Awards
Good causes are what drive us, but we’re proud of what we’ve earned along the way.
2022
Episcopal Relief & Development — Gifts for Life
With Gifts For Life, Episcopal Relief & Development wants to inspire users to create lasting change by purchasing symbolic gifts based on the organization’s three key priorities of community development: women, children, and climate. As more and more Gifts For Life supporters and prospects moved online, we turned the simple landing page into a robust microsite, chock full of features to enhance the donor experience.
The microsite is set up to engage both individual donors and groups of donors who are looking to fundraise — or pool community resources — to purchase multiple gifts or gift packages, just as they would with the physical gift catalog. The inclusion of a popular gift feature helps guide first-time users, which makes choosing a gift more accessible.
The site harnesses the power of storytelling to inspire giving by featuring stories from partner parishes who have engaged with the program. The site also features stories that highlight the impact of giving. Every page pushes users towards giving, but with more context to encourage their gift. Learn more about the award-winning website here.
San Francisco SPCA — Giving Tuesday Campaign
We all know that if you’re a nonprofit organization hoping to stand out on Giving Tuesday, you need a competitive edge to set yourself apart. Fortunately, SF SPCA (say that five times fast!) had two this year: adorable animals and a $100K match! Through a five-email campaign arc, we urged prospective and current donors to dedicate Giving Tuesday to animals in need while their gift would automatically double in value.
We kicked the campaign off with an adorable Thanksgiving cultivation email, featuring personal thank you messages “sent” by the pets themselves, and we followed that up with our first email appeal: an announcement the day before Giving Tuesday, urging people to be one of the first to double their love for pets in San Francisco and beyond. We coordinated the next few appeals to drop throughout Giving Tuesday, ramping up in urgency as the midnight deadline approached. One of the final emails on that day was signed by a member of the development staff, indicating that they were at their desk reviewing the numbers and personally reaching out before heading home. To finish it all off, we tacked on a one-day match extension to give people a chance to donate if they “snoozed through Giving Tuesday,” featuring a playful image of two cats sleeping.
Through this variety of signers and messages — sent strategically before, during, and after Giving Tuesday — we maximized our reach and impact on the global day of giving. These strategic decisions paid off in a big way for the SF SPCA. As far as we’re concerned, this campaign couldn’t have been more purrrrfect. Learn more about the award-winning campaign here.
Panthera — Website
For this website redesign, we were tasked with designing a site that had to do a lot of different jobs well. Panthera is one of the leading organizations devoted to the conservation of the world’s 40 species of wild cats, as well as the ecosystems they inhabit. In addition to their mission to conserve and protect wild cats, they are also focused on wild cat education for all ages. They have an expansive core audience, ranging from donors to feline enthusiasts to scientific and institutional partners, so our redesign needed to be able to speak to a variety of different backgrounds and knowledge points, as well as bring in donations.
To encourage engagement, we made the pages more visual, scannable, and digestible. Tied into the site are links to specific cat research, news, and fundraising — the primary landing pages from web traffic that we noticed when analyzing the old site. Because Panthera’s audience is global, their website needed to be accessible to anyone, no matter what language they speak. With a Google Translate plug-in, the whole site can be translated to any language. And we gave the site an organizational upgrade with full-screen menu navigation. A key part of this redesign was making the sitemap and UX more efficient.
Obviously, as an agency that specializes in fundraising, we also had to revolutionize their donation forms. We know that the easier you make it for people to give, the more likely they are to actually do it, so the new donation forms are sleek and incredibly easy to use. Now, donors can make gifts in a matter of clicks, and at the bottom of the page is a widget where donors can search to see if their employer has a matching gift program. Learn more about the award-winning site here.
African Wildlife Foundation — Legacy Website
The website was designed to be an updated and modernized take on the successful legacy campaign, “Only Elephants Should Wear Ivory,” which ran in print between 1989 and 1992. Not only were we reintroducing the campaign, but we were also putting a new face to it with actress and advocate, Candice Bergen, serving as the $50K match donor. The primary goal of the site was education and cultivation around AWF’s work — past, present, and future — although there was an exit modal and a small area on the landing page itself that promoted the match and linked to the donation form.
A key part in making this landing page a success was acknowledging what was so successful about the original “Only Elephants Should Wear Ivory” campaign. In order to do that, we channeled the chutzpah AWF brought to the original ad copy in our copy and turned timeless print design into timeless website design. Check out the award-winning website here.
2021
African Wildlife Foundation — World Rhino Day
We know that African Wildlife Foundation’s donors are committed to saving rhinos. So much so, that we centered the critical fall sustainer campaign on World Rhino Day. In this email, we asked current monthly donors to upgrade their support.
