Giving Tuesday Campaign
During my internship with Softerware, I worked on the Giving Tuesday Campaign for the Donor Perfect brand. Giving Tuesday is the start of an important season for fundraisers, so our campaign focused on providing information on how to maximize fundraising. I was the primary designer working on this project, and was responsible for the overall branding of the campaign. I also designed most of the individual pieces needed, including blog posts, banner ads, PDFs, social media posts and videos.
Role
Lead Designer
Key Skills
Branding Design
Graphic & Web Design
Timeline
5 months
Theme
For the theming, I wanted to play with colored shapes. The Giving Tuesday brand uses a heart shape often and DonorPerfect uses overlapping rectangles, so it seemed like a good mix of the two while allowing for some play. I experimented with some different ideas and tended to push the brand further than we would generally go.
The original mood board, showcasing a few ideas for the campaign.
I brought these ideas to the marketing team and their feedback provided direction for me moving forward. Overall, the team felt that the use of rounded hearts and squares provided the best combination of DonorPerfect and Giving Tuesday.
The squares were especially important as the written content of this campaign focused on tasks different people should complete. Square checkboxes were incorporated throughout.
The team really liked patterns for the unique look it provides, as neither brands feature a pattern. I leaned into this idea with repeating squares in other areas.
Updated mood board, with the final Giving Tuesday style: pattern, rows of squares and hearts and outlines.
With these refinements done, I began to work on some of the basic pieces of the campaign. This included role cards, timelines, header images and more. For these pieces, I worked more closely with our content writer to ensure that the design and copy fit together well.
Deliverables
The campaign included blog posts, social post, emails, ads, PDFs, videos and more. I designed a number of these pieces. The following are three that I found the most interesting and important.
Cheatsheet
The campaign centers around this cheatsheet, which is a collection of tips and advice in a printable PDF format. I used Adobe InDesign for the first time and struggled at first to figure out a new software and medium. I did my best to lay out what I could and then got advice from another designer. This strategy worked well and is something I used throughout the campaign.
Blog Posts
This campaign also included a series of blog posts that accompany the cheatsheet. There needed to be consistency across 9 different posts, so I looked first at the copy to understand what elements were needed and how much space I had. The role cards, for example, were oriented upright on the cheatsheet. But to make it work on the blog posts, I shifted to a landscape orientation to better fit the space.
Video
The final piece was a video, designed in AfterEffects, that shows off features in our product. I began by planning each shot and animating the simplest ones. I have some animation experience, so I understood the concepts but not how to achieve them in AfterEffects. For this, I watched videos or asked the design team for advice. This was the most intimidating piece of the campaign, but planning helped to limit that.
Results
In the first week of the Giving Tuesday Cheatsheet’s release and accompanying materials, there were 878 downloads and 114 conversions, a huge increase from 2021’s 98 downloads and 4 conversions. To date, the cheatsheet has had 800+ conversions!
Reflection
Acquiring new skills is essential for continuous learning and successful projects.
This project revealed that acquiring new skills is a skill in itself, and one that I am proud to have. Throughout the process, I was often working in mediums I have little or no experience in. I discovered the importance of adaptability, persistence, and the ability to absorb new information quickly. This campaign served as a reminder that the ability to learn and adapt quickly is perhaps one of the most essential skills I can have.
