From the Nominator

Once you’ve launched your first day of giving, you need to push and grow it each year to bring in more gifts. And before you know it, your day of giving is vital to your overall advancement plan, or at least it should be! We completely reimagined our Mocs Give Day at University of Tennessee Chattanooga by incorporating it into our overall advancement plan. Growing from $180,000 and 550 donors in 2020 to more than $1,700,000 and 2,131 donors in 2023, the Mocs Give Day campaign has impacted our giving and donor counts overall and in nearly every segment in our pipeline. By completely shifting our mentality from exclusive annual giving to advancement-wide, we critically improved our ability to motivate constituents, meet timelines, and raise more money from more donors. We grew segments, increased custom communications, and revamped on-campus activations; as a result, in 2023, 1 in every 10 donors were students, and we had nearly 700 first-time donors. And all of this came from a budget close to $15,000.

From the Judges

We were particularly impressed by the improvements made based on past experience, as well as stewardship (through ThankView). The results were impressive. This is a great model for other institutions.