In 2013, the Wells Foundation partnered with GroundWork group, a nonprofit technology provider, and the national Down syndrome community with the goal of increasing fundraising nationwide, creating a community of fundraising best practices, and support effective year-around outreach to engage participants, donors, and volunteers. The Wells Foundation’s founders were motivated by their nephew with Down syndrome. At the time, there were:

• Over 225 Down syndrome walk events nationally, but only 40% had access
  to an online fundraising platform.
• Less than 20% were leveraging social media and after 20 years of hosting the
  event nationwide, there was no community of knowledge on best practices.

Together we created a world class fundraising solution combined with national social media and data analytics to build a stronger community. The new social enterprise ds-connex was created and is jointly owned by multiple nonprofits and funded by the Wells Foundation. Ds-connex has helped the Down syndrome community raise over $8 million for advocacy, education and local programming. This can primarily be attributed to increased fundraising results at the local level, with top events more than tripling total fundraising after just one year with ds-connex. On average, most events using ds-connex were able to grow fundraising by over 20% and the number of participants by over 10%. We published white papers providing insights to proven methods to drive team captain results, proper pricing, timing of promotion, and motivation of donors and participants.