Nonprofit Leadership Event

Foley Fellow: Madison Mancino

Team: Marissa Marchese, Cat McMullan, Anneliese Ashley, Gianna Furfari, and Caroline Scallion

Panelists: Stephanie Ashley, Lexi Mignogna, and Stacey Torrance

Community Partner

Our community partner was Beautiful Social Research Collaborative. The Beautiful Social Research Collaborative is a program through Saint Joseph’s University that helps non-profits in different capacities based on their needs. Beautiful Social’s mission is to co-create with community partners who are driven to make transformational change, while also giving students at St. Joe's real world experience of working within the non-profit and communications world. The program mainly serves the Philadelphia area and has worked on over 100 projects to date.

Design Question

Our Design Question is, “How do we create an event that is interesting and inclusive for all students on campus?” Following a lack of interest and poor attendance from last semester’s event, we wanted students to feel excited and engaged when learning about our event. We closely considered our panelists choices, the event location, and what food and amenities we planned to provide. The key outcome we were looking to achieve was to create an event that is inclusive, interesting and well attended by Saint Joseph’s students. In order to achieve this outcome, we chose a diverse group of speakers so the event appealed to everyone. We designed multiple advertisements and pushed the event on social media and on campus through flyers. Although we do not have a community partner, we discussed our design question as a group, and discussed potential options based on our potential attendees. When considering what our potential audience may look like, the group mentioned that inviting a mix of panelists would appeal to more people. We also mentioned the way the event will be delivered, online or in-person.

Strategic Thinking

In developing the event this semester, our group decided to reimagine the previous target audience and advertising strategy. Instead of our event focusing on women representing non-profit organizations, we expanded our panelist population to include men. Thus, our event concentrated on general leaders in non-profit organizations. We believed that by broadening our panelists, our audience size would increase We invited three panelists from a variety of backgrounds to speak at our event: Stacey Torrance, founder of Free Mind Entrepreneur Network, Stephanie Dunn Ashley CEO American Red Cross- Metro New York North Chapter, and Lexi Mignogna, Director of Marketing and Fundraising of No Limits Media. Our non-profit panelists represented entrepreneurs, CEOs, and recent graduates of Saint Joseph’s University. We wanted a diverse representation of non-profits in order to encapsulate these organizations in the most complete way.

Our group used Canva to design flyers that would be posted on social media, campus televisions, and campus bulletin boards. We developed a clear design aesthetic and color scheme in order to make our event recognizable. By advertising multiple flyers on a variety of platforms, our group was able to reach a large population of SJU students and faculty.

Using an event marketing study, How to Successfully Promote Events, Festivals, Conventions, and Expositions, by Leonard H. Hoyle, CAE, CMP, our group defined our “Why,” “Who,” “When,” “Where,” and “What” within our Canva flyers. In order to “emphasize the benefits” (the “Why and “What”) of our event, we titled the event “The Truth About Non-Profits.” Our title implies there are misconceptions about non-profit organizations and there is value in understanding the realities about them. We explicitly invited students and faculty to join to address our “Who.” We decided to host the event in the middle of the week between 12:20 pm and 1:35 pm at an on-campus site. This would allow students to conveniently pop in during a break in classes.

All in all, our reimagination of the event and effective advertising led our group to a successful event.

Co-creation

Our group and The Beautiful Research Collaborative co-created by acknowledging what did and didn’t work in previous years events to work towards a more successful event this year. We collaborated as a group to make important decisions regarding whether or not we should include a virtual element for those who could not attend in person, and most importantly, deciding to make the event inclusive of men and women rather than only women. We worked together to formulate a list of panelists that would be able to attend, questions for them, and graphics to promote the event. We each had our own roles in the planning process, but ultimately collaborated together to successfully execute the event.

Results

We felt that our event was very successful. We had 45 people attend which was a 78% increase in attendance in comparison to the prior year. Once our panelists were done speaking we put up a QR code for the audience to scan to give us feedback on the event. 23 people participated in this survey and it was very beneficial. This was very helpful for us because we can see what we did well and what can be done better next time. Overall, many people enjoyed our event and learned something new. At the end of our event we wanted to allow the participants to ask the panelists questions. We wanted to give the audience the opportunity to participate. Our goal was to make this an interactive experience for the audience. Many people asked the panelists questions so we feel that it was very successful. We were able to increase attendance through planning strategically and advertising our event early. We spent plenty of time advertising on Instagram, the TVs in Campion, and flyers all around campus. We feel that we did a great job of reaching a larger audience.