DARK HORSE COMMUNICATIONS

With some of the most exciting, impactful skilled volunteering opportunities out there, AVI has a unique synchronicity with corporate Australia, and solid gold offer in staff professional development particularly.  

This assignment delivered the pitch materials as an editable PowerPoint presentation – a ‘pre-read’ that could be sent as background to an important partnership meeting, as a tool to deploy in the meeting itself, and afterwards. It gets the main points of AVI’s excellent partnership offer across, while leaving lots of room for the prospect-centred messaging that will find the greatest traction.

How do you get traction for a silent emergency against the deafening roar of a world in polycrisis? How do you cut through in a time of unprecedented demand on their time, attention and charity dollars?

Facing the quiet crisis of escalating child hunger South Asia-wide, and grappling with questions like these, a global team of UNICEF fundraisers decided to do something different. They’d get the writer to go see the programs firsthand.

This assignment, and set of co-created materials, was the result. Dark Horse Director Trish Pinto visited several UNICEF-led programs in India, subsequently attending a conference in Colombo, Sri Lanka and interviewing the Nutrition Chiefs of the eight South Asian countries, assembled to discuss the crisis.  

Designed in Word to maximise its utility in global, regional and country offices across South Asia, this package of materials included a 12-page South Asia Nutrition Emergency (SANE) Case for Support, Frequently Asked Questions, and 8 country-specific one pagers, which could be inserted into the (customisable) Case for Support.  

With a prestige event for high value philanthropists and corporate prospects less than two months away, CARE Australia needed high quality materials to make its core case for support and showcase its highest priority international programs. Fast.

Dark Horse Communications did the concept development and copy-writing for a suite of four cases for support, speaking to CARE Australia’s urgent work for women and girls in 122 countries worldwide.

Print and pdf-ready Canva presentations detail CARE’s emergency/rapid response and longer-term development programs, highlighting CARE-supported initiatives in the Upper Mekong Delta, PNG and war-torn rural Ethiopia.

This major assignment was to create customisable (in Word and PPT) case making materials to support approaches to high value prospects of every persuasion – major donors, T&Fs, government sources, plus bi- and multilateral funders.

It involved a fortnight-long field trip to Pakistan, seeing the transformative, sustainable change UNICEF achieves in one of the toughest places on earth to be a vulnerable child, to produce:

Six 8-page program/theme bases cases for support –Learning & Skills, Child Protection, Nutrition, the Climate Crisis (and Solar Opportunity), KP’s Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) and S.U.C.C.E.S.S, which stands for Scaling Up Convergence of Essential Social Services and is a new innovation in Pakistan as it strives to leave no child behind.

Four 8-page Provincial Profiles -of Sindh and Punjab, and also Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and Balochistan, the former two working remotely with UNICEF provincial offices.

Three templates for Corporate Partnerships, Major Proposals and Impact Reporting

Smiling Mind delivers the proven benefits of mindfulness meditation to Australian classrooms via a fun, easy-to-use free app and teacher training programs. Smiling Mind has grown like wildfire since it was established in 2012, with 6.1M downloads – and counting. Today it’s a quiet revolution in classrooms across the country, reaching an estimated 7.2M children across the country, with its goal of creating Australia’s first mindful generation now within its sights.

Work by Dark Horse Communications for Smiling Mind has included national and international Trust and Foundation prospecting, fundraising strategy development, and authoring and editing grant applications that raised $3.5M+.

Education, once considered the great enabler, is today the great divider – with an ever-growing chasm between the haves and have nots. The world is now in the grip of a foundational learning crisis, the consequence of pandemic-related learning losses, the cost-of-living crisis and longer-standing challenges of coverage and quality.

An estimated 64.3% of 10-year-olds in low and middle-income countries are unable to comprehend a simple written text.

What is now abundantly clear is that great leaps forward in educational coverage this century have not been met by similar gains in quality.

And while Sri Lanka has long been an educational exemplar in South Asia, achieving near universal primary school coverage, six tumultuous years in this country have put this progress at risk.

