Liberty in North Korea (LiNK) believes they will see a free North Korea in their lifetime, and every step they take is a step toward that day.
LiNK has been a Funraise customer from nearly the beginning. Over the years, the partnership has grown alongside the organization, through campaigns, galas, platform updates, and a shared commitment to figuring out what nonprofit fundraising should look like. Chelsea Quinn, Assistant Director of Growth, has been in the middle of that work.
The Challenge
LiNK’s fundraising challenge wasn’t finding donors; it was building something that could sustain the mission without depending on any one source.
Like many nonprofits, LiNK had learned firsthand what it feels like when a major funding relationship shifts. As a result, they turned to diversified, predictable revenue as their fundraising strategy North Star.
A self-sustaining fundraising engine requires more than a good campaign or two. It requires infrastructure built on purpose: a platform that can handle peer-to-peer fundraising at scale, convert one-time donors into recurring supporters, manage events, and feed clean data into the systems the team already relies on …without ballooning into a second job for the people behind the scenes.
LiNK also needed a platform that felt as intuitive to a new staffer on day one as it did to someone who’d been using it for years. A six-month learning curve isn’t gonna cut it.
“With some other platforms I’ve used historically, it can take a really long time to get everybody onboarded. You have a new staffer start, and it takes them six months to really know what’s going on. But with Funraise, when people start, they can dive in immediately. They’re building reports, building giving forms, doing all of it. It’s just really second nature.” — Chelsea Quinn, Assistant Director of Growth, Liberty in North Korea
The Solution
There’s a reason LiNK and Funraise get along so well: we’re the same people. Been through the same things, faced the same obstacles, celebrated the same wins.
“When we’re working with Funraise, you’re talking to people who understand the challenges that nonprofits deal with—the budget constraints, the staff constraints, just the way things go. It’s been really awesome to get to work face to face with people who really get what we need.”— Chelsea Quinn, Assistant Director of Growth, Liberty in North Korea
Funraise gives LiNK the tools to run all of their fundraising: peer-to-peer campaigns, events, recurring giving, and custom giving forms—all feeding into a clean, reliable Salesforce integration that keeps the whole team working from the same information.
The event giving forms have been a particular win. When LiNK’s development team hosts in-person events and needs a fast, trackable way for attendees to give on the spot, they can spin it up in minutes, and nothing falls through the cracks.
“We’ve been able to use Funraise to create giving forms custom to those events. It’s so simple. We can duplicate a template we’ve already built, send people a QR code to make a gift right there on their phone before they leave the room. It’s made it so easy to track, and then we can do actual good stewardship and really follow up with people.”— Chelsea Quinn, Assistant Director of Growth, Liberty in North Korea
And when LiNK has had ideas, feedback, or feature requests, they know where to turn.
“Anytime you have a question or an idea, a real person is going to get back to you. I always feel like they’re considering it, and we’ve definitely seen things come out in Funraise that were things we specifically were excited about and had a need for.”— Chelsea Quinn, Assistant Director of Growth, Liberty in North Korea
The Result
LiNK has built an extraordinarily well-rounded fundraising program—and their numbers show their success across multiple channels simultaneously.
- LiNK has raised $9.5 million online from 19,000 donors with Funraise
- 56% of online donation revenue came from recurring donors—in the last 12 months alone
- LiNK’s more than 800 recurring donors have contributed $3.8 million in recurring gifts
- Over 2,600 individual peer-to-peer fundraisers have raised $778,000
Let’s dive into that 56% recurring revenue figure! Obviously, it didn’t happen overnight, but at this point, more than half of LiNK’s online donation revenue arrives predictably, month after month, from donors who have made an ongoing commitment to their mission.
Tangent time: Across Funraise’s platform, sustainer retention runs at 78% after 12 months—10% better than the industry average. For LiNK, that retention has compounded over years into a recurring program that now anchors their entire fundraising model.
What’s Next
LiNK is not a static organization. (In fact, we’re laughing at the very idea!) As the mission grows, so does the fundraising infrastructure required to support it.
With 800+ active sustainers already in place, the opportunity ahead for LiNK is deepening that base further, converting more of their 19,000 online donors into long-term recurring supporters, and continuing to use Funraise’s tools to identify and cultivate the relationships most likely to grow.
For an organization whose vision is as urgent as LiNK’s, having a fundraising engine that grows along with them allows the team to stay focused and on mission.
“Working in the nonprofit space, it can feel really overwhelming sometimes because you have to get so much done with so little resources. It’s nice to just know that you are going to be working with a good company with good resources, and it’s going to work the way that you need it to.”— Chelsea Quinn, Assistant Director of Growth, Liberty in North Korea
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