From the Nominator

Oregon State University is integrating its multi-billion dollar fundraising campaign with a comprehensive campaign for engagement. Beyond counting moments of engagement (as other engagement campaigns have done), we are driving and tracking the impact of alumni volunteerism and participation on the priorities of the university community. Imagine how mobilizing it is to aspire to “deliver career mentors to every single OSU student.” Compare that palpable message to typical industry campaigns that merely hope to “increase volunteers by 15%, or Facebook likes by 30%.” Imagine delivering active legislative advocates in every state voting district. Consider the inspiration of creating centers for underrepresent alumni and students to convene. These are real aspirational goals, backed by a fully revamped measurement and tracking system.

This outcome-based approach has created a mission-driven focus on engagement, and has resulted in a framework that combines the data-driven opportunities of technology with the human impact to tell a story from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective.  

This year, university and volunteer leadership coalesced to define the aspirational outcomes of constituent engagement. To ensure success, we re-coded all participation, volunteerism, and giving data tracked since the campaign’s quiet start in 2017, and developed sharable live-data dashboards. These inform the campaign’s academic leadership (provost and deans), who bi-annually review campaign progress, and chart the shared resources and opportunities of the effort. The work of utilizing tracking engagement tools has readied us for campaign success and to achieve meaningful impact for our students and university.