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.

 

The Knights of Nutrition – Feed My Starving Children

Project Description:

 

For our project, we chose to work with Feed My Starving Children (FMSC) located in Schaumburg, IL. In order to support and raise awareness for FMSC we coordinated an online fundraiser, as well as a food-packing event. Our food-packing event was held on May 31st, 2019 at the FMSC location in Schaumburg from 12-2pm. Our goal for the event was to have 40 volunteers and raise $1,000. The event was a great success and we were able to pack enough meals to feed 102 children for a year. Prior to the event, we created an online donation page through the FMSC website in an attempt to raise our goal of $1,000. We were able to raise a total of $1,222 through Facebook and the FMSC donation webpage. We also were able to secure a $1,000 matching contribution donation from Robert Bosch Power Tools.

Description of Charity:

 

Feed My Staving Children is a non-profit organization founded in 1987 that provides volunteers the opportunity to pack dry ingredients, vitamins and minerals into individual bags. These meals will reach people around the world and help feed and save the lives of many people. Feed My Starving Children’s mission is, “Feeding God’s starving children hungry in body and spirit.” Through donations received from individuals, they are able to purchase the ingredients for their meals.

Goals:

 

  • Raise $1,000
  • Secure Bosch matching contribution
  • Recruit 40 volunteers

Results:

 

  • Raised $2,222
  • Bosch matching contribution of $1,000
  • Recruited 45 volunteers

Lessons Learned:

 

There were many lessons learned throughout this project. The most important were organization and effective communication with your team. These were very important to us because we were a small team and needed to be organized in order to successfully complete this project. We quickly learned that it was necessary to communicate via multiple methods of communication. A combination of emails, texts and in person meetings were necessary to keep us on track with all the project deliverables.  We also realized that organization was important to ensure all members were on the same page.

Advice to Future Teams:

 

Our advice to future teams would be to have fun, trust your team members, start the project as soon as possible and do not be afraid to deviate from your initial plan. There are many deliverables and tasks that need to be completed, but if you start early enough and work well with your team members, your project results will be great.

 

The Women’s Treatment Center Clothing Room Project

Project Description

For our project we wanted to update the clothing room at the Women’s Treatment Center in Chicago, Illinois. The clothing room is where all of the clothing donations are stored. The women can get clothing for themselves or their children in this room. Our update included new paint, new shelves, new clothing rods, a new folding table, a new door sign, and plaques for the shelving. Due to the expenses of this project, we needed to raise a significant amount of funds, so fundraising was done before the building was able to start.

Description of Charity

The Women’s Treatment Center helps women who are recovering from addiction. Some of the services that this center offers are medical detox, parenting classes, an emergency nursery, a CPS certified pre-K, housing, and career training. The fact that the women can live with their children (up to 5 years old) in this center is one of the reasons it is unique.

Results

For our project, we had various goals set during our project proposal. These goals included raising $1000 from donations, getting corporate donation matching up to $1000, raise awareness of the organization through fundraising, recruit at least two volunteers to help, install new shelving and clothing rods, and complete the work within one 8 hour day. We had two stretch goals, which included painting the room and adding a new sorting table.

We were able to achieve all of the goals that we set. We raised slightly over $2000 in donations, which more than doubled our goal. Bosch agreed to match $1000 of those donations. We had more than 50 shares on our GoFundMe page which means there was awareness driven. For our paint day we had one volunteer, and for our build day we had three volunteers. This also doubled our goal of two volunteers. We did complete the painting in one day (4 hours) and the building within one day (6 hours). Due to the stretch paint goal completed, we did use two days rather than one, but the original build day scope was within our timeframe of one day. We were also able to purchase a new sorting table due to the extra funds raised.

Lessons Learned

There were many lessons learned through this process. The most important lesson from this project was looking at all of the possible risks associated. The day before the build and the day of the build we had some issues arise and were able to overcome all of them to successfully complete the project in the given timeline.

Next, assigning specific tasks with deadlines is extremely important. Just having a list of tasks and roles assigned is not enough. Setting deadlines allows you to determine your critical path to ensure everything is complete by the project deadline.

Finally, I think it is important to enjoy yourself during the project. This was one of the assigned goals but we realized that if we were not having fun and enjoying what we were doing then we would not be motivated to complete the project and hit our stretch goals.

Advice to Future Teams

The most important piece of advice I can give is to get started early. This is something we were told in class #1. Luckily, we started right away raising money and not waiting for class deliverables to get started. This allowed us to raise much more money than expected.

Next, having weekly update meetings to ensure tasks are moving forward. If you just discuss verbally and do not have a living document then it is easy to forget necessary tasks.

The last piece of advice is to run through the user journey with your group a few times to write down anything you might miss. In doing this, we remembered many critical things like moving carts, garbage bags, and specialty tools.

Photos

Before

 

Paint Day

 

Complete Project!

