I just spoke with an intern journalist at the Record-Journal. He said, ‘That is so great!” three times. And, it truly is (year 14). I resume this post after year 15.
#Thegreatgive is hosted annually by the Community Foundation of Greater New Haven (CFGNH). It incentivizes individual giving. It has a 2-fold purpose: to 1) raise visibility and 2) resources for local nonprofits. The people at CFGNH know their Greater New Haven community. They listen to feedback. Over the years, changes have been implemented such as the time of year the campaign happens and the minimum gift amount (now $5).
If you are connected across the community, it can feel like another campaign season as your mailbox fills with requests for support and if we have done our job stories about what support means. This 36-hour online giving event presents over 500 local nonprofits to the community. For 8 weeks before platform activation, the CFGNH team prepares nonprofit teams.
I have been a donor to several nonprofits since its inception. When the WPAA-TV Board decided it was okay to solicit gifts from the community, my role expanded from individual donor to include WPAA-TV promotion. For years the thinking which I embraced was “Let us not compete for funds concurrent with those we serve.” Our initial foray into the individual donor space was to fund our colloabrations with others. To futher mitigate this sense of competition, WPAA-TV initiated a collaborative approach to giving with several nonprofits in wown. We dedicated development resources to collaborating nonprofits. The little we raised covered the cost of providing our services. The win for us was relationships and more video content. In year 14 and 15, WPAA-TV administered the social media and public presence of the collaborators under the hashtag #thegreatgive06492. We solicited matching funds, designed promotional material and sponsored a community launch event.
Soliciting Perspective WPAA-TV
For many years, WPAA-TV focused on time and talent rather than cash donations: we had a building to renovate. When it was time to change our operations model from a hands-on board to governance, we began public solicitation of cash gifts and used the GreatGive platform. Our small community of users obliged and showed their appreciation giving the $25 minimum. However, our profile and social media outreach about the GreatGive did not elicit any new community connections. Our best year was when we committed to giving all donations to an 80-person film project using our space. It was our best year but still negligible. We did not actively solicit during 2020 however, our inner circle did contribute with the hope of a random drawing prize. It did not happen.
Soliciting Perspective Wallingford
I observed that WPAA-TV was not the only nonprofit failing to thrive. Initially, I thought it might be just my free speech nonprofit being unsuccessful as donors had both direct services and arts organizations asking for help. But the GreatGive was not reaching its great potential in Wallingford. The marketing by CFGNH