From the Nominator

"The Veterans of Grove City College project was an effort to find and connect with our alumni who served or are currently serving in the United States Armed Forces. Our goal was to engage with this targeted community of alumni to collect their stories for the purpose of honoring their service to our country. 

We found that this was a constituency for whom we had little information. Through this outreach, we were able to develop an “honor wall,” a searchable online directory of those who served from the college’s earliest days to the present. This honor wall was launched on Memorial Day and publicized through emails and our website.  

This initiative also gave a us chance to develop a dedicated web channel for these veteran alumni. It highlights the college’s own military history through photos housed in multiple Flickr galleries, links to digitized documents, and also contains the honor wall where veteran alumni can search for friends and classmates by class year. This dedicated web presence for the alumni of our school has been a great way to engage this limited target population (roughly 4.5% of our living alumni base) in its own special way. With updated information on many alumni, we were able to continue the engagement by sending them a Veterans Day postcard with our thanks for their service."

From the Judges

We love this initiative and the partnership between the advancement department, college archives, and galleries department! Great, organized way to honestly re-embrace this community of alumni. The use of the wall concept and the ability for alumni to look each other up is fantastic. This is an excellent program that could be easily replicated at any institution with a ROTC or military programs. They had amazing results in terms of connections with alumni who are veterans and their families, as well as participation levels. Love the Flickr book and the searchable database. The pictures are amazing!