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Plant With Purpose is a leader among organizations that connect environmental restoration to humanitarian development. They started working back in 1984 and have expanded into seven countries. Because their work has been around for so long and has helped so many people, they've had to learn, adapt, and transform over the years.
For a long time, Plant With Purpose has pitched a Sponsor-a-Village program as its main opportunity for supporters to make monthly gifts. While the connection to a particular village was attractive, it seemed to work most effectively for church groups and older donors rather than millennials and individual givers.
I joined the Plant With Purpose team at a time where it was seeking to grow these donor bases. I suggested tailoring Sponsor-a-Village more specifically for the groups with who m it worked well, and designing a new entry-level giving opportunity.
I developed Purpose Partners. By signing up to give monthly, supporters would be a part of a well-branded giving community that received the latest stories that showed them how the world they were investing in was being transformed. I also suggested building up the community aspect through the chance to win trips and attend events. These decisions were based on the discoveries that revealed donor’s main motivations for signing up were to act on their values and to participate in a community.
One strength of Sponsor a Village was the connection it gave Plant With Purpose supporters to the organization’s field work. In order to continue to foster that, I designed the program’s main storytelling device to be Purpose Projects, where the communication partners would receive each couple months would revolve around a different aspect of the organization’s work.
The redesign was met with enthusiasm as it addressed many of the recurring concerns Plant With Purpose representatives have had with determining what to pitch to interested supporters. Immediately they were able to start introducing new audiences to a simpler, more effective opportunity to contribute to the work.
Purpose Partner communication soon became a primary “donor vehicle” at events that Plant With Purpose presented at, including The Justice Conference and the Whole Life Festival. The team found the clarity that the redesign provided really helped its representatives find new partners and supporters more easily.
North Korea is a bewildering place. Human rights abuses, extreme poverty, and political persecution are rampant, while 24 million people also try to survive and seek better circumstances. Its ordinary citizens and its refugees are in drastic need of support from the international community, but this can be a difficult challenge when most people only associate the country with nukes and the personalities of its dictatorship.
Liberty in North Korea (LiNK) has been at the forefront of changing the way we talk about North Korea in order to increase support and help its people. LiNK helps provide the funding and mechanisms to help North Koreans make it out of the country and into resettlement in South Korea or the United States. They have built a particularly strong grassroots movement by reaching out to people at a personal level throughout the country.
I wanted to be a part of the changes LiNK was making in the lives of North Koreans, so I signed up to go on a tour in order to help promote their work. Putting together the tour wasn't easy, and to this day it remains the busiest I've ever been. In their office, I spent fourteen hour days sometimes, making phone calls and booking events with churches, universities, and other community groups. All this was before five teams of three set out across the U.S. and Canada to deliver their message.
My team took the Heartland, and I found myself speaking in every state that fit in between Texas and Minnesota, Colorado and Ohio. I loved the act of public speaking, and my team meshed brilliantly. We made connections with hundreds of new supporters on the road, many of whom remain connected to the organization long afterwards. We also kept our broader network of supporters in the loop through social media posts and video updates.
This tour lasted three months. In the end we had booked and presented at over 90 events, reaching thousands of individuals. We spoke at college prep schools in Cincinnati, Big Ten Schools all over the Northern Midwest, Human Rights Conferences in Wichita, churches of all denominations from Nebraska to Illinois, and even at coffee shops, barber shops, and a senator's house.
Collectively, our teams raised $75,000 and the connections we made to new supporters who continued to spread the organization's messages were plentiful and impossible to count. The tour was a wide success and contributed to one of the organization's biggest years of growth.
CoachPro LLC was a great business that offered quality vehicle renovations to coach owners all over the world. They've done everything from furniture installation to making electrical components that could work overseas and adding wheelchair ramps to making coach buses more disability friendly. They did great work and were continuing to offer in demand services to all kinds of clients.
They just had one problem. Their website looked like the year 2002. CoachPro's job was to make fantastic vehicle renovations, not websites! That's where I came in. I offered to make a user friendly website that took advantage of their visually stunning work.
It started with a website audit. I went page by page, evaluated how necessary each one was, how functional it was. I showed CoachPro's owner my notes and suggested some big changes.
Then, I got to work. I started building a new website. I wrote short but compelling bits of copy for every single page, plus blog posts to help profile some of their great work in the past. I designed menus for services inspired by a completely different but visually-driven industry: restaurants and food service.
I showed my first take to CoachPro and they made suggestions for some further changes. In less than a month I presented them with their finished product.
I handed over a packet of information about how to make simple changes to the website and offered to continue to help in the future.
CoachPro was beyond thrilled with their new site and began to make recommendations to other businesses about changes their websites could make. They had a gorgeous new online home to direct their wide world of clients towards.
Anthony Meyer was a physical fitness expert about to launch a service that many would call pretty unconventional. Online fitness coaching. To many, the idea of online and fitness seemed like such contrasts that the idea of using the internet to get in shape was a bit bewildering.
