Denim Day

How We Hit 4x Our Goal in One Day

The Challenge
Denim Day was coming up, a national day of recognition for victims of sexual violence. My ERG wanted to do something but had no approved budget. With my pitch, Senior Leadership agreed comms to go live on Slack only on the day of the event. For every employee who dressed up they'd donate $10, with a goal of getting 100 employees to dress up (20% company participation).

The challenge? We had one day and no budget, and minimal lead time to prepare.

But the goal was simple: spread awareness on an important day of recognition and raise what we could.

What happened was not so simple.

To reduce friction we made participation as easy as possible: for every employee who posted a live photo of themselves on Slack in denim, the company would donate $10 to RAINN, the nation's largest anti-sexual violence organization. Due to limited budget, our main focus was to gain participation in order to spread awareness.

I crafted a thoughtful messaging strategy from the emotional framing and the call-to-action to the internal campaign voice. Due to limited resources, I utilized Canva design to drop in my own copy and share throughout the day.

My Approach:

Use clear, empathetic, and grounded messaging.

Zero guilt-based fundraising tactics

Story-forward explanation of why RAINN’s work matters

Visual participation that empowered employees to act and join in

And as a bonus, we offered multiple ways for employees to participate to accommodate different comfort levels

Impact
By 10am we hit 50% of our goal. By 12 we hit our goal. Inspired by the virality of the hundreds of participants joining in, Senior Leadership stepped in, doubling donation matches in some cases, to keep the momentum going.

By the end of the day we had over 4x our goal for RAINN.

The campaign became the most impactful internal fundraising effort our company had ever run, and its results solidified our ERG as a force for meaningful change.

It also strengthened our internal culture and brought hundreds of remote employees together. Many of whom had never interacted before or knew only their corner of the company were excitedly joining in a moment of strength and empowerment. One team, one dream.