It has been a crazy few months to say the least! We hit social media in a not-so-soft launch on July 13, 2020 and we’ve been hustling ever since. We have been focusing on our Instagram presence but have also been polishing up our LinkedIn and mulling over Facebook. We have 410 followers on Instagram as of the day this is written and while I obviously know that’s not a lot in the grand scheme of Instagram, its 410 more than we had before (and its more than I have on my 8 year old personal Instagram… but we can discuss how popular I am a different day). We have engaged 3 partners, Alix Rae who designed our logo, ParkerPR who took us on pro bono to help us get our message to the media and Plastic Free YYC who gave us loads of advice and engaged with us during their Zero Waste Fest from Aug 27-30 2020. If you have a project you need help on, or just want to check out some great Calgary businesses, be sure to check them out!
Team News
In addition to growing our external presence, our team has increased substantially since we launched. We started out with Andrea and I; the co-founders, with Tess ad Tyrone supporting us with social and technology, respectively. We have since taken on Sarah, our Communications Manager who keeps us on top of our social media analytics and content strategy. Britney joined our team as Event and Fundraising Coordinator to help us develop our virtual campaigns and organize our in-person events. Megan agreed to help us with our gift card donation analysis as our Data Management Associate, focusing on learning about the waste left on these gift cards and better understanding what this means for re:give and the greater community. Alix, our logo designer, has also agreed to help us with our graphics on a more permanent basis!
Finally, a bitter sweet announcement that our lovely Social Media Manager, Tess, had to step down from the re:give team because of an amazing new career opportunity. We are so happy for her but will miss her dearly. Her role has since been split across the remainder of our team. Our team is way bigger than we thought it would be at this point, but we are thankful to the passionate and talented individuals who have agreed to give us some of their time. We wanted to create a team that believed in re:give’s mission, that could scale with re:give’s growth.
The Numbers
You’re probably thinking “Wow cool, you’re spreading your message, your team has grown, but how many cards did you get?” Well, in our first quarter (which ended Sept 30, 2020) we collected 62 cards for a total of $596.25. This is a promising trend, and demonstrates that there is appetite and need for the work we are doing! We cant wait to continue our work and spread our message out to the community.
What’s Next
As for our next steps, there is still a heck of a lot of work to do. Andrea has her marketing team in full gear ready to launch an invite-only COVID friendly event, we have a couple of cool campaigns coming out on social, and we’ll be meeting with a number of amazing community business leaders in the next little while! We have also lined up our first monetary donations with an amazing Calgary organization for the month of October. As always, I am working with our team to keep those cards coming in and consolidating while also preparing documents to apply for our charity status and a number of other grants. Stay tuned!