This powerful email plays off the fact that, mid-pandemic, events around the world were being canceled — but not World Rhino Day. We put the hard truth of rhino poaching right in the donor’s face, dispelling the myths and misinformation, and laying the blame for rhinos’ pending extinction squarely at the feet of wildlife traffickers.
Donors who responded to the email had an additional incentive in helping to meet our goal of 100 upgraded monthly donors. Their first upgraded gift would be matched dollar for dollar if they acted by September 22, World Rhino Day. The campaign exceeded its goal. Check out the winning campaign here.
Habitat for Horses — Giving Tuesday Campaign
2020 was the year of the COVID-19 pandemic and the presidential election. While most nonprofits sent appeals that were alternately desperate, political, heart wrenching, or all three, we got very real for horses.
Sanky Communications’ client, a horse rescue in Alvin, TX, needed to replace a broken tractor. The appeal wasn’t dramatic or even especially urgent. But it was the honest-to-God truth. Our copy made the most of the executive director’s warm, friendly voice to explain why the tractor was so important to the rescued equines on the ranch. The email hit a chord with donors who felt like their gift of even a small amount would make a difference.
Our one-day campaign to raise $15,000 for a new backhoe was a screaming success — beating the goal by 130%. Check out the winning campaign here.
Citymeals on Wheels — COVID Email
This campaign succeeded because of its rapid development and deployment, as well as the authenticity, transparency, and clarity of its urgent fundraising ask. This campaign launched and evolved as rapidly as Citymeals' response to the pandemic.
While rapid response components are included in this campaign, other components were planned in response to a rapidly-developing emergency. The messaging reflected Citymeals' response to the pandemic in real time — from the ever-increasing goal of emergency meals, to the cancellation of events — while maintaining language and fundraising asks that audiences were familiar with. Though the situation was unprecedented, the fundraising asks were presented in the familiar terms of equivalent meal deliveries. The case for giving, where possible, was framed with a story of a meal recipient, as Citymeals' fundraising asks usually are.
So delivering components to audiences as quickly as possible, with consistent, proven language, containing regular updates and straightforward fundraising asks for a cause supporters care about led to a highly successful campaign.
North Shore Animal League America — Giving Day Campaign
North Shore Animal League America's second annual Giving Day featured a fully integrated, multi-channel campaign anchored by campaign branding and a matching gift. The 2020 campaign consisted of two direct mail packages leading up to Giving Day (including a letter, insert, reply in one package, and a separate "save the date" postcard for the follow-up) and a full suite of digital components. Digital efforts included six email appeals and a microsite/landing page (which took over the homepage on the day of Giving Day), complemented by social, search, and display ads shown for the month leading up to Giving Day.
Tonally, messaging was urgent and, in the light of COVID-19's impact on programming, spoke honestly about the need to care for the animals and maintain a commitment to their no-kill mission. A $150K match was leveraged to entice donors to double their gifts for twice the support for animals in need and for the life-saving programs at North Shore Animal League America.
Project Guardianship — Website
Project Guardianship, an organization that provides person-centered care for older adults and individuals living with disabilities and mental illness who need help making decisions, tasked us with developing their brand and website. Because their work centers on the rights and needs of people, we made sure to center people with our brand development, including the literal placement of a person at the center of their logo mark. When choosing images, we chose ones that reflected the vibrancy and diversity of those served by Project Guardianship. The photos are vibrant and focus primarily on the faces of the people they serve.
Project Guardianship’s audience is large and diverse. The website needed to appeal to people in guardianship, caretakers and families, government agents, institutional and individual donors, advocates for change, other nonprofits, and private guardians. We introduced a simple, full-screen nav menu that is easy for anyone to use and directs users to any aspect of the website they may be looking for with a single click. Check out the award-winning website here.
The Nation Fund — Website
The Nation needed an independent brand identity and website for The Nation Fund that was distinct from The Nation Magazine while still being recognizably related and true to its roots. The goal of The Nation Fund site is to train young journalists to run editorial pages, run the business of media, and help to set and raise the standards of journalism itself.
To create consistency between the two brands, we incorporated The Nation’s use of red and yellow as main colors for The Nation Fund. To nod to The Nation Fund’s work with young journalists, the website’s brand also incorporates text and marks that are stylized to look handwritten, as if an editor was marking up the website.
The website also needed to have lots of room to grow as The Nation Fund’s programs change. We designed and developed a custom WordPress template with a handful of site elements and page types that could suit their evolving needs. Check out the award-winning website here.
The Nation Fund — Website
The Nation needed an independent brand identity and website for The Nation Fund that was distinct from The Nation Magazine while still being recognizably related and true to its roots. The goal of The Nation Fund site is to train young journalists to run editorial pages, run the business of media, and help to set and raise the standards of journalism itself.
