We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Darby Sween a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Darby thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We believe kindness is contagious and so we’d love for you to share with us and our audience about the kindest thing anyone has ever done for you?

The kindest thing anyone has done for me is when Grace Berbig, Letters of Love’s Founder and President, gave me the opportunity to become the Vice President of her organization. She trusted and cared about me to take this position with very limited prior experience. This made me feel valued, and has brought my endless opportunities to learn about business, nonprofit work, and managing people. I feel so grateful to her for trusting me to take on this position.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am a 22 year old senior at University of Wisconsin-Madison studying marketing and management. I am the Vice President of Letters of Love, which is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that provides emotional support to pediatric patients through handmade cards of love and encouragement. We have 220 (and growing) independent chapters in high schools and universities across the United States. As the Vice President, I have my hands in a lot of different areas of the business. In terms of prior knowledge, I had a few business classes under my belt, but other than that I learned most of what I know through helping run the nonprofit. I am the most proud of how I helped provide organizational structure and processes to the organization when prior, there wasn’t any. I believe that the work I put in helped set the organization up to grow as much as it has.

How’d you meet your business partner?

I met Grace Berbig when I was 14 years old at Orono Middle School in Orono, Minnesota. She moved to my school from a different town, and I took her on an official tour of our school. We were friends ever since! When Grace started the Letters of Love club at Orono High School in 2018, I was among over 100 others that showed up to the meeting where it all started.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

While I didn’t do this directly, my team and I know the value of our social media, as it is one of our main sources of growth. We built this audience because, as early 20-year olds, we know how our target market acts, thinks, and feels, because we are part of the demographic. This has been tremendously important in our success, because we can cater our content and interactions knowing what our audience wants and expects of us.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.lettersofloveglobal.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lettersofloveglobal
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lettersofloveglobal/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darby-sween-8182611b8/

Image Credits
Devon Sween Photography