Campaign recap · October 2020 through May 2021
Warmed Hearts, 2020–21.
Warmed Hearts was the appeal we ran through the first pandemic winter. We opened it because our intake calls doubled in six weeks and we did not have the money behind them. It closed in May with more raised than we had ever handled, and more households served than in any season before or since.
By the numbers
What the winter added up to.
- Households warmed
148
Every one of them in Merrimack County, and 41 of them for the first time.
- Deliveries funded
213
Oil, propane, kerosene and pellets, paid straight to the dealer.
- Gallons and equivalent
21,400
Counting pellet tonnage converted for comparison.
- Raised in the appeal
$67,400
Against a goal of $40,000 set in October 2020.
- Donors
312
184 of them giving to the fund for the first time.
- Towns served
9
Hopkinton, Contoocook, Warner, Webster, Boscawen, Salisbury, Henniker, Bradford and Dunbarton.
How the season went
Eight months, in order.
October 2020
We opened the appeal early
Intake calls had doubled since August and the balance would not cover November. We set a $40,000 goal, wrote to every past donor, and asked the Hopkinton and Warner papers to run a notice.
November 2020
The first cold snap, and the first surprise
Nineteen deliveries in eleven days. A third of the callers had never asked anyone for help before and several apologised for calling, which is the sentence we hear most often and like least.
December 2020
Matching gift from a local family
A family who asked to stay unnamed offered to match every gift through the end of the year up to $10,000. The match filled in nine days and carried us through January.
January 2021
Our heaviest month on record
Fifty-two deliveries. Two furnace repairs paid on the same afternoon they were reported. We added a second evening intake volunteer to keep the callback window under a day.
February 2021
Working alongside the state programme
We began routinely walking callers through the state Fuel Assistance application while covering the gap, so that households were not relying on us alone the following winter.
March 2021
The late-season stretch
March is the month people forget. Thirty-one deliveries, most of them to households who had made it to spring on fumes and needed one more fill to finish the season.
April 2021
Furnace and service call fund
We set aside $4,800 of what was left for repairs rather than fuel, on the reasoning that a dead burner in April is cheaper to fix than in December.
May 2021
We closed the appeal
$67,400 raised, 148 households warmed, and $9,100 carried into the summer so that nobody calling us in July would hear that the money had run out.
Impact
What the season taught us.
The number we keep coming back to is 41. That is how many of the 148 households had never contacted us before, and most of them were working families whose hours had been cut rather than households already in the assistance system. A lot of them told us they had waited until the tank was genuinely empty because they assumed the fund was for someone worse off.
That waiting is expensive. A tank run fully dry usually needs a restart, sometimes a nozzle, occasionally a full service call, and the household ends up needing two or three hundred dollars more than it would have a week earlier. Half of what we learned that winter was about telling people to call sooner.
The other half was about the summer. Fuel emergencies do not stop in April. Furnaces fail in July, hot water goes out in August, and tanks that were left empty in spring have to be filled before the first cold night. Carrying $9,100 into the summer of 2021 meant we answered fourteen off-season calls without opening another appeal.
Thank you
Three hundred and twelve people paid for this. So did a family who matched ten thousand dollars and asked us not to print their name, two fuel dealers who held invoices without interest while donations caught up, the Hopkinton and Warner papers who ran our notice for nothing, and eleven volunteers who took intake calls on their own evenings through the worst winter any of us remember. We did not have staff, an office or a budget for any of it. We had neighbors. Thank you.
We have not run an appeal that large again, and we hope we will not need to.
