DU Just Wages Project: Translating Advocacy and Research into Digital Fundraising
- Apr 12, 2018
- 3 min read
As more people more to Denver and the city continues to grow, an issue that hides behind the scenes grows with it.
Wage theft occurs when employers do not pay workers for hours worked, when they pay less than promised, misclassify workers, make illegal deductions from wages, or pay less than minimum wage. Wage theft disproportionately affects both immigrant communities who are already vulnerable to exploitation and those working in the construction and service industry.
Since 2015, the DU Just Wages Project has worked to understand this issue more deeply, act as a community partner to those experiencing it, and advocating for legal and policy change around the issue.
The project continued a large qualitative research effort in 2017, but to continue to work on the issue, employ student researchers, and release the findings of over 2 years of research they needed some financial support. The project was chosen the University of Denver's DUGood Crowdfunding Platform to run a crowdfunding campaign to raise that support.
I had been working with Professor Rebecca Galemba for about 3 months as a Research Assistant when the crowdfunding idea came up in a meeting and I was thrilled to use my fundraising and campaign design skills to good use.
We decided to start the campaign on Labor Day, to tie to issue to the day laborers who so frequently experience the issue. We needed to explain a very complex issue to an audience who, largely, was unaware of it. So I developed a campaign plan that would allow us to communicate the variety of angles the Just Wages Project worked on on a variety of communications platforms.
I tied the importance of employing students in research positions while in university to their ability to secure employment after graduation to the project, highlighting the stories of some of the student workers who had helped with the research. I highlighted the experience of student workers in interviewing workers who had experienced wage theft. I shared stories students had written about individual workers who had experienced wage theft. I leveraged blog posts from experts during this time period to give a deeper, more nuanced look at the issue. We highlighted both the economic and the human sides of this issue.
I also tied the issue to the levels at which donors could support the project. Donating $20 would cover a worker's transportation costs to seek legal help on their wage theft case. Donating $55 would cover a worker's costs of taking unscrupulous employers to small claims court to regain their wages. Giving donors tangible examples of how they could help allowed a complex issue to be broken down to a more digestible level.
I designed a campaign strategy that leveraged our various communications platforms -- social media, a blog, and email marketing platforms -- using image and icon heavy designs on social media. As a one-person team on this campaign, I also tried to repurpose content on a variety of platforms in different ways for maximum efficiency.
Since crowdfunding hinges so much on social networks and sharing, we thanked donors weekly by tagging them in "thank you" images so the word would spread to their networks. We also identified key campaign champions ahead of time who were willing to share their message with their networks, helping the campaign to spread to new audiences.
In the end, we were incredibly successful and exceed our fundraising goal by 53%!
You can view the Just Wages Project Blog, which was created and is managed by yours truly, their Facebook page, and see more examples of my work on the campaign below:
- You Can Help Fight Wage Theft (Blog, also used as the campaign announcement email)
- Providing Students with Possibilities While Fighting Wage Theft (Blog, also used as an email during the campaign)
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