About Mission Graduates
Making college the expectation, not the exception, for San Francisco youth.
Roles and Responsibilities
Art direction
Brand design
Communications & marketing strategy
Creative production
Design operations
Digital, print, & web design
Fundraising strategy
Photography and video
Project management
Mission Graduates is a 50-year old nonprofit organization dedicated to helped 4,800 economically marginalized students and students of color access higher eduction.
At the time of my arrival, Mission Graduates still had one person to produce all projects and creative processes across fourteen program sites. Furthermore, a lack of process and strategy created a procedural bottleneck, damaging Mission Graduates’ efficiency and doing a disservice to the organization’s perceived value.
I identified three strategic opportunities to support Mission Graduates’ growth: break organizational silos and increasing collaboration across program sites through clearer operations and best practices; leveraging the organization’s story to drive donations and program enrollments; and communicating strategic value propositions through polished images and messaging.
I work across internal and external stakeholders to identify new opportunities, drive projects, and fulfill strategic initiatives.
Brand Redesign
Mission Graduates was still using design protocols and assets from 15 years prior when I started in 2019.
Within 30 days from my onboarding, I worked to create a competitive brand positioning and operations strategy that would facilitate both buy-in from internal stakeholders and engagement from external stakeholders.
In collaboration with organizational leadership, employees, supporters, and community partners, I conceived and refined this project’s scope and direction.
Mission Graduates’ new branding guidelines draw inspiration from zine publications and printing techniques, drawing upon the organization’s grassroots history of advocacy and working with marginalized communities.
As part of the brand redesign I also sought to increase XFN by identifying a point person at each program site and establishing best practices by training those liaisons on protocols and expectations.
This project improved our competitive positioning, increasing individual contributions by 215% in the 2019-2020 fiscal year, social media following by 29%, email marketing open rate by 19%, and click through rate by 3.6%.
Food for Thought
Each October Mission Graduates organizes a fundraiser, Food for Thought, where we partner with local restaurants to raise funds to support students and families.
COVID-19, shelter-in-place orders, and ensuing budget cuts, required us to abandon the program model from previous years. To compensate for the lack of outreach and funding, my team created a new program model. I created the processes, messaging, and digital assets to leverage community support and drive participation from supporters.
Food for Thought 2020 constituted Mission Graduates’ first peer-to-peer fundraising campaign, and first fundraising initiative without any in-person appeals. By streamlining operations, elevating student voices through diverse creative assets, and partnering with new organizations (like Postmates), this project surpassed our fundraising goal from any of the previous years by 142%.
Food for Thought fundraising postcards
Food for Thought promotional poster
Website Redesign
Mission Graduates’ previous website did not address the needs of the organization, as exemplified by an average monthly bounce rate of 70% in 2018.
This insight, coupled with the dramatic shift from in-person services to a virtual model during COVID-19 shelter-in-place, signaled the need for an urgent website overhaul as the website would be our primary portal to our clients in less than a month. To further compound the project restrictions, a significant loss of program revenue required me to redesign the website in-house with no approved expenses.
Through interviews and research, I determined that the website required new UX design, clearer messaging in calls to action, and greater DEI to better represent Mission Graduates’ community.
My redesign has increased the number of visitors by 188%, decreased the bounce rate by 29%, and increased average page duration to 2:30. More significantly, it also provided a central location for teachers to access COVID-19 relief resources for the community and processes to organize over 10,000 hours of distance learning for students during shelter-in-place.
