This past weekend my group working for Safe Harbor organized a Domestic Violence Awareness event that took place on Homecoming day before the Clemson football game. I am proud to say that our efforts were a huge success! Our goal was to get every Homecoming float on Bowman field to incorporate a purple ribbon in their design. Every organization was very helpful and this goal was reached. We passed out ribbons on Bowman field and asked for donations on the day of Homecoming and this raised a large amount of awareness as well. We also asked people to "like" Safe Harbor on Facebook. This goal, although not as large, was also reached. During the football game halftime show, one float displayed a purple ribbon and a Safe Harbor banner that was seen throughout the stadium. We got outstanding responses from the staff at Clemson and from news outlets in the area. Everyone was very excited by our efforts and it was a great experience to see how much five students could accomplish. All in all, we had a great time introducing thew community to Safe Harbor and domestic violence month. We cannot wait to help Safe Harbor again in our other class projects for this semester.
After reading chapters 9 and 10 in Strategic Communications for Nonprofits I realized that we used the strategies the chapters suggest about selecting spokespeople and collaborating with others in order to accomplish goals. Since we are a nonprofit group, it was easy at first to want to allow all five of us in the group to email people and talk to all of the press. We learned fast that it was necessary to have one person in charge of press releases and press contact information. For this reason, Erin took charge of our releases to the public and took phone calls when they came in. She even spoke on a radio station in the area. Luckily, our chosen spokesperson was both efficient in her press releases and great at interviews! Erin was the main face of our campaign to raise awareness during Homecoming. Hope played the behind the scenes role of helping Erin organize contacts and writing press releases. In a way, I was also a secondary spokesperson to the float community on Bowman. I made myself the main contact when organizations had questions about putting a purple ribbon design on their floats, and I sent out emails to all the organizations asking for their participation. This took a lot of the load off of Erin and allowed us to organize tasks efficiently. We also designated one person, Austin, as Julie's main contact so that she would not get overwhelmed with emails and phone calls during the week of Homecoming. We did not have much training for spokespeople in this scenario, but in the future I would use many of the interviewing tips described in chapter 9.
We did not exactly have partnerships per se, as chapter 10 describes, but we had the opportunity to collaborate with a number of organizations. This helped raise awareness to more than just our class, and it made others realize the importance of raising awareness about domestic violence. Our main collaboration was with the organizations building floats on Bowman field. We described our cause and made sure that each group understood what contribution they would be making by putting a purple ribbon on their floats. They all agreed it was a great cause and we were happy to work with them. Most groups were from the Greek community, so they had previous positive influence on Clemson's campus which meant we were collaborating with credited groups. This is important because we wanted people to take our cause seriously. There is also a sorority on campus, AXO, that supports Safe Harbor as part of their philanthropy efforts. This group expressed to us that they would love to collaborate with our efforts on another project in the future. We were so grateful to have so much support from these groups, and it was because of them that our turnout was so amazing!
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