Girls on the Run of South Central Texas
A Fundraising Plan Built to Last
The Challenge:
Girls on the Run of South Central Texas works to inspire girls to be joyful, healthy, and confident, using a fun, experience-based curriculum that integrates running. The team envisions a world where every girl knows and activates her limitless potential and is free to pursue her dreams boldly. A small staff team makes that vision real by working closely with a board of directors and hundreds of volunteer coaches, together creating opportunities for young girls to unleash their full potential and lead healthy, active lives.
Girls on the Run of Bexar County had a mission that resonated and a volunteer network hundreds-strong, but its fundraising hadn’t kept pace with its ambitions. There was no diversified fundraising strategy or annual plan to guide the year, no year-end appeal had ever been attempted, and the donor database wasn’t organized in a way that could support a real individual giving strategy. With a lean staff team, any plan also had to be one the organization could actually execute, using staff, volunteers, and board members.
Our Approach:
Over a nine-month partnership in 2019, we built Girls on the Run of South Central Texas a comprehensive fundraising plan aimed at financial growth and long-term sustainability, and then worked alongside them to build the infrastructure needed to execute it. This implementation aspect of our work sets us apart; we don’t just deliver a plan and walk away; we work with you to activate it, refine as we go, and ensure success.
What does that look like? For Girls on the Run, it was one-on-one guidance with staff and board leadership on diversified fundraising strategies, board engagement activities, and running the annual plan day-to-day, plus new strategies that put their volunteer coaches to work as grassroots fundraisers and storytellers. We also built them a corporate sponsor packet with a menu of giving options, so their team could make strategic, professional corporate asks.
Girls on the Run had never told the stories of the women who coach for them, even though those volunteers are the heart of the mission. We developed a set of interview questions and spoke with more than 15 coaches to surface their stories and passion for the organization. Those conversations gave us the messaging, the stories, and the heart to fuel real storytelling, starting with their first-ever year-end appeal.
We helped them develop the concept for that appeal and managed the entire process ourselves, from writing content grounded in the coaches’ own words to getting it into mailboxes. To make individual giving strategies possible, we also started on the donor database: assessing the system in place, helping the team use the technology to its fullest, and working hand-in-hand to tag and segment their contacts so our fund development recommendations could actually run. Once the donor database was in shape, we did the same for their email database and ensured the two systems were “talking to each other”.
Along the way, we worked with their volunteer marketing team to audit their social media channels, celebrating what was already working and offering recommendations where it wasn’t. We built them a dashboard and a system for collecting monthly analytics, along with content strategy recommendations, so the team could see for themselves what was landing and what needed to change.
From Our Partner:
“Thank you so much! It IS exciting to see these ideas come to life! This would not have happened at all without you and the (amazing) work you are doing. There are a million and one “Good Idea Fairies” out there in our community who say, “Hey! I have an idea – have you thought of doing X?” And there is simply no capacity for “doing” X. So thank you for creating that capacity now and for the future.
– MINKA MISANGYI, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, GIRLS ON THE RUN OF SOUTH CENTRAL TEXAS
The Outcome:
Girls on the Run of South Central Texas now has a comprehensive fundraising plan designed for financial growth and long-term sustainability, along with staff and board leaders who’ve been coached to execute it themselves. Their volunteer coaches were engaged as grassroots fundraisers and storytellers, turning an existing network of hundreds into an active part of the fundraising strategy. Their first-ever year-end appeal went from concept to mailboxes, giving them a template to build on every year going forward. Their donor and email databases were cleaned, tagged, and segmented, ready to support individual giving strategy long after our partnership ended. Their social media channels have been audited and strengthened, and a new analytics dashboard gives the team a monthly system for tracking what’s working. We were honored to work with Girls on the Run of Bexar County, and we left them with the plans, systems, and momentum to keep growing. We’ve stayed in touch with their team ever since, and we’ve loved cheering them on as they’ve grown and expanded from serving only Bexar County into Girls on the Run of South Central Texas, now reaching girls across 10 counties in the region.
