Crossing the Streams: Creating a Strategy to Bring a College Together for a Successful Giving Day
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How a cross-divisional team from Ithaca College selected and implemented strategies for its first-ever Giving Day, including the selection of target audiences, volunteer ambassadors, and social media messaging.
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Crossing the Streams: Creating a Strategy to Bring a College Together for a Successful Giving Day
- 1. Crossing the Streams: Creating a Strategy to Bring a College Together for a Successful Giving Day
- 2. Presenters Rob de la Fuente Director of the IC Annual Fund Twitter: @ICAF_Rob Michael O’Neill Social Media Strategist Twitter: @mikeoneill76 Christopher Pollock Director of Advancement Communications Twitter: @ICchris
- 3. By the End, You Will Have . . . A basic understanding of how to create an audience-centric giving day strategy A deeper knowledge of the role social media and communications play in a giving day — and how to incorporate into your own event An idea of how IC’s Giving Day affected donor acquisition and retention An elevated appreciation of Ghostbusters
- 4. About Ithaca College Residential, comprehensive college located in Upstate New York’s Finger Lakes region 6,400 students (mostly undergraduate) Five schools: – Business – Communications – Humanities & Sciences – Health Sciences & Human Performance – Music
- 5. You Want to Do Giving Day . . . When?!
- 6. Big Decisions Ahead Core planning team Strategic goals and outcomes desired Target audiences Vendor and platform Finding an “ambassador” Leaderboards, prizes, and hourly challenges Communications collateral
- 7. Planning Teams Core planning team: 4 people Larger cross-functional group: approx. 15 – Representing Institutional Advancement, Marketing Communications, and other units
- 8. Setting Strategic Goals What did the college want? – Focus on participation, not dollars – Engagement in advance of campaign launch What did our audience want? – Have donors feel like part of a larger community -> emphasis on small gifts adding up to big impact – Set playful goals using familiar numbers
- 9. Could We Handle Capacity?
- 10. Finding the Right Platform Needed a platform that could: – Handle front-end website and giving form PLUS gift processing and reporting – Handle an extremely heavy traffic load – Provide robust features
- 11. Setting Goals Internal goal (not publicized): 1,000 new donors Series of tiered public goals: 607 (area code) 953 (street number) 1,485.0 (ZIP code)
- 12. Tagline and Visual Identity Give Back to Move IC Forward #ICGivingDay
- 13. Communications Vehicles Website Email marketing Merchandise / souvenirs Social media (#ICGivingDay hashtag) Videos – Animated promo video – Fun video featuring college’s president – Personalized thank-you videos for donors – Follow-up video featuring students
- 14. Website For weeks, building the website was our top priority Planned to launch about a week before Content included: • The animated “Why Give” video plus additional case for support • Suggested messaging for social media • Leaderboards and prize challenge details • Social media feed
- 15. Website Examples
- 17. IC Giving Day Promo Video
- 19. Volunteers Think broadly about who and what: – Ambassadors and challenge donors – Groups who can get the word out – Speaking of our ambassadors, ours was an Angel . . .
- 20. Volunteer Ambassador David Boreanaz '91 Actor, Director, Producer (Bones)
- 21. Volunteer Ambassador A well-known name will draw attention to your efforts and be a social media champion
- 23. Challenge Donor Volunteers Challenge donors – Challengers for the overall goals – Donors for other challenges – New donors that day
- 24. Recruitment and Timing Volunteer groups – Existing volunteers – Donors – Student groups – Social media “influencers” Timing of emails Timing and hourly challenges
- 26. Gifts by Hour
- 28. Campus Volunteers Campus HQ and partnering with another event Command center Phonathon
- 29. Giving Day is Coming!!
