The work we have been entrusted to lead.

When I came into the work, there was no true ownership of Giving Tuesday and no intentional online presence built to move donors to give. Giving happened, but it happened on memory and habit. Longstanding donors gave because they always had, not because anything connected their gift to a story, a cause, or an impact they could feel.

And around Giving Tuesday itself, the organization was reacting to what other nonprofits were doing on social media rather than running a strategy of its own. In a season when every organization is asking, House of Ruth Maryland needed to be more than a familiar name on the list. It needed to be the top choice and the right choice.

I rebuilt the campaign around one conviction: donors shouldn't give out of practice alone. They should give through connection, emotion, and impact. So I led both the marketing and the story selection itself, choosing the survivor stories that would resonate most deeply with our donors and carrying them across email and social storytelling on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

The centerpiece was making impact visible. We shared a survivor's journey on our website through video, walking donors through the actual experience of a client from the first phone call all the way through the life of our services, so a donor could see exactly what their gift made possible: safe shelter, housing, clothing, child services, full wraparound support, and ultimately a fresh start. A donation stopped being an abstraction. It became a person's next chapter.

The creative direction was deliberately simple. Everything stayed in the organization's brand colors, because our donors had spent years building recognition with that palette, and I wanted every touchpoint to register as House of Ruth on sight. And the channel plan included everyone: website, social, and email for our digital audience, and printed mailers for our older donors, because a campaign about belonging can't afford to leave its most faithful givers out of the story.

Then I made the timing decisions I'm most proud of, and they worked at two levels. At the season level, I designed a four-week ramp-up to Giving Tuesday, opening giving up to a month early so the campaign spanned at least two pay periods instead of one day at the end of a spending week. Donors could plan their generosity and give from abundance, not from what was left after Black Friday and Cyber Monday. At the paycheck level, I scheduled our donation reminders for Mondays and Thursdays, timed to catch donors at the top of a pay period and again a few days later, once their responsibilities were handled and they knew what remained. We met people where their money actually lived.

And the work extended well beyond a single giving day. It started with the organization's flagship Domestic Violence Awareness Month campaign, which I marketed, managed, and delivered across October, awareness month itself, alongside a digital toolkit. Planning that month was the impetus for the Giving Tuesday strategy, and the calendar did the rest of the work for us: October built the awareness and told the stories, the four-week ramp opened right as awareness month closed, and Giving Tuesday became the culmination of a season rather than a standalone ask. I led the organization's year-round digital giving efforts with that same arc in mind.

I carried this as, essentially, a one-person marketing department and publicist, leading strategy, story selection, creative, channel planning, and partner outreach to make sure the campaign showed up everywhere our donors did.

The results were specific and measurable. The flagship Domestic Violence Awareness Month campaign and digital toolkit generated $124,684 in donations. The four-week Giving Tuesday ramp-up raised $90,013 in its initial tally, with giving still climbing beyond it, more than quadrupling a campaign that had brought in approximately $20,000 the year before I joined.

And the year-round digital giving efforts I led contributed to more than $1.6 million in total fundraising by the end of 2024, funding that translated directly into services, shelter, and advocacy for survivors and their families. Just as important, Giving Tuesday went from a reactive scramble to an owned, story-driven campaign with a repeatable structure, a model built to outlast any single giving season.