Showcasing the Achievements of a Charity Fundraising Intern

Virtual Internship Case Study

We are delighted to showcase some of the fantastic work achieved by one of Think Pacific’s interns, Katherine Maloney.

During a summer spent working for TP as a Charity Fundraising Intern, Katherine completed projects in a range of areas, including research, written reports and creative design.  Hundreds of volunteers have used her resources to fundraise donations for our charity in Fiji.

Here’s a small snap shot of the achievements.

TP Fundraising Guide

A major project was revamping Think Pacific’s fundraising guide for our volunteers.

This required researching TP’s current fundraising advice, going through historical content to find new additions and taking a fresh look at the design and images.  The pages were created in line with TP’s brand – using the same font, colour scheme and styling.

Here’s a couple of example exerts from the guide

Page example 1; Quotes from our Fijian community:

Page example 2:  Getting started –  A mind map, from zero to success

Page example 3:  How to raise your expedition fee through work

Fundraising Posters

Prior to the internship, TP didn’t have any posters that could be emailed to volunteers to use.  Often volunteers would ask to use images and make their own. Completing this project provided a ready-made resource for volunteers to download.

The posters were created with content and statistics available from TP’s website.  The branding was on point,  whilst also bringing new ideas for use of images and positioning of text.

Poster example 1:  Youth and Sports Focus

Poster 2:  Achievements in stats

Poster 3:  Education Focus

Video Creation

Here is a wonderful short video produced to offer help to volunteers with their fundraising!

This was created from stock footage in the TP archives, with some new original messages and ideas for fundraising.

Use of video is a really engaging way to share the concept of fundraising, making the content easily consumable.

Social Media Posts

Here are a couple of examples of social media posts, created by Katherine for us on Facebook or Instagram.

They provide great messages, highlighting the small lifestyle changes that can contribute towards achieving fundraising targets.

Example 1:  Coffee saving

Example 2: Cutting out meat

Community Engagement

A further project was open to interpretation – The brief was to come up with new concepts to support and engage TP’s amazing community of past volunteers, donors and supporters.

The finished result was a proposal submitted full of new ideas – from competitions and crowdfunding ideas and new uses of social media, to establishing a TP Ambassadors programme at universities, which was subsequently launched with great success!

Researching Charity Grants

These type of projects involve a lot of research, and inevitably, putting some heavy hours into google! (reaching page 100 or so is not uncommon)

So much information is available for free online, but it really can take some digging to come up with new opportunities. This is especially because so many grant giving bodies, corporate social responsibility packages or especially smaller donors just don’t advertise the grants they have available and are only uncovered through a random blog or news post.

However, sifting through thoroughly and diligently does create success. Through consuming all available resources – blogs, listings, articles and news relevant to ‘charity grants’ (and all manner of related terms) it’s possible to unearth lots of new funding sources available.

The finished product was a comprehensive guide of new grants available to Think Pacific Foundation, local organisaitons we support in Fiji and also for volunteers themselves that could apply to fund their project in Fiji.

Here are just a couple of screen shots from the documents to see some of the information discovered.

Exert 1:  The beginnings of a UK map of grants found locally for volunteers

Exert 2:  Some examples of grant giving bodies applicable to Think Pacific Foundation

Exert 3:  Focusing on one grant offering- The Lions Club International 

Exert 4:  Reviewing the application process and drafting for Trustees

Vinaka!

From the whole TP team, we’d like to say a huge vinaka (thank you!) to Katherine, for all of the work achieved for our charity.

We’re so excited, that through our new virtual internship program, we’ll be coaching and mentoring interns to provide a phenomenal benefit for local charities, community groups. grass roots enterprises and even government departments in Fiji!   We can’t wait to see what our interns achieve and the impact this makes to Fiji’s National Development Goals.