Ethics Awareness Month: Marketing + Social Impact: How to tell stories that uphold the dignity of communities
Jess Myers
Amy Pawluk, CFRE
Amy is a passionate and highly motivated leader with over 20 years of excellence in fundraising and marketing. She is a Certified Fundraising Executive (CFRE) who is driven to challenge the status quo and find a better way. As Executive Vice President, Marketing & New Business Development at Blakely, Amy focuses on inspiring charities to connect to their donors and creating long term lasting connections, driven out of donor engagement with their causes. Amy spent the previous 15 years focusing on Direct Acquisition campaigns with non-profit partners across North America, specializing in acquisition through F2F and experiential fundraising and strategies to engage donors throughout the donor journey for retention. Amy has been actively involved in the AFP Greater Toronto Chapter since 2011. She has chaired AFP Greater Toronto Congress and currently sits on AFP Greater Toronto Chapter Board of Directors. Amy is passionate about advancing Fundraising as a profession and loves the work she gets to do with the AFP Greater Toronto Chapter. Outside of fundraising Amy is passionate about raising her little girl to be a strong and caring woman, she is a lover of exploring new foods, cultures and believes that a nice compliment to a stranger could be the change the world needs.
Mo Waja
Mo Waja is a professional speaker, marketer, author, podcast host and producer, and is a Fundraising Strategist and Digital Integration Specialist at Blakely. As a marketer, Mo has worked with personal, non-profit, and for-profit brands in the charitable, software, and financial sectors, amongst others, developing successful storytelling and integrated communications strategies. As a speaker, Mo has spent tens of thousands of hours coaching business professionals, nonprofits, post-secondary students, and campaign advocates in the art of professional speaking and communication, and has delivered sessions on topics ranging from fundraising and marketing ethics to digital storytelling strategy, to social media and e-philanthropy, to personal and professional branding.
Date: Friday, October 15, 2021
Time: 12:00pm – 2:00pm
Location: Online (registrants will be sent details on how to connect closer to the date)
Cost: Free to members and non-members
One of the consistent and critically important challenges in the charitable sector, particularly for charities working with vulnerable populations, is the tension between the drive to fundraise in a way that will maximize donation dollars vs. the vital importance of demonstrating need in a way that supports the communities we work with in the long term. Frequently, this comes from a feeling that the most “powerful” images are the ones that generate feelings of sadness, pity or guilt — which are often the images that simultaneously perpetuate cultural stereotypes, reinforce white savior complexes or remove agency. The drive to raise donation dollars can feel at odds with how we must operate to support the communities we work with, which means that what many fundraisers and charitable organizations face becomes a functional and an ethical dilemma which can lead to inconsistent and ineffective fundraising marketing. So, the question is, how can we, as fundraisers, reconcile this dilemma within ourselves and our organizations? How can we create and curate content that is effective and also responsible? Because responsible fundraising does not need to come at the expense of strong fundraising results.
Join Mo Waja, marketing storytelling expert and Fundraising Strategist & Digital Integration Specialist at Blakely, and Jess Myers, Fundraising Content Officer at Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF) for a practical exploration of an intentional, responsible approach to fundraising storytelling, including an approach to help charities develop content in a way that avoids exploitation and a functional tool to help charities self-assess their own material for exploitative content.
Organized by the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) of Greater Toronto for Ethics Awareness Month and sponsored by TD Bank. We are looking forward to a stellar event.