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Fisher House Foundation - Meltwater Customer Story

Fisher House Foundation


Fisher House Foundation builds comfort homes where military & veteran families can stay free of charge, while a loved one is in the hospital. Since inception, the program has saved military and veterans’ families an estimated $547 million in out-of-pocket costs for lodging and transportation. Fisher House Foundation also operates the Hero Miles program, using donated frequent flyer miles to bring family members to the bedside of injured service members as well as the Hotels for Heroes program using donated hotel points to allow family members to stay at hotels near medical centers without charge. The Foundation also manages a grant program that supports other charities and scholarship funds for military children, spouses, and children of fallen and disabled veterans.

Meltwater helps Fisher House Foundation to:

Be resourceful: Save time and money

Make an impact: Do a big job with a small team

Raise funds: Leverage PR and media monitoring to raise and track funds from donors

The Challenge

Founded in 1990, Fisher House Foundation has been supporting military and veteran families for decades. Today, the nationwide nonprofit has 92 houses in operation, has served 430 000 families, 11.5 million days of lodging and is reason for $547 million in savings to families.

Fisher House Foundation builds comfort homes across the country for military and veteran families to stay free of charge while loved ones receive medical care. Once a house is built, maintenance and management is handled by the Department of Defense or Veterans Affairs.

"Because of this, it is difficult to track media activity. As a nonprofit, we operate with a small staff and do our best to be good stewards of donor money. Meltwater helps me do a very big job with a small staff." - Michelle Horn, VP Communications at Fisher House Foundation

"The ease of use of all Meltwater features saves me time and money, allowing us to focus on our mission of telling the story of military and veteran families' stay at Fisher Houses."

Michelle Horn, VP Communications at Fisher House Foundation

The Solution

Through Meltwater's media monitoring suite, Fisher House Foundation are able to be more resourceful, by focusing on where they can drive the most impact for the NPO, and automate the media monitoring and social analytics aspect. With Meltwater's reporting capabilities, they are able to monitor their impact across social and news media, and with the media relations solution, they are able to quickly and easily distribute press releases, leading to more reach and more donors.

"From our first interaction with Meltwater, our expectations were exceeded. We had finally found an all-in-one tool that we could use for social media tracking, press release distribution, and reporting to donors. This is incredibly important to us. In addtion, the Meltwater team have been so helpful. Caroline Montgommery has always been easy to reach and proactive in finding new ways for me to get a more complete picture of issues that affect our organization." - Michelle Horn, VP Communications at Fisher House Foundation

“The solutions we tried prior to Meltwater were cumbersome tools - they didn't have the features we were looking for and were more expensive. From our first interaction with Meltwater, our expectations were exceeded. We had finally found an all-in-one tool that we could use for social media tracking, press release distribution, and reporting to donors. This is incredibly important to us."

Michelle Horn, VP Communications at Fisher House Foundation