Capital Campaign Case Study: The Dream Big Campaign
Dream Big was Soroptimist’s first global capital campaign, raising nearly $5 million to expand access to education for more than 500,000 women and girls while building a scalable fundraising and engagement model across 21 countries and six languages.
The Challenge
Soroptimist had an opportunity to scale its mission in a much bigger way. To expand access to education for women and girls globally, the organization needed more than incremental growth. It needed new investment, stronger campaign infrastructure, and a unified way to mobilize supporters across a complex global federation.
Launching a capital campaign was the right strategic move, but it also required building new internal capacity. Soroptimist needed a stronger donor pipeline for transformational giving, a clearer operating model, and the systems to support a campaign across 21 countries, six languages, and thousands of members with deep local identities.
The campaign had to inspire people globally while giving local teams the tools, language, and structure to participate.
What We Built
I led the launch of Dream Big, Soroptimist’s first global capital campaign, helping raise nearly $5 million to expand access to education for more than 500,000 women and girls.
My role was to set the campaign vision, align teams, and build the infrastructure needed to move a distributed organization in one direction. That meant working across brand, fundraising, communications, programs, membership, and finance to create a shared strategy, unified message, and execution model that could scale.
The campaign combined multilingual digital outreach, strategic storytelling, donor communications, advertising, and high-impact supporter engagement. We built a digital engagement engine translated into six languages, ensuring the campaign felt globally consistent while still allowing for local relevance across regions.
High-profile visibility connected to Malala Yousafzai and Christine Baranski helped elevate the campaign, deepen emotional resonance, and strengthen fundraising momentum.
Impact
Raised nearly $5M from 4,800 donors
Increased first-time donor participation to 40%
Reached 1.5M+ people across digital channels
Helped expand access to education for 500,000+ women and girls
Built Soroptimist’s first scalable global fundraising campaign model
Created multilingual campaign infrastructure across 21 countries and six languages
Strengthened donor engagement, member participation, and global brand visibility
Why It Mattered
Dream Big did more than raise money. It created a model for how Soroptimist could connect mission, members, donors, and public audiences around a shared global goal. The campaign showed that a distributed federation could move with one message, one strategy, and enough flexibility for local relevance.
