WRAP AND ROLL
It’s been a while since we posted last. Sorry, there were a lot of things going on. We completed the 25K challenge, and are now in the midst of registering the AA as a formal entity. There’s quite a story to go through so let’s dive right in.
FUNDRAISING
We started the 25K fundraising challenge around January. It wasn’t until the Chinese New Year dinner held by the Alumni Office that the word got out. A giving.sg page was set up to facilitate the donations, and the fundraising team was given the task of, well, raising the funds. There are certain decisions we made, and actions we took, which probably require some clarification on first viewing, so let’s try answering some of these questions.
Why we didn’t solicit corporate donations
The challenge put forth by our anonymous donor, was to raise 25K. We debated internally, and the idea of soliciting corporate donations was floated around. But there are a couple of reasons we didn’t go down that path.
Firstly, the anonymous donor wanted this to be an alumni effort. Their goal was to catalyse the formation of the association, and for it to be a sort-of rallying cry for the alumni to work together. Approaching corporate donors would have defeated the purpose of bringing the alumni together to work on something.
More important though, is the fact that large donations tend to come with strings attached. Without a formal association in place, and no leadership structure, the responsibility of the attached strings is in limbo. We could have done it, but the risk is too great. A bad name for the AA so early (before formalisation!) would be a hole too deep to dig ourselves out of.
A hindering factor to our fundraising was the fact that the entire project was scoped out without Alumni involvment. We were involved at the point of launch, handed a set of targets, and sequentially found out about the constraints of the project along the way, one being that Corporate Donations are discouraged. Any future fundraisers must be fully scoped with Alumni invloved, followed by a detailed strategy planning for implementation, before they are launched. Our launch was pre-mature, and this handicapped us to an extent.
How we did our outreach
There were a few ways in which the outreach for fundraising was done. We tried traditional and non-traditional means of reaching out to potential donors, and the effort put into this is what led to us managing to reach our goal.
The primary means of outreach was social media. The main reason behind setting up the instagram account was the fundraiser, since we felt that constant non-direct reminders were required. The account was used to post information on the purpose and mechanisms of donations, along with periodical stories from individual donors. The account, along with this blog, were our main information caches for potential donors. We definitely could have done more, but with a smaller team, we had limited hands on deck.
The secondary means of outreach was an updated form of cold calling. We have a large repo of phone numbers of the alumni community, and we took it on ourselves to send personal message reminders to the members of our batches. This method, while quite effort intensive, had the effect of both reminder and barometer. We were able to quickly gauge the response, based on the replies we received, encourage our peers to make donations with a personal touch, and immediately answer any questions they had.
With a larger team, and a more rigorous strategy, the primary method should suffice for a small to medium size fundraiser, especially considering how the size of the alumni community will keep growing. But its good to know that the secondary method is so effective as a backup.
How we got to the magic number
With around 2 weeks left in the fundraising timeline, there was about 13K raised on the giving.sg page. 13K in a span of 3–4 months! We had a couple of weeks to nearly double that. It was at this point that we went into overdrive, sending personal messages, and constantly reminding our friends to donate.
June 30th rolled around, and we kept refreshing the donation page. We had done all we could have, and it was now down to our alumni to step up. And they didn’t disappoint. By the end of the day we had crossed our goal by a long way, raising 32K. The sudden uptick was a bit of surprise, albeit a pleasant one.
“What is this for?”, is the first question most people have, when asked to make a donation for a cause they’re hearing about for the first time. “Till when is this for?”, is one of the first questions people have, for a fundraiser they are being reminded about. Turns out that though most people did have an intention to donate, they didn’t act on it early. Donors tend to procrastinate, and a reminder close to the deadline is sometimes all it takes to tip them towards donating.
A good lesson for future fundraisers: expect an uptick towards the end, provided you send your donors a personal reminder at the end, and keep them aware of your project. Both types of reminders are important for this to work. If your donors haven’t been seeing constant reminders of the campaign, i.e. our instagram posts, they’ll forget all about it and might not donate come deadline day.
Wrapping Up
This fundraiser was an interesting experience to say the least. Being a team of rookies, it was tough for us to predict the impact of our ‘strategies’. Since most of these were planned and implemented after launch, they weren’t as well scoped out as they could have been. We were occassionally over-ambitious, leading us to overcomplicate the messaging of the campaign, our detriment. Building on one story (objective), and always aligning every communication with this story, would have no doubt improved our outreach.
On the positive side, we identified effective communication channels, and are confident on what will work for future fundraisers. Any future fundraisers will be scoped out by the Association, with a clear strategy and division of roles from early on. We managed to work our way through this campaign, constantly trying new ideas, and are happy to say it was a success. It wouldn’t have been possible without the effort of the amazing team, the ever supportive alumni and advancement offices, and of course the generous alumni. This success is all of ours.
FORMALISATION
With a significant sum of money endowed with the school in the name of the Alumni, its time the association is registered as a formal entity. Registering will allow us to be the official alumni representing body for SUTD, work with the school on alumni & student issues, and use the funds which have been raised.
Registering a society with the registry is a relatively straightforward process, administratively. But we wished to first understand from our Alumni community, the kind of association they would like to be a part of.
Alumni Feedback
What objectives do we want for the association? Who should be our most important stakeholder? What should the membership structure look like? These are questions that we had when drafting the constitution for the association. We realised that since this is an association for the alumni, the community should also have a say in what the association is. With this in mind we decided to hold a townhall in July. It would be a gathering of alumni, where we would present to them various options for the questions above, and hear their feedback.
The townhall was split into the various sections of the constitution; Objectives, Leadership, Membership, Elections, and Amendments. We prepared presentations for each of these topics, with different paradigms for each, and the audience members were encouraged to chime in with their opinions. We also set up a voting mechanism whereby the audience could vote on the ideas presented, and give us their preference for the objectives, structure, and functions of the AA.
To summarise, the feedback we got aligned very well with our own ideas of what the association should be. There were a few surprises, and suggestions from the audience that we hadn’t even considered. All-in-all, we had a good foundation of community sentiment on which to draft the constitution.
Rolling on
Disclaimer: What follows is a description of works in progress. Minor things might change but we’ll keep this blog updated with anything major that happens.
Our consitution is drafted and 90% ready to go. We are currently waiting for SUTD’s legal department to clear our usage of the SUTD name, and allow us to list SUTD as our current place of business. Once that’s done, we will be able to register as the official alumni association of SUTD.
Once that’s settled, we will be able to enter into a formal agreement with SUTD for the usage of the endowed fund’s returns, closing the chapter on the 25K challenge. However, there are still a lot of things for us to do.
We believe that the current IT infrastructure is inadequate and inefficient for Alumni usage. On top of this, the association requires its own resources. We need to develop our brand, figure out how to bring our alumni into the association membership (and give them a reason to join), figure out our finances, and settle on a few key goals for the association to have.
None of these are easy to solve. Especially for a group that is juggling these tasks on top of full time jobs. So we need all the help we can get. If you can spare a few hours a week, and are interested in making a better world by alumni, please contact us via our instagram or let us know in the comments below.
