Top 10 BBNC Sites - University Of North Carolina Wilmington 2768

Top 10 BBNC Sites - University Of North Carolina Wilmington

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We're counting down the top 10 websites built on NetCommunity as bbcon 2016 approaches. The latest installment to our list of Top 10 NetCommunity Sites comes from University of North Carolina Wilmington. 

 

UNCW Give More in 24 Home Page
For three years now, the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW) has used their annual giving day to rally students, alumni, faculty, staff and friends around the university. “The UNCW family stepped up during the challenge in the most amazing ways,” said Lauren King Assistant Director of Annual Giving and challenge coordinator. 

The giving day’s first two years were successful in soliciting alumni support, but UNCW saw an opportunity to make improvements in 2016. First, they wanted to establish a more compelling online presence that would allow the entire UNCW community to share a consistent experience, regardless of which device they used to access the Give More in 24 microsite.
 
Second, they wanted to effectively communicate why philanthropy is important and the impact donors have on campus. “Every person who donated, called, emailed and posted on social media had a story to tell about what UNCW means to them,” recalled Lauren.
 
With their first objective in mind, UNCW moved their giving day website to NetCommunity for the first time in 2016. "Our former tool wasn't mobile responsive, nor was the online giving form user friendly,” shared Public Communications Specialist Crystal George. “This change was really big for our constituents.”
 
Promoting the challenge and processing gifts through NetCommunity allowed UNCW to create a competitive environment that engaged the community in new ways. They developed a number of competitions with prizes that incentivized donor participation.
 
For instance, the first college to reach 100 alumni donors unlocked a $10,000 challenge gift for their college. Similar competitions were executed throughout the day as well. Prior to this year’s giving day, providing results of competitions as donations were processed had not been possible.
 
"This year was the first time we were able to process in real-time,” said Diane Pierce Director of Advancement Services. “Every hour we ran a pivot report to give us updated totals, showing how many alumni from each college had given."
 
The change in the giving day experience was striking. "I would say it was night and day,” said Diane. “In the past we had a lot of paper commitments and credit cards that were generated through our website, but it wasn't entered on the same day. It was a whole different ball-game."
 
NetCommunity’s conditional content email feature was used to segment alumni by the college from which they graduated. Email campaigns shared specific examples of how gifts to their college make a difference and sent alumni to online gift forms specific to their college.  In addition to this personalization, UNCW students created videos thanking donors, which were also embedded on the Give More in 24 home page.
 
"We were able to set up a feed of a third-party software called Tintup and embed it at the bottom of the NetCommunity page,” said Crystal. “It was a live feed of not only the social posts about #UNCW24, but also the videos that students tweeted to challenge donors. We were able to personalize the videos in ways that matched the donor’s intention. For instance, honors students would thank those who supported the honors program and athletes thanked donors who supported athletics. It was really well-received, donors were really excited to receive their video."

 
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The UNCW community’s response to the changes incorporated into this year’s giving day was tremendous. The number of donations more than doubled from 2015 to 2016, with more than 400 of those gifts coming from first-time donors. Overall giving for Give More in 24 grew by nearly 14%.
 
Despite their success, UNCW has plenty of ideas for improving their giving day in 2017. “I think we’re going to revisit our email strategy and identify more ways we can improve personalized interactions with donors while considering our limited staff resources,” said Crystal.

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News ARCHIVED | Blackbaud NetCommunity™ Blog 09/29/2016 10:10am EDT

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1 Comments
How did you achieve the responsive design????  Congrats on a great site!

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