To create consistency between the two brands, we incorporated The Nation’s use of red and yellow as main colors for The Nation Fund. To nod to The Nation Fund’s work with young journalists, the website’s brand also incorporates text and marks that are stylized to look handwritten, as if an editor was marking up the website.
The website also needed to have lots of room to grow as The Nation Fund’s programs change. We designed and developed a custom WordPress template with a handful of site elements and page types that could suit their evolving needs. Check out the award-winning website here.
2020
The Hunger Project — Summer Engagement
In the summer of 2019, The Hunger Project wanted to cultivate its audience and expand its base with lead generation. Founded in the 1970s, THP invests in the potential of people to end their own hunger and lift themselves out of poverty. They educate, train, and build skills so that participants in their programs can keep the good going. THP’s investors (they do not use the word “donor”) are fiercely loyal to the brand and history. This campaign capitalized on that.
We put an interactive landing page at the center of this campaign. The user was invited to answer the question, “How important is a world without hunger to you?” by sliding a globe along a continuum of “no concern” to “my priority.” For each level of response, the user’s answer was acknowledged, and they were given an opportunity to learn more. An engaging infographic provided insightful facts about the reality of world hunger. The landing page included a video and a historical collage. At multiple points, the user was invited to join the story with a pledge to end hunger, invest in people with a gift, and share through social media.
A series of three campaign-branded emails drove traffic to the landing page, as did social media posts and advertising, SEM, and a modal. Check out the winning campaign here.
2019
African Wildlife Foundation- Fall Campaign
In the fall of 2018, the midterm elections dominated the news and threatened to divert the attention of AWF’s target audience away from protecting Africa’s wildlife. To keep elephants and other beloved species front and center, we built a campaign that showed AWF’s constituents how their vote in the U.S. midterm elections could save elephants.
The campaign began with a cultivation piece, leading to a special landing page that incorporated animation, infographics and hard-hitting copy to detail AWF’s progress toward the conservation of wildlife. This was followed by facts on how Trump’s anti-science, anti-conservation agenda is undermining that progress.
The audience was asked to take a two-part action: first, to become one of 50,000 people pledging to vote for candidates who are pro-environment and pro-wildlife; and second,, to make a gift ensuring that – no matter what happened on November 6 – AWF could continue to protect wildlife and wild lands. Infographics and animation continued to be used throughout the fundraising portion of the campaign in direct mail, emails, web components, and social media. Check out the winning campaign here.
Citymeals on Wheels- Re-engagement Series
Citymeals on Wheels is a New York City institution, providing a vital lifeline of nourishing meals and warm human companionship to thousands of homebound elderly New Yorkers across the five boroughs.
We created a re-engagement campaign to draw in people who hadn’t opened Citymeals emails in awhile, and the overall message to their supporters was simple: We know you still care deeply about your frail aged neighbors, and we recognize that.
In order to harness this message, we created a highly engaging visual email to showcase Citymeals’ mission in action. Compelling facts about elder hunger, coupled with statistics on Citymeals’ work — from how many meals they delivered to how many meal recipients they served — came together in a striking infographic. Large icons and bright colors mirrored the organization’s website, inviting email recipients to explore it with a simple call-to-action: Learn more.
The email also touched upon other little-known facts not often mentioned in their regular mailings — for example, how many heartfelt handmade greeting cards were delivered during special occasions. It all came together beautifully to convey the sentiment at the heart of the campaign… just how important Citymeals’ supporters are in, caring for the city’s elderly. Check out the winning campaign here.
2018
Vera- Fall/Welcome Series
We created an email series for Vera to educate the public on these complex issues and inspire them to give in support of Vera’s mission. Each email dives further into major aspects of Vera’s work in ending mass incarceration and advancing criminal justice reform. This versatile campaign was successfully employed as both an email Welcome Series for new subscribers and prospects, as well as a Fall Campaign for current supporters. We also created social media posts that shared content with the emails in order to integrate this campaign across fundraising channels.
The first email introduces readers to a complex concept: incarceration trends across the United States. This quick email sends readers to a Vera report and primes them for a breakdown of the topic through graphics and easy-to-digest stats in the second email. Finally, the third email brings in the emotional aspect of why we must work to end mass incarceration with a personal letter from Vera’s President, Nick Turner. This final message coalesces all of the negative impacts of mass incarceration touched upon earlier, while focusing on the devastating human impact in order to drive the need to give – to help Vera end the cycle. Check out the winning campaign here.
Covenant House Website
Set with the task of redesigning Covenant House’s current website, we knew our audience was three-fold: first, those who support the organization's powerful mission through actions such as volunteering;second, those who lend support through donations; and third, the young people in need who look to Covenant House for support.
Keeping these three crucial groups in mind, we developed a streamlined user experience. On the new site, clean design and copy strategically work together to speak to these audiences, with unique technological features to enhance each visitor’s journey.
