Fundraising Campaign

After attending the Big Give SA workshop last week, now is the time to start to developing and executing a fundraising/marketing strategy with SAYL’s Directory of Communications. Although I’m still skeptical over whether its wise to pour a majority of our time into developing a peer-to-peer fundraising strategy, I did some research of organizations and people I believe would be willing to fundraise for SAYL. In past years, SAYL has traditionally just sought out donations and recruits to be fundraising champions from their board. It appears that’s the intention this year, but I believe it would a good idea to seek out employees of independent book stores, which San Antonio has a lot of to be fundraising champions. I also searched for organizers and participants in online book clubs in the region. I believe they would be the ideal candidate for being fundraising champions because they’ve demonstrated the ability to organize and operate via social media, and they obviously have a connection to literacy and have enough passion about reading to join a club about it. I’ve also tried to come up with some ideas for marketing/fundraising via social media. Last year SAYL conducted a campaign where they took pictures of volunteers participating with SAYL in the Big Give SA, while they held signs with the #Thisiswhyigive, and shared them over the course of the month. I thought it would be more effective to run a similar campaign, but instead of sharing images, we could share video testimonials of our participating volunteers instead. I explained that we could set up an appointment sheet we could email blast to our volunteers using Constant Contact, for volunteers to come in to our offices and shoot a two minute video testimonial reflecting on their volunteer experiences, which the rest of the staff seemed to think was a good idea, and the Director of Communications gave me the go ahead to try it out.