GOAL is an Irish non-profit organization dedicated to working to end extreme poverty and helping the poorest of the poor throughout the developing world. Since 1977 they have raised and spent over $900 million in over 50 countries, and currently have over 2,700 staff working in 12 countries. Their largest U.S. fundraiser is the New York GOAL Ball, and they turned to okellydesign to help raise awareness, attendance and donations.

GOAL had diminished their presence in NYC during the earlier part of the decade, and as such people were not as familiar with them and their work anymore. As such, the 2011 Ball had the dual mandate of not only raising funds (for Haiti) but also of reintroducing GOAL to New York donors and positioning them to their target audience within the large spectrum of competing nonprofits in New York. 

The Ball had a casino theme (with actual casino tables and dealers to also generate donations) and was to be held in the beautiful Gotham Hall in midtown Manhattan. I decided to use this as the main starting point, and to emphasize the elegance inherent in the night as much as the good work that would be done through attendance and donations. A logo plate was created what could be used across all Ball-related materials to help tie them all together and reinforce both the event in peoples minds, along with a  sense of GOALs professionalism. The first thing that people saw was the Save the Date (designed to be sent by email to help keep costs down), which was followed a few months later by the main invite. The invite was updated and sent each week in the lead up to the event until it was sold out. 

For the night itself I created a suite of booklets containing the menus, information about GOAL and the event sponsors, along with the full list of items for the main auction, the silent auction and the raffles. Obviously this was originally intended to be a simpler document, but I presented it as a strong opportunity to show the work and professionalism of GOAL in a memorable way in front of captive audiences (on the tables), and thankfully the client (James Kelly, GOAL USA Director) agreed with me. 

I designed the booklets to have 5 different covers, so that a look around the table (of 10, so 2 sets at each table) would have the 5 different ones in front of you showing the breadth of GOALs work across the globe. In addition, the booklets were hand-sewn (by myself and two volunteers the night before!) with different threads to tie in with the work done by the children GOAL works with in Haiti. The threads were of course also in the chosen GOAL color palette to reinforce the branding. The booklets were printed on eggshell color stock to approximate GOAL cream, with a color cover and black and white interior pages (20) to help keep costs under control. 

The 2011 was a great success and went on to raise $130,000 on the night, which was great. I also served on the Ball committee, and helped to organize the volunteers on the night (in my tux with an earpiece, great fun!), so all in all it was a really nice project to help out on and make a difference for Haiti. 

Update: The materials were so successful that James asked to use them exactly the same this year. While I would ordinarily prefer that it change a little from year to year to help generate excitement and interest, I thought it might be ok this once to further solidify the event on the New York charity season calendar along with reinforcing the success from last year. In addition however, I worked with James and the very talented Aoife O'Kelly (my sister) to produce an overview video about GOALs work that could be shown immediately before the live auction took place. 

Aoife worked with the Dublin GOAL office (Sarah Lennon, Social Media Marketing Officer) to go through the GOAL archives and create the right narrative, which I then tidied up (copy) and designed the typographic and graphic elements for the video. I also worked with Aoife to choose the music for the video (The World is Watching by Two Door Cinema Club, and Baba Yetu by Christopher Tin), and she then did a great job in marrying it all together to create the final video. The GOAL Ball 2012 was another great success, this raising over $250,000 on the night, and was also used at the sister Ball in San Francisco. The video will be used to promote GOAL worldwide from this point on as well, and we will look forward to seeing them grow from strength to strength. You can view the video here, and learn more about GOAL here.