- 30. Crafting the Message Create a sense of community
- 31. Crafting the Message Make it about the students
- 32. Crafting the Message Provide passive giving messages in early social media posts – Show how gifts affect students lives – Tell why some alumni feel it’s important to give back
- 35. Planning the Schedule of Posts
- 36. Planning the Schedule of Posts Creating a calendar of posts
- 37. Planning the Schedule of Posts Creating a calendar of posts
- 38. Giving Day
- 39. Giving Day
- 40. Giving Day
- 41. Real-time Thank You Videos Keep up the energy for 24 hours Quick and consumable Personal, not cookie cutter
- 42. Real-time Thank You Videos #REIGifts
- 43. Real-time Thank You Videos We had a room of ~15 people to create these Stalked Giving Day donors on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram Threshold of at least 500 Twitter followers Cranked out 153 videos between 10am and 10pm
- 44. Real-time Thank You Videos
- 45. Real-time Thank You Videos
- 46. Results 6,737 engagements on posts using #ICGivingDay Reached more than 1.75 million people on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram combined
- 47. Results 41,000 views of all of our videos – Real-time Thank You videos had almost 5,000 views among them
- 48. Results
- 49. Results Email: $123,373 Direct Traffic: $73,790 Social Media: $7,558 – Facebook: $5,764 – Twitter: $1,477 – Instagram: $167 – LinkedIn: $100 – Google+: $50
- 50. Dollars and Donors Over 2,300 gifts from more than 2,600 donors Over $310,000 raised and almost half a million dollars leveraged
- 51. Donor Breakdown Focused on alumni participation 1,500 of the 2,600 alumni 30% young alumni Almost 1,000 new to the fiscal year 20% new or reacquired long-lapsed donors 23% parents 18% employees Jumped 1% in alumni participation
- 52. Retention and Stewardship Retention key New or long-lapsed donors 9.2% New to fiscal year 11.5% Repeat donors 52.3% Overall 25.7% Stewardship – Thank you video – Special opportunities – Segmentation Will know more at the end of the fiscal year
- 53. Priority: Unrestricted Dollar priority or you get what you ask for… – IC Annual Fund – Donor centricity – 89% of all new dollars went to an Annual Fund allocation – 47% purely unrestricted
- 57. Moving Forward Hard decisions about IC Giving Day Part II – Campus events during fall 2015 – Gratitude Day: February 18, 2016 Opportunities during upcoming milestones – Ithaca College’s 125th anniversary – Upcoming campaign launch
- 58. Don’t Just Repeat — Reinvent
- 59. Thanks! Rob de la Fuente rdelafuente@ithaca.edu Twitter: @ICAF_Rob Michael O’Neill moneill@ithaca.edu Twitter: @mikeoneill76 Christopher Pollock cpollock@ithaca.edu Twitter: @ICchris
Notas do Editor
- Welcome, everyone. We’re here to tell you a bit about Ithaca College’s very first Giving Day fundraising campaign, which took place one year ago this month. [Point toward water and pens at rear.] Say something if you need us to speak up or have a question. We will also have Q&A session at the end.
- All three of us are from Ithaca College in upstate New York. Chris and Mike work in Marketing Communications, and Rob works in advancement Feel free to heckle on us Twitter during, and after
- Go through these one by one as they appear. Last bullet: “Ghostbusters – why? Just because.”
- After this slide, ask for show of hands. Who is from: 1) Communications? 2) Development? 3)Alumni Relations? A properly executed Giving Day involves a strong partnership, from the start, b/w all three areas, so hopefully each of these groups will benefit from this talk. Brief history: first higher education giving day: Columbia University in October 2012. Since then many schools have done similar events. Our VP of advancement long interested in innovative ways to engage our audiences. In fall 2014, a mandate: we’d do inaugural Giving Day on February 26, 2015.
- After a brief series of panic attacks, we got to work planning. It was early November, and we had about 3.5 months to go until the big day. Discussions with other schools and consultants led us to believe we should have started 6 months ahead – but that was water under the bridge at that point.
- These were the major decisions that needed to be made ASAP. Core planning team: who is in charge? Target audiences: we knew alumni was an obvious one. But what about parents? Students? Faculty and staff? Vendor/platform: could we use our existing ones, or did we need a vendor? (Rob will talk about ambassadors and logistics later; Mike will talk about social media)
- Core planning team: the three of us plus another annual fund staff member who’s focused on young alumni Larger planning group of about 12-15 from across the division Important to set up recurring meetings well ahead of time. Core group met weekly; larger group every other week. Since we in higher ed tend to use meetings as a “unit of currency,” here’s a fun fact: I was involved in 33 meetings, conference calls, and planning sessions over a three-month period.
