Outreach in Support of Plant Conservation

Holly Forbes, University of California Botanical Garden at Berkeley

UC Berkeley has an annual fundraising campaign encouraging donations during a 24-hour extravaganza called the Big Give. Each unit on campus is encouraged to participate by way of incentives (more social media posts by the public, more money provided by campus as a bonus). We focused our outreach for this effort on our popular conservation program. Donations were modest the first year when modest efforts were applied. Staff time and effort were stepped up for the second and third year, resulting in much better return ($40K). These campaigns were seeded ahead of time by established donors and print and social media were heavily utilized to reach potential donors on the day of the Big Give. In addition to financial contributions toward conservation, the Big Give helped us to better publicize our conservation program.