Dark Horse Communications was commissioned to produce a suite of education-themed Case for Support documents – speaking to the crisis in P-12 education, Early Childhood Education, and Adolescent Skills Development. Extra materials, including a PowerPoint presentation and print materials, were prepared for a high-level Government event in Colombo.

The data is in, and has been for yonks. As a tool of intergenerational poverty eradication, there is no tool like girls’ education. Yet in places like Kenya’s sprawling Kakuma Refugee Camp, as few as 1 in 100 girls get an education beyond primary school.

Established in 2005, Twic East Girls Scholarship Program (TEGSP) is a modest volley in the right direction, led by South Sudanese Australian volunteers. Most are originally from the county of Twic East (on the Sudanese/Kenyan border), and grew up in Kakuma Refugee Camp after fleeing war in South Sudan as children, and prior to being accepted as refugees to Australia. They know camps like Kakuma are not places girls can thrive.  

TEGSP is currently sponsoring 8 girls from Kakuma and Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps in South Sudan to study at boarding schools in Kitale, Kenya and Juba, South Sudan. These are high quality learning environments where the girls are safe, supported and well-fed, as well as educated.

Trish and Dark Horse Communications assist with fundraising in a pro bono capacity, and donate the cost of one scholarship per year.

World Wildlife Fund Australia has a vision of humanity and nature living in harmony together and needs sustained long term support to help make it happen. Amidst the largest inter-generational wealth transfer in human history, this necessarily includes a focus on legacy giving.

Dark Horse provided copy-writing and conceptual services for a direct mail Gift-in-Will pack to a pool of existing long term donors, featuring WWF-A’s successful Koalas Forever campaign.

With Tone Studio

Launched in March 2021, Collingwood Yards today is a popular hub of creative endeavour and edgy, art-y community life.

The capital works required to turn this massive, derelict-for-decades’ site into a contemporary arts precinct ran to tens of millions of dollars, every one of them donated.

The capital project was enabled by Australian philanthropy and a major capital campaign led by prominent arts philanthropist Daniel Besen AM; supported by Dark Horse.

Work by Dark Horse included a fundraising strategy, prospect identification, profiling and engagement planning, development of a case for support and philanthropic grant proposals that helped raise $5M+ for this fabulous new inner-city cultural hot spot.

The successful community campaign to save the Abbotsford Convent is the stuff of folklore. Restoring the site to its former glory however, was something else again – with an eye-watering price tag attached.

12 Beautiful Things about the Abbotsford Convent explained why it was worth it, speaking to all the treasures that had already arrived, and the grand vision for all that was still to come. This tax time direct mail campaign targeted the base of the Convent’s donor pipeline, and thus the future success and sustainability of fundraising efforts.

Design by GOZER STUDIO

Trust and Foundation fundraising at Arts Centre Melbourne had been a tale of mixed fortunes, and work here included addressing the misconception that grants monies may be better spent elsewhere. Not so - ACM leads the Southern Hemisphere in ‘inclusive arts’ for kids with disabilities and the neuro-diverse. It’s also Australia’s only Registered Training Organisation offering production crew training in a live performance venue.

Dark Horse secured substantial grants for both, along with support for Asia TOPA, Arts Centre Melbourne’s triennial celebration of performing arts from the Asia-Pacific region. Grant income rose by over 500% during the period in which Dark Horse was providing prospect identification and grant writing services.

The Darwin Challenge is the brainchild of Charles Darwin’s Australia-based great-great-grandson, Chris Darwin. With a background in advertising and the help of some talented techie friends, Chris has issued the Darwin Challenge – to go meat free at least a day a week. It’s one of the single most powerful things we can do for planet earth. Not to mention our health.

To track the benefits and encourage you on your meat-free journey, the Darwin Challenge provides a fun, free app which tallies the difference you’re making over time.

Work by Dark Horse included a fundraising strategy, prospect research, grant applications, copywriting and a project to secure endorsements from famous vegetarians. Sir Paul McCartney’s was a high point.

