Staci Lowell’s Post

Transcript

Thank you so much for talking to me about this. I just wanted to talk a little bit about how Upcycle Part Shop had experienced a blueprint and see what your thoughts were and see what you can share with. The community or the the world about your experience with the Blueprint? Thank you. I'm happy to share more. For us, the Blueprint was like a really great culmination of bringing people together. We have been working with you, Stacy, like over time, but the Blueprint was an opportunity for board members and committee members and staff in leadership to all be in the same meeting with your expertise and kind of create a guide. That we all had our voices in in our ideas. We're all in the room together. Can you describe a little bit about what we, where we landed and how that worked? Yeah. So for us, the blueprint would like, again, it was like this gathering of people and their ideas. But we as a team, like the people who worked at that organization had some like kind of weird ideas. And then our board members were like, let's all get together and discuss. So with your support, we came up with the idea. Of calling our expansion like we were fundraising to expand our space and we came up with the idea of talking about how many pounds of materials we have taken in at a psychopath shopping, comparing that to the weight of a rhinoceros. And then we caught it, the rhino Stampede. And I love that kind of language. But I realized like, you know, saying to board members like, so our rhino Stampede sounds a little weird if it isn't, if it hasn't gone through a process where we all discussed. And like kind of get into it together. So that's what the blueprint helped us discuss how we would go about fundraising and building campaign. And then it kind of gave permission to be like, let's call it something weird. Let's like make it feel like us as an organization and it gets some real buy in and ownership. And then we called it the Rhino Stampede. And we even developed like a little sound of Thunder of what people's feet stopping. And it worked. We got a lot of participation in our Rhino Stampede. And we were inviting people to come in like we've taken in, you know, materials We've diverted so many pounds. It's like the equivalent of 18 full grown rhinoceros is now come back and like help us Stampede toward us. Join our rhino Stampede. That's awesome. And you tell me what your goal was. For fundraising and for engagement, Yeah. So we had a goal to to reach as many people as we could to talk about our work, but also to raise $12,000 so that we would have some revenue to expand into a new space and and pay some of the utilities and things of the expanded space. So 12,000, which for us was a larger role than we've had for a year end in the past. So here's the thing, right? Like it just picked up momentum and we got to be on the news. Multiple times we just sort of really told the story about expansion and the Rhino Stampede and we ended up raising $21,000 from over 100 donors. I mean, it was incredible. It blew our minds. And it also really represented like support, like people want us to succeed in. So many people were so kind and like donated for the first time, some of them to upcycle part shop to kind of help it become its next chapter. It was incredible and it was huge success for us. Fundraising without guidance like yours, I think fundraising can have a tendency to sort of be slick and like really driven by like for this amount, you impact this many children or, you know, those sort of things that I think are valid and great. It was hard for us at Upcycle to to actually give those numbers and to figure that out. So to realize like we can be real with with where this revenue goes and what we want to do and. Now we want to grow and share that and the people that really want to support the work and the organization want to hear that. They want to hear what's real. They want to hear actually where the revenue will go and they want to know where we are and where we're going. And again, the guidance of you and the blueprint process really helped us sort of validate and feel comfortable doing that. What would you say to someone who was kind of on the fence there? They already, maybe they already do some year end campaign and they already had a plan. Or maybe they've never done anything before and they're really nervous about it. They've this is a, this is not how they've operated. Would you recommend doing a blueprint? I would because a blueprint allows, again, like you encouraged us to invite as many of our stakeholders and committee members and board members as possible. So it allowed us to all corral around the idea of like, here's our year end, what do we want to do? So that was huge, that gathering and then a blueprint. Like it is what it sounds like it's steps forward, a checklist action in sequence. And I think that that is like gold for leadership of nonprofits to know what to do next. And even if you don't accomplish your goal of getting to it in the timeline you wanted, like at least you know what the next thing is, right? And I I just think that's really valuable. And I would definitely recommend the blueprint process and working with you for sure.