- Of course, we had to start with goals. What did the college want to achieve from this to make it worth the investment of time and resources? We focused on participation since IC had low rates of alumni participation in the past But also had to focus on what our audiences wanted, too. What would motivate them? Who would they respond to? Thus, our “crossing the streams” metaphor comes from how critical it was to have both a volunteer strategy AND a communications strategy. (Next slide: Twinkie joke)
- Giving Day would (hopefully) bring hundreds and hundreds of gifts. But could our systems handle it?
- We already had an online giving system, but judging from past outages, we were nervous about relying solely on it for such a short-term event. Rob and his team talked to several vendors who specialize in giving days and crowdfunding. We ultimately selected Kimbia, a small company based out of Austin, Texas.
- Although we had an internal goal, we thought we should play it safe and start low. Selected a tiered set of goals based on numbers that were familiar to most of our audience Due to the way the Kimbia system worked, it would be difficult to count number of actual donors in real-time. So we choose to tally number of gifts.
- At the same time, we worked fast and furious with our Creative Services team to develop a core visual identity for the event that was both true to our brand but felt fresh and new. On this slide, you see the logo, tagline, and hashtag we developed. Goal was to integrate this into our campaign in a cohesive (but fun!) way. Wanted to have something that could last over several years with only minor changes (such as date, obviously).
- And here are some of those places where our Giving Day identity was featured. Creative Services assigned a web designer whose top priority was our Giving Day site (remember: “all hands on deck” mandate) For email, we decided upon a campaign that included five messages sent throughout the day on February 26, which would announce when we hit each goal or had additional challenge dollars. Also produced a series of videos, some of which you’ll see today. This is included a “Why Give’ video that made a case for support.
- As many of you probably know, building a website from scratch, including design and content, is time-consuming! Ultimate goal was to build a website that informed AND educated our audiences in a fun, compelling, and “shareable” way
- We made sure to have a responsive site that was easy for us to update without having to go through the vendor. Here you see the desktop and mobile versions of our “pre-event” site. We also had advance access to “day-of” and “post-event” instances (confusing at times!) I’d recommend a “soft launch” that includes at least a week or more for beta-testing and refining. (Next slide is “testing” joke)
- Testing is critical, especially for an event as short as 24 hours. Once your giving day starts, you’ll have very little time to fix website bugs – get that out of the way early! Inviting VIPs to help beta-test, such as our Alumni Association Board of Directors, was itself an engagement opportunity for them. Especially if you’re setting up a new system, you’ll want to familiarize yourself with the back end, both for content and reporting.
- Here is the “why give?” video I mentioned earlier. It was featured on our home page in advance of Giving Day, then moved to an interior “Why Give” page. (Next slide is Rob’s. Turn over to Rob de la Fuente, our director of annual giving and the main point person for IC Giving Day 2015)
- Giving Day was quickly approaching communicate with our audiences and get them excited for it.
- We faced a few challenges crafting the messaging No mascot incredibly high tuition our historic alumni giving percentage is very low Alumni have particular affinity for their respective schools What we needed to remind them is that even though we’re a community of thousands of people who’ve had different experiences, they all have one shared love, which is IC.
- When alumni think about their love for IC, they think of their student experience. Because of all of those challenges, we knew we had to make it all about the students. Our alumni are fantastic at supporting our students and they give back through mentoring and helping with internships and jobs so we wanted to show this was another way that alumni could support them.
- We don’t really do a lot of messaging about giving on social media over all. Most of that comes in the traditional forms of mailings and email it was important to provide regular giving messages on social for the two weeks leading up to the week of Giving Day. By posting videos of students and alumni talking about how the gift of monetary giving has affected them we were able to plant that seed which started people thinking about giving so that it wasn’t just a smack in the face at midnight on Giving Day.
- We didn’t do a lot of messaging for students other than letting them know it was happening. We have a sculpture in the middle of campus and so we attached a bow to it with a present tag with the Giving Day branding and then a sign below it showing only the hashtag. We felt it was important to have them help spread the message of Giving Day without being bombarded with messages for them to give.
