Case Study

Housing Matters Development and Community Engagement

Thoughtful, solutions-oriented communications to drive a bold mission forward.

Before I started building the communications program at Housing Matters—the largest nonprofit working on homelessness in Santa Cruz County—I was leading the facilitation of renaming the organization. Once the new name and brand were in place, we got to work bringing year-round communications to a new level.

In an effort to combat the stigma that is so pervasive in this social issue, while modeling productive discussion of the issue, I emphatically directed the content into positive messages, and extended our communications plan to reach beyond the existing donor base.

In addition, realizing that donors need consistent stewardship in order to keep retention rates high, we focused on donor-centric content writing, impact-driven stats and infographics, and humanizing narratives about the nonprofit's clients, delivering meaningful content all year.

Housing Matters has wisely invested in building engagement in the local community, making the organization stand out among regional nonprofits. Going beyond the traditional nonprofit communications materials, I led the organization through building a suite of collateral and strategies that inspired, engaged, and drove action.

The process and some key components included the following:

• In addition to the standard donor stewardship materials—an annual report and newsletters—we created additional touchpoints throughout the year

• We revamped the organization’s major event—Soupline—to include a younger demographic, paving the way for the next wave of donors; our branding and promotional strategy was so successful, we were on track to sell out just a few weeks into event promotion

• After Soupline had to be canceled due to COVID, we immediately pivoted to fundraising for a COVID Emergency Response Fund, raising $450,000 on a $250,000 goal with a simple and targeted email series

• We built a community engagement program that consistently garnered participation from a wide variety of community members, many of whom converted into donors

• Thanks to year-round stewardship, our donor retention rate grew steadily year over year

• Our year-end fundraising campaign set new records each year

• We published a survey to hear community opinions on homelessness, hoping for the industry standard response rate of 1-3%; we had a 12% response rate among all recipient groups

• We created a variety of usable educational materials for community members to more effectively engage with the issue

The materials you see below include pre and during COVID contexts. Our strategies had to shift dramatically when the pandemic hit. Luckily, we had invested in building strong donor relationships up until that point, so we simply had to pivot our communications, but didn't lose any momentum.

The executive director saw the value of uplifting, proactive communications, and brought me in to build the communications department from the ground up. The investment paid off.

The work I did creating a strong communications program had a few goals:

• Support fundraising

• Grow base of supporters of Housing Matters so the community is more likely to say "yes" to local solutions to homelessness

• Position Housing Matters as the regional leader in solutions to homelessness

We successfully hit all our goals, and our KPIs throughout the years continued to reach higher and higher. Some of our results included:

• Grew fundraising significantly YoY (at least 20% each year)

• Doubled our email contact lists in 18 months

• Increased the number of media inquiries and consistently increased participation in our community engagement program

• Most recently, Housing Matters was able to get community support to build a large new permanent supportive housing facility, the first of its kind in the area

Unless otherwise noted, I wrote and art directed all collateral shown below. Pieces written by others were edited by me.