As digital fundraising became one of the Innocence Project's most demanding revenue channels, the brand and creative execution struggled to keep pace before I joined. Campaigns were developed independently across email, social, and paid media, creating fragmented brand experiences that weakened consistency and reduced marketing effectiveness.
At the same time, the organization's restrained visual identity wasn't always optimized for the speed and competition of digital fundraising. Creative needed to do more than reinforce the brand. It had to stop scroll, to capture attention, communicate value instantly, and convert supporters across an increasingly complex donor journey.
The opportunity was to build a more integrated creative system that balanced brand consistency with performance, enabling campaigns to scale across channels while driving stronger engagement, conversion, and long-term donor growth.
Brought in to help more effectively acquire and engage donors, I oversaw the design overhaul of nearly 150 cross-channel creative assets within two months of joining the Innocence Project for its 2025 end-of-year fundraising campaign, ensuring brand cohesion across in-house and outsourced deliverables. These efforts contributed to the highest-performing Giving Tuesday campaign in the organization’s history, with a 24% YoY increase in overall donations, and a 33% increase in day-of donations.
Freedom Needs Fuel was a cross-channel fundraising campaign I successfully pitched, named, and developed to acquire new monthly individual donors and reactivate lapsed supporters around a simple idea: the fight for freedom requires sustained investment, with the tagline, "Freedom, Powered by You." Working closely with digital fundraising partners, I introduced a bolder visual system optimized for engagement across email, social, and paid media.
This campaign was so compelling as a fundraising platform to internal senior leaders that it was expanded and became the foundation for the Corporate Engagement team's new email series targeted to corporate social responsibility teams at major companies. The platform helped to create more brand integration and alignment between different fundraising verticals at the Innocence Project that were otherwise siloed, with a longer-term goal of increasing the organization's brand equity through greater cohesion across touchpoints.
The creative overhaul transformed digital fundraising into a stronger-performing growth channel. In partnership with the fundraising team, the work contributed to record Giving Tuesday results, year-over-year revenue growth, and stronger engagement across major campaigns. Just as importantly, my efforts have helped establish greater brand alignment among the output of different teams within a compartmentalized organization, enabling creative to scale alongside fundraising ambitions.
Abbey M., Digital Fundraising Manager
Ricardo H. Director, Digital Fundraising