PROJECT: UNITED WAY OF TOMPKINS COUNTY
United Way of Tompkins County (UWTC) is a non-profit organization with the mission of "helping people meet their immediate, basic needs while creating lasting change by strengthening the three building blocks for a good life: education, financial stability and health". I was hired during a time of transition for the organization. With the loss of the COO and a Relationship Manager at the same time, I was hired to fill facets of both roles with a newly created role as the manager of the Resource Development Department.
My primary responsibility was to oversee the annual fundraising drive, a $1.9 million community-wide campaign. The United Way fundraising model is unique in that the majority of the funds come from workplace giving rather than individual appeals. The UWTC community campaign consists of over 200 independently organized workplace-based employee giving campaigns that range in size from 3 or 4 employees to 15,000+ employees. In order to help train the volunteers that run these campaigns within each organization, my team and I created a manual and supplementary resources that each volunteer had access to.
ECC Guide
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FUNraising Ideas
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Campaign Collateral
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The direct mail campaign includes over 800 individuals and local businesses that receive appeal letters. My team and I created the various appeal letters that were sent to different donors, as well as the thank you letters that were sent to everyone that contributed to the campaign.
In order to effectively manage this campaign, I worked with a committee of volunteers that would help reach out to the local organizations and follow up with each organization one-on-one. As the staff lead for the campaign committee, I was responsible for analyzing the campaign, looking for trends, and keeping everyone on the committee up to date on campaign progress through weekly reports and bi-weekly meetings.
Radio Ads
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For the national day of giving, Giving Tuesday, UWTC had traditionally worked with the giving platform GiveGab to run a day-long campaign to solicit donations. This strategy had garnered a lot of negative feedback due to the inundation of e-mails people typically receive that day asking them to make a gift. As a result, I suggested a different strategy for engaging our donors and volunteers. We ran a hashtag campaign on social media asking people to share why they support UWTC, and recruited a corporate sponsor who was willing to make a contribution every time the post was shared. This campaign nearly quadrupled the income we received from Giving Tuesday, built a partnership with a new corporate donor, allowed us to collect testimonials for use in future marketing materials, and had the largest reach of any post we had ever released on social media.
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When I started this role, we we were producing a generic digital newsletter that was distributed to +/- 2300 contacts monthly. While we were achieving industry standard open rates of 20-25%, we didn't believe like this tool was being used as effectively as it could be. As a result, we transitioned to a weekly newsletter with short 1-2 sentence updates, blurbs, campaign highlights, and infographics that demonstrated the impact that UWTC was having throughout the community. Additionally, we created a monthly deep-dive newsletter that would rotate focus through the three impact areas that UWTC supports (education, financial stability, and health). Before transitioning to this new format, I cleaned up our contact lists and we were able to maintain our open rates while doubling the distribution list (+/- 4700 contacts).
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I was also responsible for planning and executing an annual slate of community events. This included overseeing each element of a variety of events, from designing and mailing event invitations, to booking venues, caterers, and performers, ordering supplies, drafting talking points for speakers, and performing on-site event direction and volunteer management.
Disaster Relief
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In addition to our community campaign and marketing activities, UWTC's board decided to take on the role of community organizers in response to the series of natural disasters that took place in fall of 2017. I was the primary liaison and managed all of our efforts surrounding the disaster relief response. This included creating a community-wide fundraising campaign that directed over $35,000 to areas that were impacted by the Hurricanes that devastated Houston, Puerto Rico, Florida, and the US Virgin Islands. I also worked with volunteers and partners in the community to organize a supply drive that sent 3 truckloads of supplies and 20 generators to those that were affected by these disasters. United Way Worldwide recognized these efforts in a blog post titled "Volunteers Help Storm Victims From Afar".
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