Top 10 BBNC Sites - Illinois Institute Of Technology 2631

Top 10 BBNC Sites - Illinois Institute Of Technology

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We're counting down the top 10 websites built on Blackbaud NetCommunity as bbcon 2016 approaches. The first installment to our list of Top 10 BBNC Sites comes from Illinois Institute of Technology's Fueling Innovation campaign.



21a4d0006dba7c94f3ad51c653236953-huge-ii"I'm kind of sad that the campaign is coming to an end,” Rebecca Scherer says wistfully, “because I really loved this site." The campaign that she’s referring to is Illinois Institute of Technology’s $250 million Fueling Innovation campaign that will be wrapping up at the end of this year. Illinois Tech is 99% of the way to their fundraising goal thanks in no small part to the Fueling Innovation home page that she helped develop when the campaign launched in 2013.  

"The home page was always going to focus on innovation stories,” she recalls. “Our campaign is called Fueling Innovation: The Campaign For IIT, and the point of the site was to show that our university and our people are literally fueling the future of innovative ideas." To do that, Becky and her team put together a list of all-star alumni, students, and faculty who are driving innovation in their respective fields. Thanks to a plethora of great ideas that can draw their origins to someone with a connection to Illinois Tech, there was no shortage of exceptional stories to choose from that they could share on the campaign website.
 
For Becky and her team, the hard part was coming up with a design for the campaign’s web page. “Our alumni are really smart and really fast paced,” she explains. “They keep up with trends, even if it’s not in their business to do that. So there’s always a little bit of pressure to have an innovative web presence. If our alumni see that we’re lagging behind, they might be less inclined to give.”
 
They got started by checking out as many campaign websites as they could to cherry pick ideas from, even looking into for profit sites for design inspiration. The group reconvened to share their favorites and develop a list of their design recommendations for the larger campaign management team.
 
Once those ideas were approved, Illinois Tech collaborated with Blackbaud’s design team and began tinkering with their vision for the website like Doc Brown working on the flux capacitor.
 
"We had a lot of conference calls with our designer and told him what we wanted, and he came back with different designs. We sent him samples of our three favorite sites—we like element A from this one, element B from this one—and he just kind of came up with this awesome square concept. I think it was his idea to do the mouse overs."
 
The Fueling Innovation website went live on the day the campaign publicly launched. Illinois Tech marked the occasion with a huge party in their campus center for trustees, students, and alumni that was full of innovative décor like the Fender Blender, a bike partygoers could ride to blend their own drinks and a wall covered in iPads.
 
Those iPads were aligned in a grid to mimic the website, and each screen had the website on it. Partygoers could read stories about fellow innovators from Illinois Tech and even make a gift right then and there. “Alumni loved that; we still get compliments from them.”
 
The site went on to get plenty of recognition beyond the Illinois Tech community, earning two Interactive Media Awards in 2014 for Outstanding Achievement in the Nonprofit and College categories as well as a CASE Award for Best Website.
 
The campaign is set to end in December and remains on track to reach Illinois Tech’s ambitious fundraising goal. “I’m sure it won’t be too long before we’ll be in a new campaign,” says Becky, “and if they ask me to work on another website, I’ll definitely take inspiration from this one.”

Do you have a site that you want to share? Use the comments to tell us all about it!

News ARCHIVED | Blackbaud NetCommunity™ Blog 08/23/2016 2:45pm EDT

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2 Comments
Hey Gregory, good catch. The tagline has been updated to reflect the fact that this post is the first installment to the BBNC Top 10 List.
You wrote "The latest installment to our list..." but where are the previous ones? I clicked the "BBNC Top 10" category link in the sidebar but that just took me to an unfiltered list of all the NC blog posts.

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