The Council for Advancement and Support of Education is pleased to present this online webinar. Expect greater changing the course from what's happening to what can and should be. My name is Anne Weller and it's my pleasure to introduce our speakers today. Becky Furtado provides strategic leadership for marketing and communications for UC Davis Development and Alumni Relations that supports organizational and university goals to build the philanthropic brand and to increase contributions, donor stewardship and alumni engagement. She led the development of a dynamic campaign brand to compliment a new master brand, collaborated with the key university stakeholders for adoption and directed staff to developing and launching an integrated marketing Communications plan for UC Davis, the second comprehensive fundraising campaign. Becky has more than 20 years of experience in communications that includes advising executive leadership, providing strategic counsel to boards, authoring communications, overseeing brand management and digital outreach, and managing public relations, crisis communications, media relations and community outreach. Kyle Kastranec is the creative executive director for oLogy, where he expertly mixes visual and verbal elements to create effective communications that bring brands to life, while also overseeing a wide range of work in a studio of talented writers and designers. His experience includes extensive work at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Arizona, and the University of Buffalo, as well as California Lutheran University, Pratt Institute, and Warren Wilson College. He graduated valedictorian from the highly respected Savannah College of Art and Design, where he received a BFA in graphic design. Welcome back, Kyle. Thank you, Aaron, for that introduction. And welcome, everyone. We're glad that you could be with us today as we get started. I wanted to just provide a frame of reference for those of you who might be joining us from areas around the country about where UC Davis is. We are located in beautiful northern California, about 90 minutes east of San Francisco and just west of the state capital of Sacramento, the main campus for UC Davis is in the town of Davis, which is one of the true college towns remaining in California. And we also have a campus in Sacramento for our health system, which includes our medical center and our School of Medicine and our School of Nursing. Now, UC Davis is pretty well known in some key areas, such as being a world leading school for veterinary medicine, having the number one agricultural college in the country, and also being a leader in climate change science. But Davis also has what I would say is a kind of unique and quirky personality. And there are a couple of iconic images that just really resonate with a lot of our alumni and supporters. And those are icicles and cows. Would you agree, Kyle? I definitely agree. And hi, everybody. Kyle From ology, we are a branding and marketing agency headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, and this pandemic world that we're living in, we have people all over the country now, so we have folks in all the key markets that we work in and we like to define ourselves as a purpose driven company and work with brands that really serve the greater good. Most of the work that we do is in higher ed, but we also do a lot of work in health care, in cultural institutions like museums and a little bit in financial services here and there. But I'm really excited to be with you all today and to share the great work that that we had the opportunity to produce along with Becky and her team. Let's jump in. So a little bit about what we're going to look at today. We had a really unique opportunity with UC Davis to handle both the master brand and the campaign in a really tight timeframe together. And so we were able to gain some some pretty great efficiencies by overlapping those timelines and capitalizing on some of that momentum with the work that we were doing. And then also, I think this is a really great opportunity to talk about the relationship between a brand and a campaign and where we landed with this one in particular. And then we'll share out the work that we did. We'll talk a little bit about the process of getting input on what this work needed to do. Talk a lot about the work that we ended up doing and how we put it out into the world and where all this work was placed and how it started to reach those audience groups. Yeah, and then I'll we'll be sharing how the marketing team and development put together a very comprehensive marketing communications plan to support the public launch of this historic fundraising campaign for UC Davis was going to be the largest in the university's history, and some of the significant outcomes that we achieved by really sticking to that that plan and following through. And then on the end, I will share some key takeaways, both from the perspective of the university and from the perspective of the creative agency. CEO jumping in and talking a little bit about our overall relationship with UC Davis. We came in initially as a partner for a master brand refresh, and then we knew at that time that a campaign was on the horizon and had started talking through what that would mean and how we might be able to approach both of those projects together. And when we start to think about branding and campaign, they have really different purposes and really different goals and really different focuses. So branding is a little bit more of