Case study · Emotive · 2006–2011 · Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation
Build the Dream: $15M+ in Digital Fundraising, VIP Ticketing, and the Morgan Freeman Spot for the First African American Memorial on the National Mall
At Emotive, I led digital marketing and small-dollar fundraising for the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial — the four-acre tribute on the Tidal Basin that opened in 2011 as the first memorial to an African American on or near the National Mall. We ran the public-facing campaign, managed VIP and public RSVP ticketing for the 2006 groundbreaking ceremony, distributed the Morgan Freeman celebrity spots, and raised $15M+ through digital outreach toward the memorial’s ~$120M total cost.
The brief
In 1996, Congress authorized Dr. King’s fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, to establish a national memorial in Washington, D.C. The Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation spent more than a decade raising the funds and shepherding the design — 906 entries through an international design competition, the eventual selection of ROMA Design Group’s Stone of Hope / Mountain of Despair concept, and the commissioning of Master sculptor Lei Yixin to carve the 30-foot likeness of Dr. King from granite.
The capital campaign target was approximately $120 million. Emotive was the digital agency of record for the public-facing campaign — responsible for the website, the small-dollar fundraising program, the celebrity-spot distribution, the email program, and the public & VIP ticketing for the November 13, 2006 groundbreaking ceremony on the National Mall.
What we did
Designed and ran the digital fundraising program
The small-dollar fundraising program was the digital workhorse of the campaign. Direct email solicitations, peer-to-peer asks, donor cultivation, and one-off pushes against milestones in the build all flowed through the Emotive platform. The mix — many small donors plus a steady stream of major-gift activity coordinated with the Foundation’s development team — generated more than $15M in digital revenue toward the construction of the memorial.
Coordinated VIP and public RSVP ticketing for the groundbreaking
The November 13, 2006 groundbreaking on the National Mall was a public ceremony with a layered VIP component — civil rights leaders, the King family, members of Congress, mayors, fraternal-order representatives, and a large public audience. Emotive built and operated the digital RSVP and ticketing system that managed both audiences in parallel: tiered invitations, accessibility accommodations, day-of credentials, and the kind of overlay coordination a high-security National Mall ceremony requires.
Distributed celebrity advocacy spots, starting with Morgan Freeman
Morgan Freeman was an early and outspoken supporter of the memorial campaign. We produced and distributed the “Build The Dream” PSA-style video featuring Freeman, seeding it across the campaign’s digital footprint — the Foundation site, email, YouTube, partner networks, and the press kits we sent to outlets covering the campaign.
Build The Dream — Morgan Freeman
One of the celebrity-advocate spots Emotive distributed for the Foundation’s capital campaign.
Built the campaign website, email program, and donor stewardship
The Foundation’s public site, the recurring email program, the donor-acknowledgement workflows, the post-donation receipting and stewardship sequences — the unglamorous infrastructure that makes a multi-year capital campaign actually run. All of it was built and operated on Emotive’s platform.
The memorial itself
The memorial occupies a four-acre site on the northwest corner of the Tidal Basin in West Potomac Park, directly on the sightline that connects the Lincoln Memorial to the Jefferson Memorial. Its official address is 1964 Independence Avenue, S.W. — a numerical reference to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The 30-foot Stone of Hope, depicting Dr. King emerging from a slice cut out of the Mountain of Despair, references a line from the 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech: “With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.”
Why it mattered
Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.— Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have a Dream,” August 28, 1963
A national memorial is a building project that takes a quarter-century and somewhere between a hundred million and several hundred million dollars to ship. The capital campaign behind it has to do something the institution itself can’t: turn the public into participants. The Foundation’s decision to put the digital program at the center of the campaign — not as a sidecar to the major-gifts work but as the principal channel for the broad-based ownership of the memorial — was the call that made the public-facing piece work. The $15M+ we raised digitally wasn’t just money; it was the receipts on hundreds of thousands of people choosing to be part of building Dr. King’s memorial.
The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial was the highest-profile fundraising and ticketing program I worked on at Emotive, and the project I’m proudest of from that era. It set the template for every public-cause campaign I’ve worked on since: build the platform around the donor, then ship the kind of content that earns the next gift.
References: Wikipedia — MLK Jr. Memorial · NPS — Building the Memorial · Morgan Freeman PSA on YouTube