Tons of furniture go to the landfill every year, while thousands of families live in empty homes.
Through a grant-funded multi-channel marketing campaign, I helped double our donation intake from 300 to 600 tons per year by mobilizing donors.
Impact
Furniture donations increased by 300 tons (200%)
Volunteers increased by 600 (100%)
200 new furniture donors
421 additional homes furnished
2 new permanent staff positions funded
Background & Goals
Flourish’s biggest barrier to furnishing more homes was increasing furniture donations and volunteer force. We were a young nonprofit without widespread community awareness. We needed to differentiate ourselves from thrift stores by highlighting the direct connection between donations and families. In addition, we wanted to showcase our environmental sustainability and the fact that volunteers repaired and refurbished every donated item.
Results
I wrote and managed two consecutive grants from the Mid-America Regional Council Solid Waste Management District. The grants created two new staff positions, increasing organizational sustainability, and funded a multi-channel marketing campaign that I designed and executed.
The campaign doubled our furniture donation intake from 300 tons to 600 tons and grew our volunteer base from 300 to 1,000 volunteers over two years. The project broadened our awareness through a multi-channel marketing campaign that included three truck wraps, direct mail, social media advertisement, radio advertisement, and a billboard, which I was in charge of designing and executing.
The impact of the project was an increase of 421 homes furnished - changing an additional 800 lives per year.
Truck Wraps
Flourish offers a volunteer-run furniture pickup program. Volunteers drive a small fleet of box trucks to make regular trips to homes and businesses. The pickups range from single pieces in family’s garages to cleaning out multiple floors of a hotel. However, without branded vehicles, we were missing out on thousands of miles of visibility in the community. By designing and funding truck wraps for our entire fleet, I helped make every pickup count not only for the furniture we collected but for awareness raised. To date, the truck wraps have garnered millions of impressions across the Kansas City metro, taking advantage of the trucks as mobile billboards to raise awareness about our mission.
Using brand colors, impactful imagery, and direct messaging, I created a visual design that communicated our mission and how the public could get involved.
Radio Ad
We partnered with HotJamz 103, a radio station hosted a few blocks away from us in Grandview. As the oldest black-owned-and-run radio stations in the country, they were a perfect platform to reach our community. We created a 30-second ad focused on volunteer recruitment and furniture donations that ran for several weeks.
Billboard
We created a bus billboard focused on volunteer recruitment and furniture donations. We chose to work with the KCATA’s mobile bus billboard program to reach people all across the city, rather than one fixed area. Part of the proceeds from the wraps also helped support our city’s bus system.
Instead of using stock photos, I wanted to showcase actual Flourish volunteers. I chose five volunteer roles to highlight: woodworking, dish-packing, vacuuming, sewing, and showroom hosting. The left to right layout represents the series of hands that furniture goes through at Flourish: from being cleaned and repaired to going home with a Flourish guest. Every home takes an average of 25 volunteer hours to furnish and there are more than 30 unique volunteer jobs. Combined with simple, direct messaging the bus billboards communicated the wide range of opportunities at Flourish and the direct impact they have for families.
Direct Mail Campaign
Flourish was founded as a church ministry in Leawood, a suburb in Kansas City, Kansas. When the organization became an independent nonprofit, it relocated to Grandview, Missouri, a township across the metro region. In order to increase furniture donations, I conducted a direct mail campaign to surrounding zip codes in our neighborhood.
