So All May Eat: A Community Focused Capstone

Developing the capstone project for your masters degree is a high pressure process. Picking the perfect client to write about is nearly as challenging as creating the actual campaign.

That’s why I considered myself extremely lucky to have already had an organization in mind that I had established connections with.

So All May Eat (SAME) is a nonprofit dedicated to addressing food insecurity using a pay-what-you-can restaurant model. SAME Café’s approach to food justice builds on a strong passion for health, dignity, and community.

The newest branch of SAME Café opened in my hometown, Toledo, Ohio, in Fall 2022. When I found out some of the key players in the local social justice activism community whose work I deeply respect were spearheading the project, I knew I had to get involved.

This project is not only about utilizing the campaign development skills I have built in my courses at Loyola University Chicago, but it also has provided me an opportunity to explore the type of work I may do if I follow my interest in a nonprofit career. The time I spent researching SAME, as well as the advertising field and nonprofit industry, has helped me develop a more realistic picture of what my career may look like in the future and the current state of the industry.

From the start I knew I wanted to develop a communication plan that would be genuinely useful to SAME, so I secured an extremely helpful preliminary meeting with the organization’s CEO Brad Reubendale. From this I was able to learn that their next major goal for SAME is to expand to new cities, particularly by opening more cafés in public libraries due to the success of the partnership with the Toledo Public Library. The board had already outlined a few broad goals and their hopes for the coming year, but I was given quite a lot of creative freedom with the campaign. I knew I wanted to target public library leaders to make use of their existing connections with marginalized community members who are more likely to be experiencing food insecurity.

To prepare to create a communication plan tailored to the situation I wrote two research reports, one about the practice area of advertising and one about the nonprofit industry.

Conducting in-depth research on the practice of advertising was particularly interesting due to how accustomed I have become to being immersed in ad content in my daily life. In particular native advertising is fascinating due to how well it blends in with normal content on digital news platforms and social media, making it less likely to fall prey to ad fatigue and banner blindness.

Overall, advertising does not achieve its peak effectiveness though operating independently, pairing advertising work with strong market research and public relations efforts is what creates a truly powerful campaign.

Diving into the nonprofit industry was probably one of the most valuable portions of this project for my own knowledge about my career path.

I had some awareness of how nonprofit differs from for-profit, but I found some of the biggest differences in how they measure performance for the sake of comparison with other organizations. Due to the range of industries nonprofit organizations fall within it isn’t possible to compare them using a typical measure such as market share. Instead there are three major statistics used to evaluate effectiveness: fundraising efficiency, charitable commitment, and donor dependency. Fundraising efficiency is a percentage calculated by subtracting the cost of obtaining private donations from the total amount secured. Charitable commitment is the percentage of total expenses that went towards a nonprofit’s stated mission rather than to fundraising or management costs. Finally, donor dependency measures how important private donations are for covering expenses. Donor dependency indicates to audiences how self-sufficient an organization is. Some donors prefer to put their money towards a cause where they’re deeply needed and donor dependency is high, while others prefer the stability of a nonprofit with low donor dependency.

Many factors influence how people choose to donate. When developing my strategies and tactics, I made an effort to account for behaviors such as preferring donating to local causes and those with which one has personal connections, as well as the desire of older donors to receive regular communication from organizations.

I was also lucky enough to be able to interview three professionals with extensive experience both in various parts of the nonprofit industry and with SAME Cafè itself. First, I spoke with the CEO of So All May Eat (SAME), Brad Reubendale, both for an interview as a client and as a professional in the nonprofit industry whom I hope to learn from. I was also able to speak to Erin Peterson, an independent consultant who has worked with both for-profit and nonprofit organizations and acted as the SAME Café Toledo Lead during its development in 2021. Finally, I spoke with Steve North, the founder and CEO of the nonprofit Lifeline Toledo. His passion for helping others and understanding of the challenges faced when building an operation from the ground up were incredibly helpful in understanding the behind the scenes of the nonprofit world.

The insights of these professionals helped me avoid some of the common mistakes made when getting started working with a nonprofit and develop a more effective campaign based on the lessons they learned while establishing SAME Café Toledo.

When creating the campaign plan for SAME’s library based expansion to new cities I based my tactic executions on the research I read during the practice area and industry report phase. I also incorporated what I learned from my interviews about both nonprofits and SAME.

I particularly wanted to focus on connecting with public library leaders, so I chose to create an example template email for the Toledo library director to send out when reaching out to other libraries that may be a good fit for a SAME café. In addition, I hope to have SAME pitch and secure a placement of a story about the success of the library partnership in Toledo in Public Libraries Magazine, the official journal of the Public Library Association. I also proposed SAME run a booth at the Public Library Association 2024 Conference, this would function as both an endcap to a year of campaign efforts and a launching point for the next wave of expansion by showing what has been achieved to some of the most active members of the public library community.

Taking into account the research findings that older donors need repeated communication to continue donating to a cause, I outlined a quarterly newsletter to be sent out to existing donors and interested parties about the progress of the campaign and what their donations have achieved at the established locations. I also chose to target news media on both a national and local scale. National coverage will allow the concept of SAME to spread quickly while local coverage will boost interest in new locations and draw the attention of key players in the community.

After the initial development of this campaign I was able to do a site visit at the Toledo SAME Cafè location, as well as meet with the CEO Brad Reubendale and one of the Toledo board members in person. This meeting was incredibly informative and brought up some important points I would love to include in an updated version of the campaign.

Being able to experience the space in-person was incredibly compelling. The strong relationships and welcoming community is already obvious despite the Toledo location only having opened in late 2022. Not only was I able to speak with some of the people who frequent the cafe and volunteer there, but I was also told about the official research and interviews conducted at the end of 2022 by the SAME team. The results of this research will be published soon as part of their 2022 Impact Report alongside their 2022 Audited Financials. These documents will provide crucial insight into the performance of the new library partnership in Toledo compared to previous data from the original Denver location which can be found on their Financials page.

I was also informed of some promising new partnerships. It is not my place to publish information about these before they are made public, but I believe they would be valuable additions to how the campaign would be carried out.

Possibly the most interesting point brought up in the meeting was that many libraries SAME has reached out to have unused café spaces that could be transformed using the organization’s trauma-informed design rather than building from scratch. Reimagining an underutilized space is a very compelling reason for public libraries to partner with SAME, so I hope to include this as part of the narrative in future campaign materials.

The research, brainstorming, and writing that has gone into my capstone campaign is the culmination of what my professors in the Global Strategic Communication master’s program have worked to instill in me. I have learned as much about my client as I have about myself and my career through my successes and failures during this course. I hope to take these lessons out into the working world and refine this campaign to support SAME’s mission to create community through healthy food access.