No Smokes is an anti-smoking website and set of smoking cessation tools developed especially for young Indigenous Australians, who take up smoking earlier and at wildly disproportionate rates to the rest of the population. It’s a key reason Indigenous Australians can expect to die an average decade earlier than non-Indigenous Australians.

Work by Dark Horse Communications included a strapline (check it out, it’s deadly), website concept and content development, a communications strategy, and writing feature articles for industry publications.

Eighty-five years after first opening its doors in 1935, the National Theatre endures as a magnificent performance venue and celebrated home of creative education and training. This grand heritage-listed theatre is a treasured local landmark and cultural asset; its ballet and drama schools incomparable – unique in their offer to a new generation of Australian creative talent. Vast, ongoing feedback speaks to the special place the National Theatre holds in the hearts of many. The National is also a heritage gem in need of some serious TLC, with a serious price tag attached.

Enter Dark Horse, assisting with up-to-date fundraising collateral to take the National Theatre to ‘philanthropic market’, by identifying its philanthropic sources most likely, and articulating strategies to deploy in fundraising over the immediate and longer term.

Under visionary new leadership Melbourne’s much-loved ‘JewMu’ is ramping up its fundraising activity.

Dark Horse Comms completed a comprehensive review of past fundraising before devising a strategy to reboot the Museum’s multi-channel fundraising programs. Dark Horse Director Trish Pinto also provided hands on fundraising assistance, authoring grant applications for philanthropic and government sources, as well as copy for fundraising communications.

Early wins include putting Melbourne’s second Mirka Mora tram on the rails with support from Creative Victoria. The JewMu’s MIRKA exhibition the tram promotes is itself a smash hit, and fundraising at Museum is officially back on track.

UniMelb Arts commissions the services of Dark Horse, a stewardship specialist, to prepare impact reports on Arts programs supported by UHNW donors. This includes the wonderful Hansen histories, part of a revitalisation of the History Department enabled by the generosity of the Hansen Trust.

Focused on the 20th century, war, the Soviet Bloc, protest movements and revolutionary histories, Hansen-supported subjects are a major hit with students and a good news story for donor impact reporting.

Dark Horse Director Trish Pinto is alumna of Melbourne Uni Arts and its History Department, picking up the prestigious donor-funded JA Aird Memorial Prize for her final year politics essay (that’s now history).

Trust for Nature’s primary purpose is to protect and restore nature on private land. With more than 60% of Victoria’s natural ecosystems in private hands, Trust for Nature’s work is central to the survival of Victoria’s spectacular wild places and the native plants and animals that make their homes there.

The organisation aims not only to conserve but rehabilitate and restore ecosystems, returning life to degraded habitats and helping native wildlife flourish anew.

Dark Horse Communications assisted with a suite of thematic cases for support (designed in Word so that they’re living documents), as well as by identifying philanthropic opportunities and authoring high value grant applications.

Few will fail to recall the advertising campaign that accompanied WSU’s rebrand from UWS. Telling graduate stories including that of once-was-child-solider now leading human rights lawyer Deng Adut, Unlimited celebrated WSU’s rich diversity and struggletown roots. With it came a clarion call to unlock the potential of Sydney’s Greater West.

Unlimited was fundraising genius. Dark Horse Comms has assisted with several major campaigns under its banner – providing concept development and copywriting for Creating Opportunity (supporting merit and diversity scholarships), a major Science Centre and a new Medical Building.

Live4Life is a mental health and suicide prevention operating across rural and regional Victoria. It’s the only model of its kind designed specifically for rural and regional communities – where rates of youth suicide are 40% higher than metropolitan areas.

With proven effectiveness, a growing portfolio of industry awards, the imprimatur of federal, State and local governments, Live4Life is scaling Victoria-wide as fast as funds allow. Now with added urgency given what we know about the mental health repercussions of the pandemic.

Dark Horse designed Live4Life’s first comprehensive fundraising strategy and helped implement it, identifying philanthropic opportunities and authoring grant applications. The organisation has now secured $1M+ in grants and doubled its footprint in two years.