International Stewardship Award Spotlight

University of British Columbia's Thanksgiving Thank-a-Thon  

2017 ISA Winner

View original submission

2020 Update

In 2017, The University of British Columbia’s successful Thanksgiving Thank-a-Thon project earned them ADRP’s Digital Communications Award. And while 2017 may seem like a lifetime ago, the methodology and the strategy UBC implemented can provide us all with valuable insight and inspire us to find ways to embrace digital communication channels to forge deeper connections with our donors. Now more than ever, it’s important to be able to maintain relationships virtually through social networks and online engagement.

The University of British Columbia launched its Thanksgiving Thank-a-Thon in late 2016. This award-winning campaign is a study in how coordinating efforts across stakeholder units and physical and digital platforms can result in a stellar donor experience that translates into deeper donor engagement and continued support. UBC turned their need for compelling programming for a key live donor event into an opportunity to connect with an audience outside of the in-person attendees. By utilizing their social networks to generate content for the in-person presentation, they were able to reach a broad range of donors, alumni and friends across the University that extended well beyond the ones they could invite to the event.

The catalyst for the project was UBC’s annual Donor Appreciation Evening and the need to develop compelling content for it. The Thank-a-Thon project was designed to capture and display appreciation for donor-funded initiatives across the University that demonstrated the significant impact donors were having on the UBC community. By securing buy-in and support from a wide range of key stakeholders, they were able to do just that. 

The goal was to collect mini stories and messages via Twitter that would be combined and shared in a video slide-show during the event, which was to be held several months later. The effort was met with enthusiastic support from faculties and schools within the University. Many even developed their own tweets because they were excited to have a platform to highlight certain projects to which they wanted to bring awareness.

The tweets provided fantastic heartfelt material that was shared in a variety of ways. The social media portion of this initiative was mainly disseminated over Twitter but also used Facebook and Instagram. The finalized video was put together in-house (and cost-free) and shown at the Donor Appreciation Evening as well as at several subsequent events. The video was later sent to more than 16,000 donors via a donor newsletter, garnering many online views. You can view the video here.

Though the intended audience was a “live” one, UBC’s strategy to create the video by collecting appreciation messages via social media from areas across the University benefiting from donor support allowed for rich content that was easily shareable through various digital channels. The strategy achieved a reach of over 229,000 unique users with more than 600,000 impressions for the hashtag #UBCItsYours. The effort also earned 365 likes and 495 social media interactions. Utilizing social media to generate user content allowed UBC to demonstrate to their donors just how broad and deep their impact is. Thanks to so many faculties and schools across the University sharing messages of appreciation for a wide variety of initiatives and programs, UBC was able to illustrate just how many people, units, and projects donors impact through their generosity.

UBC designed and executed this campaign with the intent that it would be used as material for one specific event; but they were able to recycle it for several more efforts and share it with a broad audience. This allowed the UBC advancement team to achieve its goals of creating an outstanding stakeholder experience for donors, conducting ambitious fundraising efforts and keeping alumni engaged. This initiative created an outstanding stakeholder experience by connecting program successes back to donors and showing them the impact of their gifts across the UBC community. It helped UBC's fundraising goal by stewarding donors appropriately, which is an essential part of the fundraising cycle; and it engaged both donors and alumni by providing personal heartfelt messages that both inspired and informed.

When this project was launched in 2016, social media was still playing a secondary role to in-person interactions when forging connections with donors. And, as UBS proved, it was highly effective in that capacity. Now, of course, we are relying on social media and digital communications to do the bulk of the work as we try to maintain relationships in a mostly virtual world, because it’s simply not possible to hold events and meetings like we can during “normal times.” UBC’s successful effort to utilize Twitter as a content collection platform is even more inspirational now. Having compelling, effective material that’s easy to share broadly across donor segments via a multitude of digital platforms is going to be central to our communication efforts for a long while. And the things we learn now just might drive strategy for years to come.