Columbia Giving Day and the Trifecta of Love, Belonging, and Generosity

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)

November 8, 2013

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.

Lloyd Reynolds's Perennial Pedagogy

Lloyd Reynolds (1902–1978) was a calligraphy professor at Reed College for close to forty years and a calligraphy icon in his own right. His love and dedication are contagious. In his work, Reynolds followed what he called the “Perennial Pedagogy,” a simple, well-worn guide to creative practice.

Perennial Pedagogy

1.  Get the idea of what is to be learned (the “formative image”).
2.  Concentrate (serene open awareness - try softer, not harder).
3.  Get the feel.
4.  Practice, practice, practice.
5.  Take it easy (Easy does it.).
6.  Get the swing of it.
7.  Be in good form.
8.  Get lost in the work.
9.  Let IT do it.
10. Work for the work’s sake.
11. Don’t sell out.
12. Do it the right way.
13. Keep to your calling.
14. Teach. (Share your skills.)

Engaging Your Community by Enlisting Your Community: Meg Bernier at SLU

Meg Bernier at St. Lawrence University recently shared her success creating an official SLU Instagram account that students control. She writes:

“I was also shocked by the incredibly positive reaction I’ve gotten from our alumni. One said, ‘Meg, I actually search for the account on Instagram to make sure I haven’t missed anything.’ Who could ask for anything more in a new endeavor? All parts of our community audience are enjoying this, not just the people it was created for.”

We can’t applaud her more. What she’s demonstrated is not just that students are passionate and capable of engaging their own community with minimal guidance, but that the entire community, not just current students, are intensely interested in this sort of effort.

Meg’s work reaffirms our hope that our own efforts weren’t a fluke—or a mistake. We’re inspired to see the efforts of Meg and SLU students succeed. It takes a lot of faith in your community to do something like this, and it’s projects like Meg’s that restore our confidence in our own work when we’re feeling unsure. Kudos. If you haven’t read Meg’s blog, check it out. We’ll be looking to her for more inspiration in the future.

Planning Your Switchboard Roadtrip: Michela '12 & the Power of Community Advice

Michela and three of her friends posted an ask on Switchboard last April. The four of them were seeking advice on a roadtrip to the Southwest that they were planning for the summer. Michela chose to post on Switchboard because she had had success with Switchboard before. “I had a lot of success with Switchboard before (finding a place to stay in NYC), and I was really impressed with the effort alumni made to help,” she says.

Michela and her friends also knew that the advice they received from their community would be unique and reliable. Michela says, “Secondly, we figured that Reedies would have good perspectives on our Southwest adventures that we wouldn’t be able to find elsewhere. We’d looked through guidebooks and the internet broadly, but wanted some targeted advice or at least advice that we could trust 100%.”

Several members of their community responded with advice on where to go, what to eat, and what to avoid. “Honestly the suggestions we got from Reedies ended up being the best advice we got for the whole trip,” Michela says. “Paria Canyon and Calf Creek Falls literally shocked us into complete silence. They were both at the ends of 3 mile hikes and the incredible beauty of slot canyons at sunset and a waterfall at sunrise after a desert hike was literally breathtaking. I will probably never forget how awesome and just totally alive I felt after visiting those two places. And we would have never thought to go to them without the advice of Reedies on Switchboard.”

Some people come to Switchboard looking for a mentor, or for a place to stay. But Michela found a life-changing experience. “The other Switchboard-related story that really sticks out to me is our 3 day trek into and out of the Grand Canyon,” says Michela. “The trek was physically and emotionally grueling and full of unbelievable turns of events. It was intense and I’m not sure I would necessarily recommend people do what we did, but it is one of the things in my life I am most proud of, and is the first story I tell people when they ask what the trip was liked. Had we not been inspired by advice on Switchboard we probably wouldn’t have even had the idea to hike into the Canyon in the first place and definitely wouldn’t have had the guts to follow through with it.”

Michela adds, “More generally, that entire trip was one of the best and most important experiences of my life, and it came together in large part due to the generosity, helpfulness, and enthusiasm of the Reed community.” Our communities can change our lives if we only know how to tap into their reservoirs of experience and altruism. Switchboard makes it easy to ask our communities for help, and for our communities to respond to those asks. Sometimes this manifests as a job or internship, sometimes as a breathtaking view of a waterfall after sunrise.

Photos by Rick McCharles and Greg Willis, respectively.

Ask and Offer: Making the Language of Generosity Familiar

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.