Fundraiser: Butler School Collage Series

Increased seasonal budget from $200 to over $2,000 by leading a fundraising campaign with 6 team members.

I joined the Butler School Collage Series as Head of Fundraising and Development. It was a relatively new student organization that was dedicated to providing students at the university with extracurricular recital performances around the Austin area. When I joined, the artistic director informed me that there was only $200 to be used for this coming season. Obviously this wasn't enough to run a series of concerts, so my job was to raise as much money as I could.

I was super intimidated by this prospect, since there was an urgency to have money in the bank account as soon as possible so that concert preparations could get kickstarted. I had also never worked in development before, the only leadership position I had served was geared towards event management as a Regional Director. But I'm so grateful to have this opportunity to rise up to the challenge, as it has been a huge learning experience and made me a stronger leader!

Quiet Phase

What's the "Quiet Phase" you might ask? It happens one to two months before the fundraiser officially starts. This is the preparation time, where you think about goals, strategy, and how you want to market your mission. Our goal amount was $1,200. Originally we wanted to have an elaborate concert series that would cost around $4,000, and that was a lot to raise with a team of 6. Instead, I thought it was better to have continuity of the program and eventually build up to a bigger season. Therefore I adjusted our scope to be much more manageable for a smaller team.

During preparation, it's important to have a compelling narrative. I wrote both the short and long descriptions of our project. This helps tell the story of the Collage Series and the importance of our mission, which was to make performance opportunities more accessible to students. Believe it or not, you can also tell stories through donation/perk levels. There were 6 donation levels, making sure that each level's perks would also tell a story about our program. For example, someone could donate $80 to cover our pianist fees or $300 to pay for a student commissioned piece and recieve a complimentary recording. In addition, I wrote the email templates for soliciting donations during the campaign. These emails served three purposes: reminding the donor of our mission, updating the current status of the fundraiser, and creating momentum to the next email (i.e. we're half-way there, LAST CHANCE, etc.). After writing all these excerpts, I realized that the coherentness of a narrative was super important in selling our campaign to potential donors, and take every opportunity to talk about it!

I also learned the importance of using pictures. A lot of people that we would reach out were within our networks, and the truth is, they're donating to also support us as the individual too. So it's super crucial to put faces to the cause, I made sure to collect my teammates' headshots and biographies. I organized a video shoot where I had student and professor testimonials about the importance of our concert series. But the most important thing in the video is to be straightforward and ask for donations, as that is the call to action! (You can check out the video here). I also collected "action shots" from previous concert performances. That way the audience would see the students being impacted by their donations.

Lastly, I made a communications calendar for my team. During the month that we were to be campaigning, I scheduled when my social media team would be posting, when our team would send out solicitation emails together, and benchmark goals throughout the fundraiser. The reason I did this was to promote transparency between my team members; I wanted us to all be on the same page on what would be happening. In addition, it gave my team members time to plan out their workload against their schedules and we could come up with a compromise if there were conflicts.

Active Phase

After months of preparation, it's go time! This is called the "Active Phase." It's super important that the very first day the campaign goes active, all social media and solicitation emails "Kick-off" the campaign. This creates an exciting atmosphere and helps with the momentum later on. Our social media also did a couple "sneak peek" posts to build up to the kick-off as well. I also learned the importance of team members interacting with the social media posts, as it helps gain traction online but also shows how important the cause is to us. I'm not sure if this can be spoken generally, but in my experience, the first 48 hours was when we recieved the most amount of donations, which was super exciting! In part, I think it's because we had a great kick-off.

A crazy moment in our campaign was when we actually surpassed our goal. I was in shock, I hadn't expected it and was thinking, now what? To keep the momentum forward for our campaign and team members, I set a stretch goal. The narrative of the campaign changed to helping out Collage Series continue their work in the next season and make a bigger impact on the student population. It's really important when establishing a stretch goal to thank all of your donors and also emphasize that it is a stretch goal; transparency is key! Our stretch goal was $2,000, and by the end of our campaign we had actually raised $2,230.

What I've Learned

The fundraising campaign was a huge success, and honestly it lifted a lot of the pressure that I was feeling earlier in the year. Now that I'm looking back on it, it taught me how to lead and rely on a team with such a big endeavor. Throughout the campaign I was scheduling meetings with everyone to go over our plans and what the next steps would be. It forced me to be clear about expectations with my teammates, but also promote a positive work environment as much as I could. I definitely couldn't achieve this without the help of my teammates, and I'm sincerely thankful for all the work they put in with me. This campaign also taught me how to "sell a product." While working during the Quiet Phase, I was thinking about who our target audience was, what our story should be, the benefits of our service, and also how it physically looks as well. I've learned a lot of valuable lessons with this experience, and am excited to apply it to future projects. Thanks for reading!