Elite Donor Recognition Dinner
One of the incentives offered to our donors who pledge $10,000 or more for 5 years is a chance to attend an exclusive dinner with our players and coaches. For this 40 person event, I converted a space in our arena and gave it a completely different look and feel using lighting and digital signage. Following the dinner, donors were escorted into the locker room where a plaque was revealed dedicating a locker with their name on it.
Annual Fundraising Campaign Lead Off Event
This event that I developed has become the cornerstone of our fundraising and development efforts. Annually, 50-75 people gather in our head coach's home for food & drink, to meet the new team and to hear about the needs of the upcoming year. Annually, this event helps generate up to $200,000 in donations.
Pre-Game Chalk Talks
Once a month during basketball season, a coach will present a scouting report to a group of season ticket holders gathered before a home game. This happy-hour style event is opened an hour before tip-off. Over the last 5 years since we began hosting this event, I have helped grow the attendance of these events from 20 people regularly to over 350 people in attendance. These events help build excitement and create awareness for big games throughout our year.
Community Outreach: Shoe Distribution
One of our program's core values is to positively impact the lives of others. Part of my responsibility is to make that happen practically. One of our biggest annual community outreach events is the shoe distribution. We partner with Samaritan's Feet, a non-profit putting shoes on the feet of over a million children around the world, to provide shoes to area neighborhoods. Our largest distributions have helped provide shoes to nearly 300 kids from local neighborhoods in one day.
Annual Season-End
Celebratory Banquet
The largest annual event I direct serves over 300 people dinner and a heartfelt reflection on the past year. My role starts on the ground level: creating invitations, selling tickets, and managing RSVPs to coordinating the caterer, event space, audio/visual and technical aspects, creating the awards presented to athletes, writing the program script and finally creating the visual presentation which includes highlight videos, photos, and slides from the past year.