that. That idea of longevity and this enduring platform that that can serve to represent us. Whereas a campaign is a little bit shorter, but it has these meaningful messages and specific goals attached to them. As far as the focus, branding is a little bit more of an inward facing process and defining who we are, what we do, and most importantly, why it matters. Whereas the campaign focus is really outward, really promoting that offer and how the audiences can benefit or be a part of the campaign. Those audiences are really different too. I think branding is is really everyone that we touch, but really all the different communities within that that we're reaching out to. Campaigns are a little bit more segmented and really specific communities of focus that we're trying to reach. As I mentioned that time frame, a brand should be long lasting and have a lot of longevity to it, but also with that ability to evolve slowly over time, whereas the campaigns are a little bit more short term in their nature. And as far as how these things start to come to life, branding is really about that big idea and the toolkit that's needed to bring that idea to life. Whereas on the campaign side, we're really talking about this orchestrated set of tactics that work in conjunction with one another to inspire people to take action. So as Kyle mentioned, we knew that as we built out the campaign brand, it was going to be very focused and for a finite period of time as we work toward achieving our fundraising goal of $2 billion. But we also knew that this was not going to be a campaign where we were putting forward the dollars as the main goal. We really wanted to talk about the impact that UC Davis is making in the world and motivate our donors to want to want to be involved, to support an area that they're most passionate about through the breadth of what UC Davis is doing. And it really was that that unique opportunity to capitalize on the energy and momentum of this master brand refresh that was happening starting in the beginning of 2019 and knowing that this campaign was on the horizon, set to launch on ten, ten, 20, 20 and finding a relationship between the two that that felt natural and felt familial and felt like a really great way to to leverage our resources and the resources at UC Davis to make all this work as powerful as possible. And this was a unique opportunity, not only for ology from the perspective of being able to look at kind of that overarching master brand and working into a campaign brand from there. But it was also a really unique opportunity at UC Davis. And as we began this process, we were very deliberate about bringing three distinct groups together who have individual marketing plans, often in the market. So development, strategic communications, which is our central communications group on campus, and then the health care marketing team, the communication leaders from each of these areas came together and we're very intentional about approaching this in a cohesive way because we knew that potentially we could have three brands in-market and we did not want to be confusing our audiences. We wanted to be strengthening our messaging together. So this was a unique process that we went through. And we've heard from many of our colleagues at other institutions that it's unique in the industry as well, and not a lot of people have done that. The other unique thing about this process was that we had a very specific date for a public launch for our campaign ten, ten, 20, 20 that had been determined more than two years prior and all engines were moving toward that date. So I remember talking with Kyle and the folks at ology and saying, you know, this is great. All this work we're doing. There's a lot of work out there. But hey, this is a drop dead date. We are going to make it. And there's no question that back. So it was all engines. Forward. And that allowed us to really have our eyes on the prize from the get go and know exactly what we were working toward. So just on that timing note, the master brand refresh really kicked off at the beginning of 2019, kicking into high gear in February, slated to run through December with training and getting everyone, all the campus communicators up to speed and knowing that we had that that drop dead date of ten, ten, 20, 20 for the campaign. We started to work backward from there and realized that a lot of the campaign work needed to overlap with the tail end of the brand work, and that that overlap was something that we were a little bit unsure about at the beginning. Just trying to understand how the resources would be allocated and everybody's bandwidth. But it actually turned out to be, I think, one of the key strengths of this work, being able to capitalize on the momentum, but also being able to have this singular team that knows so much about UC Davis that can get in really deep and understand who they are at a really granular level and take that information from the brand side to the campaign side. And I think to you'll notice that specifically when it comes to strategy and creative, that's where the overlap in the handoff was starting to happen. So everybody was in the same frame of mind. Everybody was really engaged and energized about the work. And we all knew with that that end goal in mind of ten, ten, 20, 20, what we were working toward and really were able to be efficient with how we executed this work. And this overlap allowed us also to really be socializing with our key stakeholders, both brands. So they really, as you'll see in some upcoming