About the Charity
Vertical
Health & Wellness
Mission
Fleece & Thank You provides comfort and hope to children battling illness by giving donors the unique opportunity to create a fleece blanket and a cherished video message of support and encouragement.
Favorite Features
P2P fundraising pages, event registration, fundraiser page creation at scale.
Fundraising Wins
Grew from 12,000 to 19,000 kids comforted over two years.
60% of annual revenue driven by peer-to-peer fundraising on Pledge It.
Hundreds of individual peer-to-peer pages created per year, at scale.
Scaled personalized donor stewardship to small, mid, and major donors with Virtuous automations.
A Tech Stack That Couldn't Keep Up
Fleece & Thank You's model is simple: groups from around the country host blanket-making events, raise money through P2P fundraising pages, and every dollar goes toward getting more blankets to hospitalized kids. But as the organization grew, with hundreds of events and hundreds of pages to manage, its tools couldn't keep up.
Fleece & Thank You was running GoFundMe Pro, formerly Classy, for P2P and Kindful as its CRM. GoFundMe Pro worked, but it was an enterprise product priced like one, and the workflow for creating pages on behalf of fundraisers required workarounds that couldn't keep up with the volume. To set up a page for a group, Founder & Executive Director Nicholas Kristock had to open an incognito window and manually build each one as if he were the fundraiser himself.
"On Classy, we were having to go into incognito windows and create fundraising pages almost as if we were the fundraiser." — Nicholas Kristock, Founder & Executive Director, Fleece & Thank You
Kindful had its own limitations: the automations weren't there, and the kind of personalized, scaled stewardship Nicholas envisioned wasn't possible. Small donors were falling through the cracks. Mid-level donors weren't being cultivated. The tools were functional, but the vision was outrunning them.
Tools That Finally Matched the Mission
When Nicholas saw a demo of Pledge It, one thing stood out immediately: it could do everything GoFundMe Pro was doing, at a fraction of the cost, and it was being built in the direction Fleece & Thank You's program needed to go. Creating hundreds of fundraising pages on behalf of groups, without the added manual effort, was no longer a problem.
"Pledge It has come out with feature enhancements and changes over the years that allow us to just do that at scale, and it's way easier." — Nicholas Kristock, Founder & Executive Director, Fleece & Thank You
Today, Fleece & Thank You creates hundreds of P2P fundraising pages a year on Pledge It, powering the blanket-making program that drives 60% of its annual revenue. It also runs two of its three signature events on the platform: Make a Blanket Day, a Guinness World Record event, and Night of Gratitude, its annual donor appreciation event.
The shift to Virtuous addressed donor stewardship. With Virtuous's automation capabilities, Fleece & Thank You now cultivates donors at every level with a personal touch that previously would have required a much larger team. When a gift comes in, donors automatically receive a voicemail drop, a video message by text, and a personalized email workflow.
"Virtuous automations help us cultivate at scale with a really personal touch... Virtuous is the only tool I've seen that's been able to meet the vision we have for that." — Nicholas Kristock, Founder & Executive Director, Fleece & Thank You
The two platforms connect via Zapier, with donation and donor data flowing from Pledge It into Virtuous, giving the team a complete picture of every supporter in one place.
More Groups. More Blankets. More Kids.
The impact shows up most clearly in the mission itself. Last year, Fleece & Thank You comforted 19,000 hospitalized kids with handmade blankets, up from 14,000 the year before, and 12,000 the year before that. The fundraising infrastructure is a direct line to that number.
But for Nicholas, one of the most meaningful outcomes isn't in the totals. It's in who gets to participate.
"There are probably groups where people wouldn't have been able to afford the donation amount to make a blanket, but because we have tools like Pledge It, they can give their dollar or $5 and still participate equally in an overall mission." — Nicholas Kristock, Founder & Executive Director, Fleece & Thank You
The P2P model, supported by the right platform, means a group without a budget has the same access to the mission as anyone else. Every dollar pools together. Every blanket gets made together.
