FUNDRAISING CAMPAIGN: SAY HEY
- xingyu zhong
- Feb 28, 2018
- 5 min read
The second project in brand design 4 class is a team work project for a real nonprofit organization named CHOICE Humanitarian. We were devided into 3 teams to come up with our fundraising campaigns for the literacy program in Guatemala. The goal was to raise $3k as a whole class, but which team raises the most money wins.
Actually, I doubted about if each team could raise $1k in only 3weeks even when I first heard about this project. On one hand, I have no experience making a nonprofit fundraising campaign; on the other hand, I am not really into donation myself. I didn't really know how to get people to give their money just to help some women so far away. But, I asked myself, "what would get me to donate my money?", doing good things of course is one reason but not enough to get me in it. I thought it would be something special that I could get through the donation that would remind me that donation experience. I felt like that was the thing could bring me ( a not rich and not into donation person) into donating my money. And that was the thing I wanted to do in the campaign.
Well... the teammembers of the first team that I was assigned to had totally different ideas from mine. They seemed like not really focus on the theme "helping Guatemalan women to learn literacy" when they were conceiving the activities of the campaign ( or I couldn't understand they did ). They were talking about holding movie nights, cocktail parties and selling ballons on valentine's day. At the end, maybe it would be a great way to get people to pay, but I felt like it is not the same if people are paying mainly for the activies or the donation.
So, I changed team in the second class of this project. That is the "Say Hey" team. There were three members, Sarah, Deanna and Erin. I wasn't in the team when they came up with the idea. But, I found it was quite similar to my thoughts. The basic idea was you make a donation, then the team will send your friend a postcard with an inspiring message. It is like your donation empowers Guatemalan women, and we will send a message to empower your friend because of it. It kinda makes an empowering circle. I loved that idea. Also, I felt more passionate to get to creat something and give them to people in the campaign.
Next, I am going to talk about my works in this campaign.
The first thing I did in the campaign was applying an email for it. Then, I applied for a facebook account to create a public page for the campaign. I was having a trouble when I was setting up the facebook page. Facebook blocked the account because I was using the same phone number as my personal account. Then I had to rebuild everything using my personal account and change the page username to @sayheychoice. Here are some trys that I made for the page cover.
At the end, I refined to this one based on team feedbacks.
This is how the facebook "about" page looks.
After discussion, I published our facebook page ad for a 7 days period covering several rich cities women from age 24 to 65, who are interested in charity and hunman rights.
People who click on that ad will go to our rallybound donation page for detailed donation instructions. At the end of the project, the ad covered 1,372 people, got 23 clicks and 10 likes.
As the page itself, it covered 1,209 people, got 62 conversations and 5 followers and likes.
Then the 4 members designed their own postcard all choosing a picture of Guatemalan women and using the dots background. The picture I chose was a Guatemalan mom carrying her baby on her back. I felt like it mached the theme of helping Guatemalan women education because it will also help their children's education so well. Also, the picture kinda gave me a feeling that being a mom is not easy but she has to be strong for her child. That was also why I used the message "YOU ARE STRONGER THAN YOU THINK" there to encourage people like a mom to be strong and positive. Here is my postcard design.
After we all came up with our postcard designs, I made the mockups for each of our postcards as the promotional material on our facebook page. It was also because our printed postcards wouldn't arrived until the day before the campaign ends. We wanted to show people how they would look like in reallity, so that people might love them more.
This is the back side mockup with the stamp and hand writen name and address.
Here are the mockups of our real postcards:
We also had some promotional buttons. I printed out the cards that go with the buttons. Then we all went to hand them out in downtown as another way of promotion. Here is the picture of the buttons with cards.
In the end of Say Hey campaign, we got $220 donation. Most of it was from the friends or relatives of the team members. I got to say the social media part wasn't working out quite well. Even though a lot of people shared our campaign page, it seemed like most of them did not make a donation. I really think we did a good job in this campaign from graphic designs to every copy posts. And according to the people we have talked to, they all loved the idea of this campaign and the postcards and buttons. I feel like the time factor is important here. The time we got to do the actual promotion of our campaign was only a week. I think people would need more time to get to know about the campaign to trust its authenticity that it is really helping those people there. A week is far from enough time to realize that.
If we set the time factor aside, we want to accomplish such $1k donation in such a short time, we could only depend on our personal social network because the trust has aleady been built through our personal relationships. But the problem was we didn't have that wide enough or rich enough social network in this team to make that happen. Actually, I am not sure if we should ask our personal contacts to make the donation because we are doing a campaign to see if our designs work. Our friends or relatives supporting us is not because of how good our design looks or how amazing the idea is, but just because of the relations. In this point, I feel like "which team gets the most money wins" has lost its meaning because most of the donation of every team was from their personal social networks. It seems like it had nothing much to do with the campaign itself.
Even though the campaign has come to the end in this project, I think our Say Hey is still very potential to have a great impact if CHOICE Humanitarian would keep putting efforts to develop it.
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