Holding the Marketing Together When It Mattered Most

When RUN DIPG’s Marketing Manager went on leave for a couple of months, the team needed more than a plan. They needed someone who could step straight in, take the keys to the whole marketing function, and just run with it.

No long handovers. No easing in. Just full trust, full responsibility, and a lot of moving parts.

That’s where Sunday Marketing came in.

The Situation

Charities don’t operate on slow timelines, and RUN DIPG is no exception. Events, fundraising, community engagement, and communications were all happening at once, and they needed to keep that momentum going without missing a beat.

My role was to hold everything together while their Marketing Manager was away. Day-to-day marketing. Campaigns. Events. Social. Email. Messaging. The lot.

The Monday.com Project

Building Systems for Work That Cannot Pause

Alongside the marketing execution, I led a project to design and implement ‘Monday’ as RUN DIPG’s central project management system.

RUN DIPG runs recurring events throughout the year, and they needed a framework where any team member could step in, understand what was happening, and keep things moving. The goal was to make their operations resilient, not dependent on any one person being present.

When you’re doing work this important, you cannot afford for the business to slow down because someone is on leave, unwell, or unexpectedly unavailable. The organisation needs to keep functioning, seamlessly.

This system now allows their team to manage events, campaigns, timelines, and responsibilities clearly and collaboratively, with continuity built in.

The Real Challenge

This wasn’t normal marketing. RUN DIPG is a charity dedicated to funding research into DIPG, a rare and aggressive form of childhood brain cancer. It is currently incurable. The organisation exists to drive awareness, raise critical research funding, and support families navigating the unimaginable.

Which means the message is never “donate and we’ll save every child.”
The funds raised go toward research, and toward building a future where that sentence is no longer true. That reality creates a very delicate marketing balance.

You’re holding hope, without making promises. Urgency, without fear.
Fundraising, without pressure. And storytelling, while honouring the beautiful children who have passed.

Learning how to communicate that, respectfully and honestly, was one of the most challenging and meaningful experiences of my career.

What I Worked On

In a short timeframe, I supported RUN DIPG across:

• Event marketing, planning and campaign support for RUN 4 RUN DIPG, Heels to Heal in Sydney and Newcastle and many more events.

• Social media management and coordination

• Email communications turned around quickly and carefully

• Ongoing marketing support as new needs arose

• Systems and process development

• Project management infrastructure via Monday.com

Everything had to move fast. And everything had to be right. When you’re communicating about children’s cancer, there is no room for sloppy copy, mixed messages, or rushed decisions.