One day. One cause. A complete campaign.
The 24 Hour
Design-a-thon
One nonprofit. One room full of communications volunteers. Twenty-four hours to find the message and build the campaign around it.
The event
A pop-up agency for one cause.
The 24 Hour Design-a-thon is a media event disguised as a volunteer drive. The concept: a pop-up ad agency that exists for exactly 24 hours, built to focus a room full of communications professionals on a single nonprofit. Copywriters, designers, web developers, video producers, marketers, and PR pros work in structured teams alongside the nonprofit's own leadership, and by the final hour the organization has the campaign of its life: strategy clarified, every deliverable in hand.
The room
The deciders are part of every decision.
The board and decision makers are in the room the whole time, in structured strategy conversation with volunteer domain experts. A year of board time in one sitting. And the work gets adopted, because the deciders are in the room for every decision.
The story
Three news moments. One day.
A Design-a-thon is an irresistible, highly visual, high-value good-news story. Each one makes news three times: the call for volunteers, the opening of the event, and the big reveal of the finished campaign. Every Design-a-thon has drawn local TV and press coverage with no dedicated PR effort behind it. A partner's PR team turns those news moments into a drumbeat.
For established causes and brand-new ones
Clarify an organization or stand up a mission overnight.
The Design-a-thon works for an established organization, and it can stand up a startup nonprofit overnight. It is great for celebrities and sports heroes with a mission they want to accelerate: walk in with a cause, a business entity, and its leadership, walk out 24 hours later with a brand, a message, a website, and a story ready for cameras. YouthTurns was exactly that: a founder with a mission and nothing else. One day later he had the whole startup and was on TV. One caveat: the Design-a-thon does not do the business administration side of starting up. It does the identity, the messaging, the media tools, and the strategy.
Four events. Four receipts.
A format proven in the room.
2010
YouthTurns
Roughly 30 creative professionals helped a formerly incarcerated founder addressing the cycle of incarceration for children of the incarcerated turn a mission into a complete startup and a television story.
2012
Safe Haven Family Shelter
About three dozen communications volunteers built a campaign that the organization adopted across its work.
2013
Tennessee Literacy Coalition
A new message and identity led to measurable growth in giving, participation, social engagement, and brand awareness, according to the executive director's accounting.
2017
Operation Stand Down Tennessee
Volunteers produced more than 80 campaign assets in a single day, with local news covering both the event and its reveal.
The results
One day, then years of impact.
At Tennessee Literacy Coalition's 2013 Design-a-thon, the team built a new message and identity in a day. What followed: giving up 34% in year one and 34% again in year two. Their signature fundraiser grew from 1,200 participants to 5,500. Twitter engagement went from 0% to 29.2%. Facebook following rose 89%. “We have brand awareness now!” Suzanne Horne, Executive Director. The tagline from that room went on to run in radio, print, and online.
The honest part
The reveal is real.
It is a 24-hour event with whoever shows up, and nobody knows what the room will make until the end. That is the reveal, and it is half the drama. And every time, without exception, what comes out of that room is a delight. One lesson learned along the way: the finished campaign needs somewhere to go. Billboards, bus benches, radio, TV. Nobody can guarantee a budget for work that does not exist yet, which is exactly why the fix belongs in pre-production: donated media lined up in advance, media partnerships, sponsorship funding, or both, so that when the reveal comes, the campaign already has a stage.
Get involved
How to get involved.
There are many ways to be part of a Design-a-thon: host it, help staff it, champion a cause that needs it, or back the campaign's rollout into the community. The first step is always the same: a conversation.
Quality
Professional direction, all 24 hours.
Every Design-a-thon runs under a paid professional Creative Director for the full 24 hours. Non-negotiable.
Sponsors get a signature community event with press built in. Causes get an agency they could never afford. The same 24 hours serves both.