Sara is the Senior Engagement Partner at Finish Line Youth Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Finish Line, a leading seller of athletic footwear and apparel. Although Sara’s main role with the foundation is in event planning and employee engagement, she can find herself writing and strategically planning social media to raise awareness for the foundation’s partners and build stronger communities.
Transcript
My name is Sarah, and I am the Senior Engagement Partner at the Finnish Line Youth Foundation. So, I work for the foundation, which is the nonprofit arm of Finish Line, and a part of being an engagement partner is I work with our two main national partnerships, Special Olympics and Boys & Girls Club. We get our employees to go out and volunteer with them and to engage with them in various ways. So I have the east half of the country, my teammate has the west half, and so I work with district managers and store managers, and then all of my Special Olympics and Boys & Girls Club contacts to get them to volunteer. It also comes with a lot of event planning. We do a few fundraisers a year, and then I personally do all of our social media and PR. Throughout a typical week, I will spend a lot of time writing. We have an intranet at Finish Line, so it's a place where employees can go to look at everything and anything that's happening. So I manage our page for that And everything that's written on there is written by me, so that's a lot of writing social media. It's a lot of work as well. We plan things out months in advance and so writing all those posts and making sure they're spaced out evenly and they're going at the right time of day and the right day. We do a lot of different event planning. So there are times when I'll just take a break from writing to work on an event that's coming up. But we take it by chunk so it's small and easy to handle. For example, the next event we have coming up is Bowl For Kids and it's in March. It's an event where we invite our employees and their families and friends along with our business vendors, partners, and sponsors to come out for a casual Saturday of bowling, and all of those teams fundraise which goes towards the foundation. So it's a lot of fun, it's a very casual event. So right now, we are working on a sponsorship timeline to secure those and then I am finishing up the contract with the bowling alley, and before the end of the year, we will secure team captains for about 50 teams, and then we will leave it up to them to recruit team members. Come the new year comes nitty gritty things, such as even details, what are we serving for food, what are T-shirts looking like? And then what other things are we going to add to the event to make it fun, and special, and different?
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