- Again, because our tuition is so high, we wanted to be mindful of how that might look and we were trying really hard to not give anyone a reason to troll our efforts that day.
- We have a lot of channels and a lot of things we wanted to post leading up to Giving Week, leading up to Giving Day, and then on Giving Day.
- It was clear that in order to keep any of that straight, I needed to create a communication schedule for all of those posts. The tabs for the weeks leading up to it and then for the day of I really just showed the times and locations of the posts so that I could visually see which places might get redundant posts and which places weren’t getting enough messages.
- Once I figured out exactly when and where I wanted to post the messages, I began crafting the exact wording for each message that went out. This was true for everything except for the last two goals. Because we never imagined that we’d even get to, let alone destroy, our third goal I had to make up that messaging on the fly. A lot of these I could schedule to post ahead of time but for those that I couldn’t, it was extremely helpful to have the wording, the link I wanted to use, and the image available for when I needed to post so I didn’t have to take the time to think about what I wanted to say.
- Our Giving Day started at midnight and though we kicked it off with posts on all of our social media, the messaging between midnight and 8 am was very light. I stayed up for a couple hours to answer any questions or comments and there were a few right in the beginning from some who wanted to be the person to give the first gift.
- It was really exciting to see the number of alumni who were vying for the spot of “first gift”.
- The day though really kicked off when we posted this video of our president going around campus telling everyone it was Giving Day.
- One of the challenges of any Giving Day is how do we keep up the energy and enthusiasm around it for a full day? The hourly challenges were definitely a good start but we wanted to do something that would be an instant “thank you”, other than the automated email, and something that would create excitement and be shareable. We thought that if we created something in real time that they could view quickly and it was personal enough that it didn’t feel canned, then they’d probably reshare or retweet them on their social networks.
- The inspiration for our real time thank you videos came from a campaign that the outdoor store REI did a couple years ago. They asked people to ask for suggestions of what present to get for someone during the holidays and hashtag it with #reigifts. REI then did a quick scroll through the Twitter accounts of those people and then create a quick :30 second video with an idea, adding in the people’s names and references to things in their Twitter feed so you knew it wasn’t just a cookie cutter video. This one was to two students, who are brothers, who I worked with when I was at RPI.
- We hired 30 student “actors” for the videos throughout the day. In the room we had two to four actors at a time who could switch out so we weren’t sending these videos from the same people all the time. A camera operator, two to four people quickly editing the videos, my boss to upload the videos to our YouTube channel, me for posting the videos on Twitter, my social media student assistant to do the stalking, one or two donor relations team members, and one of my co-workers to help me monitor social media.
- All of the videos were under :30 seconds and the majority of them were under :20 seconds. Here’s one example of the videos that we created. Aaron Inver ‘06 is a producer of news media at Fox29 in Philadelphia. We told our students to have fun with these videos so here’s what they came up with for his.
- And here’s the one we did for David Boreanaz.
- Just so you know, we’re claiming “Turn Up For Giving” as the slogan for our next campaign.
- Because we used separate tracking URLs for emails, each social platform, and on the Giving Day website, we were able to track exactly how much money was raised by each platform.
- And course, we wanted to share the good news about Giving Day soon afterward. We sent a thank-you email the following day, again from David Boreanaz. Also did a full-page infographic-style spread in ICView, our college’s magazine (as seen here). I know you can’t read this, but we have copies here for anyone who wants one.
- Thank you, Rob. Of course, the next question everyone asked was, “When are doing the next one?” Unfortuately, our college endured a rough fall semester, with protests related to issues surrounding diversity, inclusion, and the college’s president – who just announced his decision to retire next summer Originally planned Giving Day 2016 this month, but decided to do Gratitude Day instead (stewardship rather than solicitation)
- Whenever we do it next, it’s important to reinvent, not just repeat it Hell, even “Ghostbusters” had a 27-year gap between movies!
- Thanks to all of you for coming. Here are our email addresses and Twitter handles – please feel free to reach out. I’d now like to open up the floor for questions.