Campaign Analysis (not as boring as you think)

By Colin Peterson

This time of year, when people get anxious for warmer weather and go outside without jackets when the high is in the 40s, the resource development department at UWCI hunkers down for campaign analysis. What this involves is two days' worth of meetings with leaders from other departments on the accomplishments and challenges of the prior year's fund raising campaign. The point, of course, is to take a close look at our strategies and operations and look forward to how we can raise more money to expand UWCI’s community impact. We’re crunching the numbers and analyzing areas that experienced growth and contraction in last year’s campaign and then asking the follow-up why and how and what’s next.

Here is a little behind the scenes on what we’ve been discussing:

We were fortunate to see growth in our campaign in 2008, especially considering the economic environment. Going forward, our work is certainly cut out for us since economists are forecasting the current downturn to go deeper in the first part of this year before starting a turnaround in the second half of the year.

The repercussions of the downturn are felt in our own communities. In November, December, and January, United Way 2-1-1 (a 24/7 health and human services referral line) experienced a 32% increase in calls with top requests relating to counseling, food and shelter. UWCI was able to respond by distributing an additional $150,000 to our partner agencies taking on the majority of referrals from 2-1-1. Thanks to central Iowa’s generosity in 2008 we’re able to continue to respond to these kinds of emerging needs.

Here is the flip-side: UWCI gets the vast majority of its contributions from workplace campaigns. One of the strategic priorities we identified in our campaign analysis is the need to continue to build our relationships with our community outside of the workplace. One way we hope to reach out is through our presence in the social media world - ENTER: UWCI’s SpeakUnitedCI blog, our Facebook page, our LinkedIn group, our YouTube channel, and our Twitter profile. We certainly hope to meet and converse with more people online but that is just the start. We are looking at building our presence in other places too (book clubs, community fairs, bowling leagues, etc).

I would love to hear suggestions from you on where you would like to see us. Tell me about your relationship (or lack thereof) with United Way. What experiences with us have you had outside of the workplace? When is your next bridge game and can I come?

As always you can share your feedback with me in the comments section below, send me an email at cpeterson@unitedwaydm.org or give me a call at 515-246-6500.