Humanae Vitae Giving Day 2017: Enormous Success

Pope Paul VI on a postage stamp in the Ajman "world peace" series. DSLR with 100mm macro; no sharpening.$57,000. That’s the official gift count from Couple to Couple League’s second annual Humanae Vitae Giving Day.

And that’s before the matching gift of $50,000.

Thanks to generous gifts of all sizes, a grand total of $107,000 has been collected to directly support the mission of Humanae Vitae.

“[The success of the giving day] opens up a lot of possibilities for more clergy seminars and teacher training events in this fiscal year than we had initially been able to budget for,” said Chris Reynolds, CCL’s executive director. And, he points out, it’s no small matter:  “We are getting requests for these events from all over the country.”

Clergy seminars are particularly important. Preparing the seminars can come with a hefty charge, but they enable hundreds of priests to experience intensive education regarding the importance of NFP, the science behind its effectiveness and how best to support parish families engaged in its practice. Now, thanks to an overwhelming outpouring of generosity, the financial burden has been greatly alleviated and such seminars are far more possible than we’d originally planned.

Beyond finances, though, Humanae Vitae Giving Day saw NFP awareness skyrocket — even just on CCL’s pages alone.

Here are just a few of the record-breaking stats from July 25th:

  • 124,000 Facebook users saw Giving Day content — an 18 percent increase over last year and a nearly 3,000 percent increase over the normal daily reach
  • 257 new Facebook likes were added, bringing us to 9,109 — a 15 percent increase in likes compared with last year
  • 34,672 Twitter users saw content — a 45 percent increase over last year
  • 1,105 Twitter users checked CCL’s Twitter home-page — a 1,000 percent increase over normal

Perhaps best of all, the social media traffic drove people to CCL’s home page in record numbers. Our website enjoyed 9,105 total page views for the day, which is a 49 percent increase over last year’s giving day and — more importantly — a whopping 914 percent increase over our daily average of page views. In other words, thanks to your liking, commenting and sharing, thousands of individuals were exposed to NFP for perhaps the first time ever.

And that, above anything else, is what makes any Giving Day a true success.

— Forest Hempen
Marketing & Communications Associate