CLIENTS & PROJECTS
Academy Night Live Watch Party, 2021
Produced a VIP experience for large sponsors as a part of this 16-camera socially-distanced virtual gala that raised $400,000 for the Chicago Academy for the Arts.
EVANSTON CASE
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Served as the Director of Development, securing funding (through grants, events, major gifts, and individual giving campaigns) since 2022.
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Over the last two years, we have revamped their individual giving program, with attention towards creating regularly scheduled campaigns (spring and fall) to help with yearly cashflow. We also create a campaign template that the organization can use to easily personalize appeals, creating custom levels for different levels of donors and to create a more friendly approach to individual giving.
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Working with content from their original Wix website, we did a light rebrand of the Evanston CASE (community, advocacy, support and education) website.
We added in new graphics, created a new palette, put in some edited (to match their new palette) stock photography, gave them a new payment processor and a much more modern donation interface, and overhauled their back end to make it easy for staff to make edits.
FOOTHILLS FOOD BANK
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We collaborated with Foothills Food Bank, located in Phoenix, AZ, to support the development of an individual giving program. This organization had not previously employed a development professional and had been successfully fundraising, including running a capital campaign, with limited resources.
Our team conducted a data analysis covering individual giving from 2016 to 2024, which helped them identify giving patterns, create a list of their top 100 major donor prospects, and recognize their most loyal donors.
Since our partnership, they successfully completed their capital campaign for a new building and have appointed their first Innovation and Development Director.
EVANSTON JUNETEENTH PARADES (2024 & 2025)
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In 2024, we helped Evanston Present & Future and Mari Enterprises with logistics, sponsorships, and graphic for the Juneteenth Parade. We helped close $20,000 of sponsorships in a little over six weeks, coordinated communications, designed collateral (t-shirts, banners, social media assets), and staged the parade, working with the City of Evanston, civic divisions of local government (police, streets & sanitation, etc.), and more than 40 local businesses and organizations.
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In late 2024, as per our suggestion for the sponsorship timeline, we started soliciting last year’s sponsors and building a pipeline for the 2025 parade. from December 2024 - February 2025, we sent four rounds of solicitations, built the 2025 presentation decks for Evanston City Council & Sponsors, updated the website, and closed 25% of the amount of 2024 sponsorships six months earlier than in previous years. This included renewing 12 from last year, 1 lapsed, and 3 new sponsors.
THE CHICAGO READER
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We served as an interim Director of Development immediately preceding and during the first six months of the Chicago Reader’s transition from for-profit to non-profit newsroom. In this role, we built their individual giving program, created them a Salesforce database, and conceived, planned and executed their 50th Anniversary “Un-Gala” (pictured above at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.)
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Raised $100,000 and attracted more than 1,000 guests to the Museum of Contemporary Art for the Chicago Reader’s 50th Anniversary Un-Gala. This event included a whole museum takeover with music, dance, djs, theater, performance art and variety entertainment from the Best of Chicago. (Pictured above: Stage setup on the second floor and DJ booth on the third floor balcony, early in the evening.)
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Ran the newsmagazine’s first-ever nonprofit individual giving campaign that generated $60K for the Chicago Reader over six weeks.
WEB CLIENTS
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Working with content from their original Wix website, we did a light rebrand of the Evanston CASE (community, advocacy, support and education) website.
We added in new graphics, created a new Palette, put in some edited (to match their new palette) stock photography, gave them a new payment processor and a much more modern donation interface, and overhauled their back end to make it easier for staff to make edits.
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Mo Maids is a queer-owned Chicago-based personal maid service. They needed a complete revamp of their Wix website to make it more professional, easier to use, and cleaner. We worked with them to find stock photos they loved (bright and clean to match their cleaning aesthetic) , to write more effective copy for them, and to make the site easier for customers to book their services.
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We built the website for artsy Twin-Peaks-inspired Brooklyn-Based band F*ck You, Tammy! site from scratch in 2020.
In 2024, we built out more functionality and updated their photos, merch, upcoming shows, video content, and past show posters sections. We made the site extremely easy to update so that they could DIY it in the future.
This was a job with extremely tight artistic parameters, since the aesthetics of the site needed to closely align with the band’s aesthetics. -
We built this website from scratch for this Brooklyn-based moving company (the “emotionally available rock & roll movers”) in 2020. They had intricate needs around building out their moving forms and client quote pipeline. The forms and systems we built for them are still in use today.
We had several problems over the years where their domain name expired and we worked with ionos,com to resolve the issue, despite not being on retainer anymore.
HUMBOLDT PARK HEALTH FOUNDATION
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Worked with the team at the Humboldt Park Health Foundation to create their 2023 Annual Report. Spent eight weeks interviewing staff, taking photos, writing copy, and designing and editing this 44 page book.