An interactive quiz educates the user on various charitable giving plans while a special maps element zooms in on locations to help individuals locate their nearest shelter and provides other resources for religious and governmental assistance if no shelters exist nearby. Website visitors can even virtually meet some kids at Covenant House and read their stories.
Overall, the newly redesigned website has revitalized Covenant House’s online presence for the current era, enforcing a strong focus on the mobile experience. Check out the winning campaign here.
African Wildlife Foundation- Fall Campaign
Many of Africa’s most iconic species are being driven toward extinction. African Wildlife Foundation (AWF), the continent’s oldest and most trusted conservation organization, has numerous programs that are successfully working to protect these species. However, if program expansion goals aren’t met in time, we may soon live in a world without elephants, rhinos or lions.
To engage AWF’s donors and motivate giving, Sanky Communications created a campaign called “Where is Africa’s Wildlife Headed?” The campaign used social media, social ads, and a series of emails to drive donors to a responsive landing page. Once there, donors explored the microsite, which featured bold and arresting animations along with clever wordplay. Shocking facts about the conservation status of each species created a sense of urgency, and opportunities to give appeared throughout.
In spite of the fact that the 2017 Fall Campaign ran for a shorter period of time than did the 2016 campaign, is still raised nearly $42K in revenue. More interestingly, it saw an increase in average gift of nearly $8 (from $37.97 to $45.90) over the previous year, while the open rate rose by 1.5% and requests to unsubscribe dropped. Check out the campaign here.
Covenant House Website
African Wildlife Foundation- Fall Campaign
2017
Classroom Africa – Holiday Year-End Campaign
Classroom Africa is dedicated to uplifting Africa’s children by bringing high-quality teachers and sustainable schools to rural communities. We knew that their supporters would be ready to give generously at the end of the year, so we developed a campaign for them that would take advantage of the 12/31 tax deduction deadline and introduce a $100,000 holiday match to multiply a donor’s support. Check out the winning campaign here.
African Wildlife Foundation – Black Rhino Friday
We helped the African Wildlife Foundation turn Black Friday’s hyper-consumerism on its head by encouraging their social media followers to save something more meaningful than money: the critically endangered black rhino. Posts ran throughout the day using high-impact visuals and simple copy including, “Save Huge,” “Save a Ton … Or Two” (featuring two rhinos), and “Save a Little More” (featuring a photo of a baby rhino). More than just an award winner, the campaign increased the number of AWF’s Black Friday gifts by 64% and total giving by 71% over the previous year. Learn More
Drug Policy Alliance – DPA Election Report Card
As the nation’s leading organization promoting sensible drug policy reform, the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) realized the 2016 presidential election would be a pivotal period for its cause. We leveraged it by creating a striking online campaign for Drug Policy Action, DPA’s advocacy arm, to showcase elected officials’ stances on drug policy reform in a powerful, shareable format. Learn More
Covenant House – 2,000 Heroes for Homeless Kids
Covenant House has been providing loving care and vital services to homeless youth since 1972. During 2016’s summer donor drive campaign, which included a 2,000-supporter goal, we created a powerful email message that allowed prospective donors to “walk” with a homeless child. Through gripping visuals and succinct copy, a reader was given the chance to see how their personal donation, paired with the concrete resources of Covenant House, has a direct, lifesaving impact. Learn More
Rainforest Alliance – Mysteries of the Rainforest
To educate new and current donors about the incredible biodiversity of rainforests we created a microsite for The Rainforest Alliance, which showcases newly discovered plant and animal species in order. The site allows the user to “discover” four amazing species by clicking on each icon to reveal a photo and explanation of how and where the species was found. The following frames tell the reader that we still don’t know all the mysteries rainforests hold and we may never find out if we don’t stop their destruction. The user has a chance to act immediately by becoming a monthly donor ensuring the protection of biodiversity and forests worldwide. In the last frame, the user can choose to stay informed through email, and a static share button toolbar allows them to share on social media at any point in their experience. Happily for all rainforest species, this campaign won an IAC award for outstanding website!
Covenant House – Not A Game Campaign
Tragically, many of the homeless youth Covenant House provides shelter and care for have fallen victim to human trafficking. In Not a Game, we leveraged their anti-trafficking work to generate support and awareness during America’s biggest football game of the year. The result was a multi-faceted advocacy campaign, centering around an interactive microsite where users were able to email their local officials and petition for their cities to protect innocent kids, especially during major sporting events. Learn More
African Wildlife Foundation – Fall Campaign
Drug Policy Alliance – Election Campaign
Website — Citymeals on Wheels
For Citymeals on Wheels, an organization that provides nourishment and companionship to thousands of frail aged New Yorkers, we designed a stunning website with a dual purpose: First, it had to be highly accessible to the population using it to get meals, and second, it had to be compelling enough to convert visitors to the site into caring donors.