Outside The Bowl - Nonprofit Organization
Marketing Intern
Outside the Bowl is a nonprofit organization that is based in Oceanside, California, but serves in several different countries. I was immediately drawn to the mission of this company and feel beyond grateful that I was able to be apart of the team for over two years.
In response to Jesus’ command to feed the hungry, Outside the Bowl is dedicated to eliminating physical and spiritual starvation in impoverished communities by building Super Kitchens, and working with established community partners to serve hot, nutritious meals to those who need them most. - Outside the Bowl Mission Statement |
year one.
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Each year Outside the Bowl hosts a gala to help raise money for the upcoming year, the normal attendance is between 200-250 donors. Originally I was brought in to help lead and gather the auction donations in preparation for that night. To gain the amount of donations needed for the auction, I spent many hours on the phone communicating with hundreds of potential donors, as well as meeting with others in person. This communication with the community and volunteer team led to over $200,000 in donations.
year two.
The next year looked a little different. Instead of focusing on events, I focused more on their media accounts. Wanting to have a central question for this next season of internship I asked myself, how can Outside the Bowl improve the way they market to accurately spread the word of their impact to more people? My goal was to revamp the marketing outlets Outside the Bowl had and find new avenues to discover donors. One of the most important things to first understand was who their donor base was, meaning I needed to find the demographics of the people that followed them on social media and of their donor base. To do this, I first looked in to the OTB Instagram and Facebook. The nice thing about these two apps was that it made it easy for me to get things like gender, age, location, types of posts interacted with, and the most active time of the followers. From this, I created a spreadsheet so that this information could be compared and evaluated. I could also analyze previous posts so I could predict when a photo may get the most likes. To get an accurate description of the existing donor base I made a donor survey. I used this as an opportunity to not only gain analytics of the average donor, but to also understand what kind of content they were most interested in. The survey was sent out to all the monthly donors and as an incentive to complete the survey, the completion of the survey was a ticket for a raffle. Once I created a profile of someone affiliated with OTB, the information could be used to accurately market to the existing followers/donors and to gain new ones. Having this information in mind, I used it to change social media posts as well as the content being distributed pertaining to upcoming events and newsletters.
Another large part of my result included A/B testing. Although A/B testing is normally vital to improving donor engagement and response my results proved to be inconclusive. To conduct this kind of research I created a campaign for the month of February called "Served with love." I structured this campaign to serve multiple purposes. The first being strictly data collection to see what kinds of images the followers engaged the most with. Having this data could transform the way OTB ran its media accounts. The second purpose was to spark social media unlike the company had ever done before. Normally their campaigns were sent out via email and were then promoted on Instagram, FaceBook, etc. I wanted to see what would happen if we led the campaign through these accounts; how would the engagement differ. Lastly, it was to spread love to children for Valentine's day. By raising a little extra money we would be able to send extra meals during the season of giving. Below is the logo I made for the campaign along with some of the posts and Instagram stories I created.
For more detail and the findings of my research feel free to click the link below.