slides, we really worked with our key stakeholders to bring them along and by getting them so involved and bought into the master brand, it was just a natural progression for them to then work toward the campaign branded and made it a much more smooth process. The other thing I'll say about this two year chart that you're looking at is from the UC Davis side. We started even earlier than this. So really our process began in fall of 2018 when we put out an RFP to engage a creative agency to be our partner in this master brand strategy and then campaign work and that really occurred throughout the fall of 2018, and that is how we ended up working with ology and coming to be great partners in this process. And then the one thing that's hovering over all of this is the pandemic and how that really started to affect the work that we were doing and the way that Becky and her team were going to launch this campaign. Yeah, you know, 2020 hit in January. And we were a full steam ahead. We were on the countdown. We had ten months to until we launched. We had a lot of really big work streams that we were kicking off of our marketing plan. And we jumped in and then, you know, March rolled around and COVID 19 and, you know, where did that first case of community spread COVID 19 appear? Why UC Davis Medical Center, Of course. And so we were right in the thick of it. And of course, the big decision for us was, you know, what are we going to do or are we going to proceed toward our campaign launch in 2020, or might we postpone that? So we took a little time to kind of watch and listen and hear from our donors and alumni and, you know, some of our major gift prospects, how they were feeling about things. And we had a really good indication when we held our annual gift day in the spring of 2020, which was a completely virtual event and weren't sure exactly what the reaction to that would be. And it turned out that, you know, we raised more money than ever before and had great engagement over the previous year. So what we learned is people wanted to help. They wanted to be involved. They wanted to support what UC Davis was doing, not only to help with, you know, research and treatment for the pandemic, but also the many other areas that UC Davis is impacting. So we made the decision that, yes, we were going to go forward with our campaign launch in October. And so we knew that we needed to continue down this road and that digital our digital presence was going to be more important than ever because everything was going to be completely virtual. And so one of the other opportunities that that was presented by tackling this brand and campaign work together was being able to be really deliberate in how those two things lived with one another, what kind of relationship they had to each other. And the analogy I always like to use specifically in workshops is, you know, what's that familial relationship? Do we want the campaign to be a twin of the master brand? Do we want them to be a sibling? Do we want them to be a cousin where maybe you can see some of that similarity, but they do feel pretty distinct from one another? Or do we want them to be a distant cousin where you can't really tell that they're related at all? And I think that the thing here is that there's no one right answer. I think it always depends on the circumstances at each individual institution, the relationship that exists between a strategic strategic communications department or marketing and communications and the fundraising team, it it all depends on on a lot of different variables. But but for UC Davis, what we decided is that they because the master brand was going to be so fresh and so new that we really wanted to capitalize on that and have them be siblings with one another where maybe they started to be a little bit different. You could see some some distinction between them, but they really felt like one cohesive family unit. Yeah, and this was really supported by our stakeholders as well because again, they had felt really positive about the master brand work that was done and it seemed just very natural to keep close in the in the brand that we came up with for the campaign, knowing that we wanted a distinct flair for it and to be able to use it in those flexible ways. But they needed to be closely aligned. And understanding this from the get go was really integral in the work that we did and understanding where we had a wiggle room and where we didn't and allowed us to take a lot of the learnings and the feedback from that, that master brand refresh process and roll them directly into this campaign worked pretty seamlessly. And at that master brand level where we ended up with the creative platform, where that big idea was this idea of outgrowing the expected. And I think it ended up being a pretty perfect fit for Davis given their ag history. But then all of the wonderful things that they're doing now, both in AG but across the board, specifically in areas like health care and viticulture and all these really fun things, this idea that outgrowing your expectations not only for what Davis is and can be, but also outgrowing what you can expect from the results of all the work that's happening there. So all that out of the way. I think we want to talk more specifically about how we we built this campaign and then how it relates to the master brand and how we focus that outward into those audiences that we were trying to reach. So one of the most important steps we took, I think, in achieving success in this whole process was really engaging