Fundraising – Alison Cantor

Sister District is a political organization aimed at electing Democrats to state legislatures. They hired me in December 2017 for a two month contract to give their social media a boost so that the founders could focus on their longer term strategic goals. I was responsible for generating relevant content for Twitter, Facebook and Medium in accordance with the Sister District calendar and other current events. I monitored and responded to social media messages and posts, and worked to accurately convey the voice and spirit of the organization.

In those two months, I promoted Sister District’s mission and amplified their reach. I grew their Twitter following by roughly 3,000 (from ~9k to ~12k followers) and sent approximately 1,700 tweets. I also expanded their Facebook audience by 1,500 new page likes, with 60 posts.

Fundraising was one of the organization’s outreach goals; Sister District was running a crowdfunding campaign at the time to fund their operations. I helped the organization raise $40,000 during my two month contract, surpassing their funding goal.

During this time, Sister District was also focused on one special election in Florida’s state legislature, backing Margaret Good’s campaign. With my help promoting this endorsement through social media channels, the organization raised more than $30,000 to support her race. She won her election, thereby staving off a Republican supermajority in Florida!

In 2016, Alex Steffen and I produced a three-night talk series called The Heroic Future. The talks were filmed and later edited into a single video for general audiences.

We successfully crowdfunded the project with a Kickstarter that generated more than $75,000. With Alex’s voiceover and some creative direction, I created the Kickstarter’s promotional video. I also edited the page content, gathered press mentions, and followed up on backer leads. Check out the page here and watch the video below.

Once the series was funded, I shifted my focus to planning and producing the three nights by zeroing in on the following tasks:

securing a venue
hiring a film crew
renting equipment
ensuring venue compliance
recruiting volunteers
designing programs
selling additional tickets
creating a scholarship ticket ticket program and offering tickets to applicants

By managing all these details, I enabled Alex to focus almost exclusively on content. The three nights ran smoothly and brought together hundreds of attendees.

After the final curtain, I again shifted my focus, this time to working with a professional video editor to cut the six hours of raw footage from the series into something digestible for a general audience. I contracted this editor for the project, and worked with Alex to select highlights from the three nights and slice them into a cohesive flow. The resulting video can be found here.