Catholic Charities of Santa Rosa
client
Catholic Charities of Santa Rosa
Outcome
Increased giving for the Back to School Campaign by 67%
services
Communications Management
date
2019
Catholic Charities is the North Bay’s leading nonprofit in tackling poverty by providing over 20 programs of service to nearly 80,000 people each year. Catholic Charities leads the charge in supporting people experiencing homelessness, provides access to affordable housing, immigration services, senior services, disaster recovery, and more. This independent 501(c)(3) serves people of all faiths, races, gender, or sexual orientation, providing support to those living in Sonoma, Napa, Mendocino, Lake, Humboldt, and Del Norte counties.
The Problem
CCSR’s Development Team was bootstrapped, overburdened, and lacked guidance. They needed support with conceptualizing high-level strategy, effectively rolling out a rebrand, creating effective fundraising campaigns, building better internal communications, digital communications, and content production. With their work becoming highly politicized and polarizing among their audiences and donor base, they were concerned about their stance in their messaging.
The Solution
- Created a high-level road map for the Development Team, Communications Strategy, and Content Calendar
- Created concept, design, and copy for a variety of externally facing documents and marketing assets according to Communications strategy
- Trained Volunteer Manager and Capital Campaign employees on Social Media marketing and email marketing
- Rolled out organization-wide rebrand
- Cross-trained various departments on the power and necessity of story capture, storybanking, and photobanks
- Ran website audit
- Ran audience surveys and audience mapping to increase understanding and redefine donation “buckets”
The Outcome
Enabled the organization to meet its revenue, advocacy, and awareness goals. Through new tactics, I increased giving for the Back to School Campaign by 67% year over year through digital campaigns and Direct Mailings. I also helped to increase advocacy and awareness around CCSR’s Immigration Services, resulting in statements to the press, the creation of an internal advocacy committee educating audiences on trainings and services, and refined targeting for donors and audiences. Trainings also increased interdepartmental buy-in for support in story collection and content creation, bolstering confidence and moral around the organization’s mission internally.
