GiveNOLA Day

GiveNOLA Day is the Greater New Orleans region’s (13-parishes in Southeast Louisiana) 24-hour giving day, presented by the Greater New Orleans Foundation. When I was the Communications & Public Affairs Manager, and as a contractor for a few more years, I led this initiative with strategic planning and organization, running stateside advertising and marketing campaigns, assisting in and creating nonprofit training materials, running point on integration with our technology partner (the amazing Neon One), and of course, design. Under my direction, and with the help of our amazing team - from 2019-2021, we raised helped our region’s nonprofit organizations raise a collective $21.1 million.

This day is promoted across the entire region, and a huge part of the marketing efforts fall on the shoulders of the individual nonprofits to tell their own stories. I created a wide range of marketing materials, social media graphics, printed and digital materials and templates, and merchandise such as t-shirts (one even got resized for Beignet the nutria!), training materials and toolkits, yard signs, masks, and stickers to help these often-small teams get the word out. I also launched social media nonprofit spotlights - posts that went up at regular intervals to tell the stories of some of our region’s strong organizations.

While nonprofits promote themselves, the Greater New Orleans Foundation puts their advertising focus into promoting the day. This advertising blitz lasted a month prior to the event and included paid digital advertising, traditional print advertising, radio and video PSAs, billboard, as well as earned media interviews and coverage.

The GiveNOLA Day Summary Reports were an idea that I had to have a tangible report (and, of course, digital versions for social media) that showed off the impact of the annual day to stakeholders such as Foundation board members, staff, donors, and sponsors as well as to provide insights to the participating nonprofit organizations that they could use to up their funding game.