some of these key groups along the way, and oLogy was really instrumental in helping us with some some research and some focus groups and one on one meetings and interviews with these different groups of people that you see on the screen. Everyone from, you know, leadership at the university to faculty, to our donors, board members and patients and clients at our medical centers, even parents and students, and also our internal communications directors from across the campus. You know, we we gathered input from all of these groups to really bring them along really with both the master brand and the campaign brand so that they understood, felt engaged and were ready to be ambassadors, because this is really our group of ambassadors for the campaign. Yeah. And again, the overlap of these two projects gave us a unique opportunity when we were physically on campus presenting some of the master brand work to talk with some of these individuals, with these groups in person and and really be able to make a connection with them and dig deep into what they wanted to get out of this campaign. So what did we learn from talking with all those people? I think the first thing that came out of pretty much everybody's mouth was collaboration is what powers UC Davis I think from the top down side to side, everybody we talked to said that collaboration is really natural here. That's what fuels us. That's where, where we really find our stride is when we're working together. So we wanted to keep that top of mind as we started to approach the campaign. And we also heard that the gifts that are given to UC Davis really have that power to be widespread and to reverberate all over the world with, you know, a really huge impact. So being able to talk about those outcomes we knew was going to be paramount in a successful campaign. I think that answering that question of why now, why give looking at the weight of the work that UC Davis is doing, it is truly life changing, world changing work that is happening there. So being able to put that work into context for our audiences and show them how their gift can impact that work, it was going to be really important here as well. And then some of the existing work that was being done on the fundraising side around the big ideas, which was a smaller campaign that kind of ran throughout being able to pick up pieces from that into this comprehensive campaign and make sure that those two things related to one another didn't feel like they were at opposite ends or working against each other. But we're all going toward the same goal. So I'll take the first one here from what we learned, three cheers for Chancellor Jeremy. So I just have to say we are so fortunate to have Chancellor May at UC Davis. Not only is he an excellent leader and a brilliant engineer in his own right, he's just very relatable and he really connects with people and he understands the importance of building a culture of philanthropy and he dedicates a good portion of his time to development. So we heard pretty much universally from our donors, trustees, alumni, campus leadership and partners that, you know, Chancellor May is a real asset to UC Davis and we should definitely be including him as a big part of this campaign. And, you know, when he came to UC Davis, one of his goals was to really raise that reputation and awareness of our university. What he what he liked to say was beyond beyond the Rockies, because we had a very well-known reputation maybe on the West Coast, but not as much on the East Coast. And he always like to say that it was time to wake up the sleeping giant. So he is definitely a big part of this campaign. Definitely. And something else that we heard specifically from the gift officers, almost all of them, was that in the minds of the donors that they work with, the credibility and the reputation of UC Davis was was the most important thing. And for only 8% of them to think of that as a struggle was really important and gave us a bit of a guiding light as far as what was going to resonate most with the audiences that we were trying to reach. We also heard that alumni are really proud of the social consciousness at UC Davis, and so finding a way to weave that in and make that a really prominent feature of the campaign brand seemed like something that that not only aligned with what people were expecting and excited about, but also with where we were headed with a lot of the master brand work as well. And I think lastly, we heard that Davis has a really competitive advantage when it comes not only to the quality but the diversity of the programs that it offers. So finding ways to tell this really multifaceted, layered story about all that work that was happening and being able to tie this point back with the first one about collaboration seemed like a really natural way to pull all of that together. So as we start to think about the toolkit and how this campaign brand starts to come to life, this is how we tend to approach it at ology, breaking it down into these five categories. So the purpose of the campaign, you know, how do we want to be thought of the idea of the story? So what what do we say? How do we start to tell all these great things, the audiences, you know, breaking down? Why does it matter to all of these different groups and what's going to reach them in the most meaningful way, the personality of the campaign. So how do we look? How do we sound? How do we feel? What's the way that we put ourselves out there into the world? And then lastly, the creative. So pulling all this