Dancing for a Cause
Date
Summer 2026
Purpose
Served as a creative consultant for my mom’s social media and event planning efforts as a part of her Dancing for a Cause fundraising campaign in our community.
Project description
Dancing for a Cause is an annual philanthropy event in my hometown that raises money for three local non-profits. Ten community members host events to raise money in addition to being paired with a professional dancer to learn choreography to any song and dance style of their choosing. Participants often pair with local businesses to host events in order to raise the funds. This year, my mom was asked to participate and she let me help her publicize her campaign! I created social media content and print information cards, took photos at her events, and worked with her to help make sure the events went smoothly.
Project process/takeaways
For this campaign, the target audience was men and women aged 35+. With this being such a large age range, we knew we needed a diverse range of events as well as promotional efforts. The first event my mom hosted was a dancing themed day/informational table at the gym where she is a member, then she hosted a cabaret filled with local talent from our community at a senior living home, next was a rooftop yoga class hosted by her favorite local yoga studio, and lastly, she had a mahjong and martini event. It was very important to her that the events were representative of her favorite parts of the community through the local businesses that she partnered with.
My mom carried the weight of the event planning—she came up with the ideas, reached out to the local businesses she wanted to partner with, and led the charge in word-of-mouth invitations. Promotional material is where I came into play. I got the chance to design a print information card for her campaign (pictured above), which had a QR Code to a LinkTree that we kept up to date with her fundraising events, instructions for how to donate, and information about the three local charities that were supported by this event. These cards served a variety of purposes; she was able to put them at local businesses around town as well as hand them out at her fundraising events, or just give them to a curious friend she ran into at the grocery store!
Social media was at the forefront of this campaign. Our goal for social media efforts was to pair visually appealing graphics/images with songs that would give the audience an insider look into the process and somewhat of an idea of what to expect from my mom’s dance, but not completely spoil it. At the start of the campaign, we made three carousel posts: one announcing her participation in the event, one detailing all of the fundraising events she would be hosting, and one with photos from all of those events. As we got to the point where my mom was in the rehearsal room, we started posting reels to capture the progress that was being made. One reel was a short, ten-second clip of her and her partner in rehearsal, one was a ninety-second reel with videos from the whole process and an interview with my mom describing her gratitude to the community, and the last was a campaign recap with clips from the event itself. Throughout the whole experience, my mom’s main interest was highlighting how thankful she was for the community that rallied behind her, so I was sure to include elements of that in all of the posts that we released.
Overall, this was a great experience! It gave us the opportunity to turn into a two-person agency of sorts. We handled partnerships, creative, production, and account management. I am thankful for the experience in working with a client to achieve their goals while gaining strengths in design and communication. I even completed a portion of this project while I was across the pond studying in Oxford, England, which added a communication barrier, but taught me the importance of attention-to-detail and intentional communication.
