving funds for the CARE Crisis Response Campaign.
