Rick Golembeski of Randolph-Macon College talks about the success of “Macon Day” – a day where for 24 hrs. alumni, faculty, students and supporters are asked to donate online to the school. On their very first try in 2013 they raised over $650,000 and have continued to see incredible success in numbers of gifts received and total donations.

Transcript:

Hi, my name is Rick Golembeski and I’m the Director of Annual Giving and Alumni Relations for Randolph-Macon College.  We’re a private liberal arts college in Ashland, Virginia with around 1,400 students enrolled each year. I joined the Office of College Advancement in November 2013. On my very first day I was asked to organize a “Give Day” after the President of Randolph-Macon had just seen the results of another colleges “give day”. We wanted to create one day where alumni, students, faculty and friends were asked to make an online donation during a 24 hour period of time. In only six months, my team pulled together the first “Macon Day”.

It was an incredible success. Before “Macon Day” the College had never brought in more than 300 gifts in one day, but because of this day we created for giving to the school, we brought in 952 gifts totaling over $650,000 on our first try.

By tapping into our volunteer base of various Alumni Boards and Class Agents we were able to get the word out leading up to the event.  We prepped them on how they could help out, asked them to share videos we created, gave them social media toolkits with sample emails, graphics and much more to make it easy and fun for them to get involved and share information across their networks.

In 2015, Macon Day continued to grow in number of gifts we received and supporters involved and we have even higher hopes for the future as we empower those closest to us to drive our mission forward.

Want to learn more about this campaign and other local online fundraising success stories? Join ConnectVA at the Social Media for Nonprofits Conference on May 4th.