Portfolio Tag: Fundraising

During the time I worked at Spark (2018 – 2019) the organization had four regional offices and one national office, which I worked in. Spark Program offers educational opportunities for middle school students, hosted by local companies. These opportunities include Spark Lab and Spark Mentorships. At the end of each school year, Spark runs a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign called Mentoring Matters where they ask current and former Spark mentors, friends, and family to raise money and share stories of how “mentoring matters.”

As the National Communication and Development Manager, I collaborated with each regional lead to set goals, brainstorm collateral and create milestones. As the National lead, I designed all the graphics for the campaign, wrote the fundraising language, set up the initial campaign pages, created the “100 for $100” graphic (pictured above), and created a fundraising page toolkit (pictured below). The highlighted fill-in-the-blank areas are so each region could customize the guides according to their own needs.

During my time at Spark Program, I wrote several grant proposals and reports for the organization. While most of these proposals remain with the organization, I do have two draft examples that I can share.

The draft statement of need was made available for all of the regional offices to use in their grant proposals. I also drafted a shower version that was used as copy on the website.

This grant language was used specifically for STEM grant proposals. I made this specific draft customizable for regional offices. The highlighted yellow regions offer other development managers the opportunities to personalize the copy to fit their needs.

To fund their most ambitious youth performance yet, Free Street Theater embarked on an energetic campaign to fund the performance.  The 57 Blocks youth performance will be performed on, in, and around a bus that travels up and down Chicago’s Ashland Avenue – the street that connects both the Pulaski Park and Storyfront youth ensembles. The goal of the campaign is to raise $1,000 for each block the bus will cross, totaling $57,000.  As of 12/26 more than $25,000 was raised towards the campaign.  The team used a combination of peer to peer outreach, email outreach and social media marketing to get the word out about the campaign.

Fundraising Guide

Email Outreach

Social Media Outreach