Giving Day Fundraiser

The UCSC Chapter of Women in Science Society hit an all time high in their semester when they raised $4,565 during their universities’ Giving Day! The purpose of their fundraiser was to raise enough money to cover the legal fees associated with the IRS recognition process to officially join the Women in Science Society at the national level. With their fundraiser’s success, the Chapter’s executive board is now looking forward to providing their members with the full scope of benefits that being an Official Chapter has to offer.

To put on this fundraiser, the Chapter’s executive board worked alongside the UC Santa Cruz Giving Day organizers to create website content, along with sending out correspondence to likely donors. The money gathering portion of the fundraiser was managed by the Giving Day team through a website called Community Funded. This unique website was able to aggregate all of the different groups that took part in fundraising, and create a single domain for all fundraising efforts.

To track their fundraising progress, the executive board created a master spreadsheet to pay close attention to who board members were reaching out to, and encouraged each other to reach out to as many potential donors as possible. In reaching out to potential donors, the executive team would also ask those individuals to pass their information on to others. This explains the great success seen in the fundraising dollar amount and the total amount of donors surpassing 60!

Chapter President Marie Gredell and Treasurer Kayleigh Boyd stated that they believed the fundraiser was especially successful because of the leadership skills they have acquired through serving on their Chapter’s leadership team. Their involvement with WSS helped both women feel more comfortable in talking to faculty and staff at their university, as well as STEM professionals in their community. Learning to be effective communicators and leaders through their positions on the executive board, helped both women delegate tasks, set goals for their organization, and strategically plan how they would approach any goal. All these skills significantly added to the fundraiser’s success!

The best piece of advice the WSS- UC Santa Cruz Chapter’s executive board has to give to other chapters who are looking to fundraise is to not be afraid to reach out to as many individuals as possible and take advantage of the full scope of all your networks. Fundraising $4,565 during a pandemic is especially difficult, and we, at the national level, are extremely impressed with this accomplishment!