"Switchboard can build you a stronger and happier university community." So concludes CASE Currents' senior editor Tara Laskowski in her recent profile of Switchboard.
Love was a central theme at this year’s AMA Higher Ed symposium. Examining the role of love in branding, storytelling, and internal collaboration, speakers emphasized that love is integral to a college or university’s identity. Deborah Maue writes in her reflection on the symposium,
If there’s any doubt about the power of emotion in college choice, think back to your own experience. What do you remember about your visit to the school you ultimately chose? The number of books in the library? The average SAT score? If you’re like me, you remember a feeling. A feeling of belonging.
We want to use this as a backdrop as we examine Columbia Giving Day. Two-year-old Columbia Giving Day is a 24-hour rush of giving, content, and online ambassadorship each October. In 2012, Columbia Giving Day raised $6.8 million from 5,000 donors in fifty states and thirty-nine countries. This year, Columbia raised $7.8 million from nearly 10,000 donors in fifty states and fifty-three countries.
Columbia Giving Day’s success is due to not only top-notch online ambassadors, reminders about the event embedded everywhere in the online Columbia ecosystem, and a flood of earned advertising, but to the love, belonging, and generosity that the campaign cultivated.
The Columbia Giving Day campaign video highlights the accomplishments of Columbia students, how Columbia uses alumni donations, and the shared experience of students and alumni. The video isn’t an advertisement; it’s a call to action, and a reminder that Columbians share a connection, that they belong.
By creating a single day for alumni, students, parents, staff, and faculty to donate to the university, Columbia made giving a collective, social experience. When donors made their contribution, they had a chance to think not just about their own connections to Columbia, but about their connections to other Columbians who were doing the same thing. Columbia also hosted Giving Day events on campus to make that communal experience tangible.
In doing so, Columbia was able to attract a broader base of donors and engage important demographics, like young alumni:
Update on #columbiagivingday from our fund chair. Largely driven by young alumni participation, giving was up by 58%! ^h
— Columbia Engineering (@myCEYA)
An impressive 40% of donors on the first Columbia Giving Day had never given to Columbia before. For those first-time-donors, Columbia Giving Day is now a tradition.
That returns us to where we began: the trifecta of love, giving, and generosity. Columbia founded Giving Day only two years ago, and the results are already astounding. If colleges can start cultivating a culture of love, belonging, and generosity while students are in school as well as after they’ve graduated, their communities will only get stronger.
Last week we discussed part of the outreach campaign we ran to convert our alma mater’s community to Switchboard. In that post, we named Instagram as an easy way to build a sense of community among a distant and disparate audience. But Instagram is just so boring. If you want to excite the people you’re trying to convert, you have to be creative.
Yes, we dressed up as Gumby. Or, one of us did. During the annual “Working Weekend” at Reed, Brent dressed up as Gumby and asked visiting alumni, and current students, to write down what they could teach each other and pin it to his costume. We got offers to teach everything from how to play Carmina Burana on guitar to how to understand Heidegger’s Being and Time. That offer came from the college’s president, who is pictured with Gumby below.
On top of having the obvious benefit of keeping “Reed Switchboard” on the minds of those who participated, the Gumby campaign also got people to adopt the Switchboard mindset. “What can I offer my community? What does my community need?” Each paper pinned to Gumby was an offer that the pinner could, potentially, post on Switchboard. And every person who read that offer, and all the others pinned to Gumby, saw what their community had to offer.
This wasn’t just a stunt to attract attention, it was about involving community members in the creation of a Switchboard, a Gumby Switchboard that stood in as a metaphor for the real thing.
Switchboard isn’t hard to understand. “Ask. Offer. Succeed.” is intuitive. But people don’t always realize right away what they can offer their community. “I’m not an expert in anything,” they might think. Or, “I don’t have a job to offer.” Gumby was an exercise in self-confidence, in a way. We wanted people to think, “I have something to offer.”
Because they do. Everyone has something to offer—it doesn’t have to be a spare bed or an internship. It might only be barrels of snack mix.
Changing what people think of when they hear the word “offer,” changing it from the uppercase ‘O’ “Offer” to the lowercase. If the language of generosity is everyday, generosity will be, too.