Raising Funds for Students in Crisis

Evelyn and Beteab explain how they organized their activity in their own words:

For our project we teamed up with ARCC foundation development director, Anna Reiser, to bring in students and help to volunteer for “Max your gift day”. The volunteering activity ran on Thursday November 18, 2021, from 8am to 7pm. On max your gift day, volunteers’ job was to call individuals that have previously donated to ARCC help students in crisis and ask them if they were willing to donate again to maximize their donations with a minimum of 25 dollars. Our goal for the activity(excluding the two of us)was to gather at least a minimum of 10 students to help volunteer for the foundation and help gather money to be distributed for students in crisis.
First, after learning about the “max your gift day” activity, we reached out to Mrs. Reiser and proposed a collaboration to work together. We stated that with us two and the additional potential number of students our activity can bring in, Mrs. Reiser, will have more students to help on the activity.

After receiving her confirmation, we then created a form application using the website, Typeform.com. The form was going to be used to help log the number of students that have agreed to help us, as well as the time they were planning to come and volunteer.

We then proceeded to reach out to the students we know that go to ARCC school with us. Due to finals week approaching many students were busy and only the ones that had class on Thursday (day of max your gift day) were willing to help us if they had free time after their classes. We also reached out to Dr. Mo, to help us advertise our activity across our ethics class to increase our chances of gathering more students.

Screenshot of a text message asking a student to volunteer.

Email to Dr. Mo explaining the Organize an Activity and asking for volunteers.

On Thursday November 18, 2021 ( “Max your gift day”). Our final act was to do the activity, and before that we met with the number of students that went to meet with Anna and helped volunteer before us. And we just gathered them briefly and took pictures with them for the documentation. It wasn’t as many students as we hoped, and we did fail to get the minimum of ten people. But we were able to gather 6 people, and out of them we had the chance to take pictures with four of them.

While in our desks we had three – four sheets of paper with the individual’s contacts on and we had to call each one of them. We had a script already written for us and we simply had to follow the script and try to convince the donators to donate. Since it was a weekday almost all the calls went to voicemail, making our job easier. We had some that refused (we would like to think that they were being an effective altruist!), but we wouldn’t have known if we haven’t tried. Our donators were not just alumni’s, we also had faculty member like our own teacher, Mo, who donated $150 to the student crisis fundraiser. But by that day, we learned that the foundation was able to rack up $44,000 of the $54,000 goal!

Screenshot of ARCC Foundation webpage with the amount of money raised.

List of who to call and what to say.

Picture of Beteab making calls.

Picture of Evelyn making calls.

Once we finished, we had the chance to meet with the executive Director of the Foundations, Jamie Barthel. He was excited of our involvement with the foundation, that he wanted to take a picture with us and provide us with free Anoka Ramsey t-shirts!
Furthermore, we posted our work on linkden with ARCC tagged, so that we can improve our connection for future opportunities.

Here are Beteab and Evelyn’s tips for YOU if you want to organize something similar:

Have fun! That is the first tip we would tell any students. The experiments in this class are what makes this class engaging and help you learn the material.
When doing an activity like this, start early! Again early! By starting early, you will have more time to plan things out and make sure things run thoroughly. Another good reason to start early is if things don’t work out you will have time for plan B.
Professionalism is the third tip. When dealing with important people like the foundation for example in this assignment, you should work on being punctual to the meetings, have formal communication, even in emails or texts and show respect.
Learn to use your resources. In this activity for example, we tried to use our resource effectively. And one good example is reaching to the instructor itself to help with you organize an activity.
If your activity is in groups learn to divide work evenly based on each individuals’ qualities. Everyone is good at some thing, and you learn to divide workload as you get to know the individuals. We advise you get this figured out before working on things, this is usually done at brainstorming stage.
Finally, in a group work, there is no competition! Remember you all are working for the same goal. So have respect for one another and learn to work in harmony!