It was attention getting, at least, and that's always a plus. I met with Anthony to talk to him about how to overcome this hurdle in order to drive in more customers. While he was skilled at coaching, he was relatively new to the world of marketing. I made suggestions about how to align himself with clients' life narratives, how to use visuals to appeal to those clients, and how to explain the benefits of online coaching.
First, I helped Anthony identify an audience. Who would benefit from an online coach? Frequent travelers, busy parents with kids, and other demographics that can't easily make it to a gym.
I then helped him work through the storytelling process. If these busy parents and travelers were the hero of his story, what was their goal? To get in shape, of course. Then we identified obstacles. Kids. A busy life. Now he was ready to position his service as a solution.
I encouraged him to promote the online aspect of his work as a way to give these groups access to staying in shape when life doesn't allow it. We talked about what images to have on his site, what logo to work with, in order to drive home this point.
After a few weeks of working with Anthony, here's what I was able to develop with him.
Restavek Freedom has been one of the most effective organizations working in Haiti for close to a decade. The organization focuses namely on the Restavek issue– a complex practice in Haitian culture and history where children from rural families are often sent to live with other families as domestic laborers and are often subject to mistreatment and dehumanization. Many have called the practice modern day slavery.
For years, Restavek Freedom has excelled at advocacy work for these children, but their work became even more complicated after October 2016, when Hurricane Matthew struck. The Category 4 major hurricane struck the country’s southern peninsula in early October, destroying around 200,000 homes and putting over a million people at risk. The country’s vulnerable infrastructure raised concerns of cholera spread, a lack of clean water, and broken networks of transport and communication. Based on their experiences after the 2010 catastrophic earthquake, this disaster would likely put even more children at risk.
My work began when I was contacted by the organization's Chief Operating Officer to draft a press release in order to tell the story of what the organization had accomplished in their relief efforts so far and how others could support the work that remained.
I worked with Restavek Freedom's staff to gather information and figures about their work towards relief so far and began to draft the press release to tell their story in an engaging way.
Restavek Freedom’s network of supporters were also a great benefit to the organization’s relief efforts. Staff reported many emails from donors, churches, and volunteer teams looking for opportunities to help. Through donations and volunteered time, the organization has been successful at delivering 40,000 pounds of food and 1,000 relief packs for families, digging two wells of clean drinkiing water, and creating access to temporary shelter for hundreds of local families.
While Restavek Freedom has contributed significantly to local relief efforts, its established mission is focused on advocacy for children in Haiti who have been put at risk by child slavery. The term Restavek refers to the complex issue of modern-day child slavery where children are sent to families to serve as unpaid, frequently mistreated domestic laborers.
In less than a week, I was able to submit my press release to Restavek Freedom to be disseminated through the organization's media channels and other external outlets. Restavek Freedom's staff was thankful for the story to have at their dispersal. The organization continued to see expanded interest from concerned supporters looking for further opportunities to help.
As more time passed after the earthquake, the organization further established itself as a leader in relief efforts around Port Salut. The surrounding community was able to slowly regain their connection and networks with guidance provided by the nonprofit.
The West African Cultural Arts Institute (WACAI) based in Eugene, Oregon is a grassroots nonprofit organization dedicated to connecting locals with the culture of West Africa. When I came into contact with the organization, it became clear that it was ran by high-performing individuals with strong ambitions, but they faced the same challenges many nonprofits do– limited funds and staff availability.
My team and I were asked to develop a strategic plan to identify and address WACAI's most pressing issues. After a site visit, a review of their materials, and a SWOT assessment, we realized the challenges we needed to solve were largely related to communication.
A community event hosted by WACAI
The organization had a strong reputation and positive responses from virtually all the community partners they've worked with, however much of the public did not understand their mission as an organization, and the lack of clarity was inhibiting their growth. Our next step was to conduct research in order to create a strategic plan that WACAI could use in their marketing moving forward.
My team and I spoke to dozens of stakeholders with ties to WACAI. This included past and current students, the organization's board of directors, schools they had partnered with, and other collaborators. We also spent time with the executive director to determine what was feasible within the organization's next several months.
A snippet of our strategic plan
We also began drafting a guide– a written out explanation of our findings and a user-friendly manual of what next steps could look like for the organization. We wanted to ensure that our strategic planning session could lead to action steps.
We developed three objectives, along with suggested tactics for WACAI to undertake–
1) Being present at public events and information sessions to provide broader audiences with more information about what the organization does. There are many in the Eugene area who would be attracted to the offer of a cultural exchange.
2) Create other fun events, like music or food festivals, in collaboration with other likeminded nonprofits. This would increase working partnerships and public visibility.
3) Use a team of volunteers to take advantage of social media and community based platforms for promoting WACAI's activities.
These, along with other suggestions, were outlined in a comprehensive 34 page guide that was presented to WACAI's executive director and governing board.
Cover page of our 34-page report
The organization remains a strong presence in the Eugene area and continues to thrive in its artistic programs. As it grows, it now looks to purchase land in Guinea that can be used for humanitarian purposes.