Free Street Theater

Our team chose to support Free Street Theater, a Chicago-based non-profit theater company that has been in the city for 50 years. After a few calls and discussions, we decided to support their marketing. With a team of only 4 full-time members, Free Street needed a lot of help with marketing, communication and strategy. We focused on 3 main goals: supporting their May 2019 youth play, creating an electronic press kit (EPK) and strategizing around their 50th anniversary event (50-in-50 which was comprised of 50 performances in each of the 50 wards in Chicago).

Free Street Theater (FST) is committed to building community through performances, facilitating difficult conversations and being accessible to anyone, anywhere. One of their main focuses is on creating a safe space for youth and compensating them for their efforts in producing and acting in performances. They have two main locations but also use community areas as their stage.

Free Street produces youth shows throughout the year including teens and young adults. Their May 2019 youth play was titled Parched, and spoke to water justice, pollution and theft. The teens that were part of the play exposed injustices and discussed the power of water and the privilege behind it. Team 1 assisted with supporting donations for FST through seeking donations and creating a pledge card. FST is also celebrating their 50th anniversary in June of 2019. They already established an event to celebrate this occasion when we joined: 50-in-50. They will hold 50 performances within all 50 wards in Chicago on June 23rd. Team 1 supported them with a communication strategy leading up to the event. Lastly, FST was in need of an EPK for various reasons. This is a helpful document to have for future grant-asks, public relations, article writing and donations. This press kit is ultimately their website scaled down to less than 10 pages of a PDF. Our help was needed in various tasks for each of the areas above.

Our project objective was to increase the ease and frequency in which the charity could receive donations and social media followers at their events. The ease of donating was a huge success by creating a “pledge card” which could be included as an insert in the program for any Free Street Theater event. This card was a simple and intuitive layout which gave 2 options for donating. First one could fill in the basic information (name and contact info) to be followed up with at another time since there was often a line by the ticket counter and people might be in a hurry to get home after the shows. Second we had a QR code which links directly to the charity’s donation page. In addition to collecting donations the card also has the reminders to check the Free Street Theater social media pages and a section to advertise the next upcoming event. While donations can be highly variable, we were told that on average plays usually raise about $250 per night that it runs accounting for both ticket sales and good will donations. Our goal was to raise the stakes and we were shooting for helping them reach double their average collections. The play was actually sold out in the last weekend it was running (with 20 people turned away because of lack of seats), so it was extended an additional weekend.

Our original success matrix was ambitious and we didn’t consider that with 50 in 50 being several weeks after the conclusion of our class, we may not be able to see a measurable change in the social media relations. Instead we changed the matrix to account for timely delivery on the community ward map and EPK since FST was requesting this a prerequisite for some other activities like choosing the locations for the 50 different performances.

 

Success Matrix
Increased donations at plays & other
Current plays $250
Success $350
Stretch Goal $500
Actual $3,131

 

Usually there are 2 plays for a weekend and they would run 3-4 weekends in a row. That means an average play gets $1500-2000. We wanted to bump this measurably, and we also got more bullish on the stretch goal when we learned that Bosch would be matching donations up to $1000 which made doubling their average seem achievable. Total donations raised by the play + Bosch’s match + outside donations were $3,131.

 

Community Map
Success Complete on time
Stretch Goal Accepted and every ward listed with at least the alderman contact info and 1 community area
Actual COMPLETED

 

The community map was underestimated and ended up taking many hours longer than anticipated. Because of this we did not complete the map in time before it was shared with presenting teams. None the less, it’s being treated as a living document so anyone can add or modify fields, so it should hopefully prove useful in the future as well.

 

EPK
Success Accepted by FST and per spec.
Stretch Goal Accepted and complete by target date (5/28)
Actual COMPLETED

 

The EPK was much more critical to have a document that was refined and represented the brand of Free Street Theater. We got a template of guidelines that should also be followed in order to keep a more consistent image with the website.

 

Two or three lessons learned about managing projects

            Something we learned early on was that we needed to have a schedule of our own deadlines. We had a lot of moving pieces throughout the project, with deadlines for class assignments as well as deadlines to the organization. We created our work breakdown structure and included as many details as possible. We kept a secondary file with our personal responsibilities and team deadlines. This helped us throughout the quarter.

Another thing we learned early on in the project was when you’re working with a charity on a project that is more in-depth than just hosting an event or getting donations, you have to set clear expectations on what you want to learn. We were given a lot of different tasks that didn’t necessarily align with what our goals were. We quickly reevaluated and aligned on deliverables that had multiple uses (i.e. electronic press kit, pledge card, community map).

 

Advice for future teams doing similar projects

            Our advice is to think outside of the box. You don’t have to do a typical event or fundraiser. We wanted to help in an area where we could drive future change rather than in-the-moment change. A lot of non-profits don’t have the bandwidth for a lot of marketing they would like to help gain traction and ultimately get more donations. Our support would be used in future events such as grant writing, press releases and events/performances.