Team 4 – NAHS Fundraising Project

Project Description:

Our team chose the Naperville Area Humane Society as our non-profit organization to focus our fundraising effort. Admittedly, we were really ambitious with our goals at the start our project (more on that later!) but ultimately narrowed our focus toward achievable goals given our timeline. Our group focused on the following Events:

Go Fund Me Campaign

Raffle Event

Mini-Golf Tournament

We identified our strategic audience for each event to ensure we were targeting the right donors and then used many of the PM best practices to drive the events to completion. Ultimately, we were able to meet our fundraising and participation goals for each event with the bulk of our donations coming from our Go Fund Me campaigns. Overall, we were able to raise a little over $1,100 dollars for the Naperville Area Humane Society!

Charity Description:

The Naperville Area Humane Society is a no-kill animal shelter for cats and dogs that services the Naperville and surrounding area. The Naperville Area Humane Society is dedicated to making sure every animal can find a home, and receive the care they need to live a happy and healthy life. Their mission is promote the humane treatment of companion animals and create lasting human-animal bonds. They deliver services to the community that reflect integrity, respect, compassion and joy for all people and animals.

Project Goals:

The above table shows the matrix we created to grade our efforts with each event in our project scope. We decided to weight our success from “Goal Partially Met” – “Goal Exceeded” and then we determined a dollar range for each of the buckets in the matrix. The purple highlighted boxes represent the actual range we achieved for each event. We raised a little over $1,100 across the three events = GOAL MET!!

Lessons Learned:

We mentioned earlier that we started off with huge ambitions and many ideas on how we could make a difference and raise money. This made it difficult for our team of five to make decisions and move the project forward early on. There was quite a bit scope creep early on and when we compared our ideas to the project timeline, we were able to plan more realistically with the time available to complete each event.

Advice to Future Teams:

First, don’t forget to have fun with your projects – You’re helping to make a difference and that’s awesome!

A detailed risk mitigation plan is very important because there will be things out of your control that may negatively impact your project – Your risk mitigation plan will literally help you weather the storm! Identify everything that could possibly go wrong and you’ll put your team in a position to meet your goals.

We had a big team and it was important to send summaries of meeting minutes and deliverables, after every meeting, to ensure the entire team was on the same page and up to speed on next steps. Even on smaller teams we found that this was an effective way to avoid confusion and keep the project teams aligned with the project status and on-time with deliverables.