together into a really streamlined and engaging creative expression as a way to to really put us out there and to reach these donors in the most powerful way possible. So getting into the purpose statement, something that really is that that kind of core and essential nugget at the base of all of this work is this idea of the given the gift. So talking about what we are putting out there and then also talking about what donors will will receive from being a part of this campaign. So a gift to this campaign unites and empowers the brightest minds at UC Davis, and that really translates to the betterment for all. So that idea of the widespread impact of the gifts and the widespread impact of the work that Davis is doing is really at the core of how this campaign brand started to come together. And then as far as how we start to tell that story, this is a snippet of a messaging map that we put together that really starts to take all of these various ideas that and everything that we heard during Discovery into hopefully a really organized and easy to understand template that that people can start to pick up and use when they're telling these stories. So that up top there, the impact of UC Davis kind of taking some of that positioning that we just covered. UC Davis confronts life's most urgent challenges and unjust conditions to bring a fuller, healthier and more resilient world within reach. So you can start to see a lot of those key findings from Discovery being turned into something actionable here and tied together. And then how does this campaign support that? That impact is a gift to this campaign unites and empowers the brightest minds for the betterment of all. So really pulling forward that that positioning, aligning it directly with the impact that we're hoping to make and then using these areas of change that that Becky and her team through through no small feat had developed and really distilled to encompass all of the great work that they're doing now. These areas of global change that you see are really meant to represent the breadth of UC Davis and as Kyle mentioned, you know, they they look simple and clean and nice headers for these areas. But I'll tell you, there was a lot of work behind the scenes and I'm not even sure ology is aware of all the lobbying and the committee meetings and the one on one meetings going on with various stakeholders in the university. And I'm sure many of you can relate to come up with these exact words and phrases and the nuances that we would be using. And of course, our main goal was to come up with key areas where everyone could see themselves no matter what their priority was. If they had a fundraising goal, they could see themselves in one of these areas. So to help with that, we, you know, provided some examples of how priorities and initiatives could potentially fit into these four campaign pillars. We were very clear upfront that this, you know, would not be a comprehensive list, but it was an example. And we also clarified that there could be a particular initiative or program that could potentially live in more than one color, and it would depend on the story that we were telling on on where that might be aligned. And that was okay. And through this process, we were really able to to get that buy in that these four pillars would really represent the campaign. And from the marketing perspective, you know, we knew as a marketing team there was no way that we could market all of those individual priorities that you see on the screen there, plus the ones that aren't on the list. So we really need to focus our efforts on those four campaign colors and be able to tell stories within those areas. And as far as how this campaign started to look and feel similar to everything else in this process, we wanted to find the correct relationship with that master brand. So what you're seeing on the left here are the personality traits that we developed as part of that master brand Refresh, where UC Davis is witty and compassionate and earnest and curious, smart, mindful, profound and forward looking. And in talking with Becky and her team and kind of understanding what made the most sense for this campaign to feel like and relate back to the master brand, We highlighted those four words that you see underlined on the left compassionate, curious, smart and forward looking as those master brand traits that made the most sense to pull forward as part of the campaign. So by highlighting those, we were able to customize them a little bit more in what you see on the right hand side, which really started to dictate how the campaign was going to feel when it turned out to the idea of being human or benevolent and compassionate. The idea of being forward looking so proactive and groundbreaking, the idea of being really perceptive, so smart and sharp. And lastly, the idea of being momentous, you know, taking this moment in time to be impactful and to be a worthy cause for a donation. And then all of that got wrapped together in what we think is a really great, succinct and appropriate campaign platform and identity with this idea of expect greater. And even our tagline from UC Davis for the World was very intentional because, you know, again, we wanted this campaign to be about what you see Davis is doing so by us, but for you. And we really wanted to invite donors through that to to want to get. Involved and understanding again that we wanted to have that that sibling relationship between the master brand and the campaign brand, knowing that we're the expected was the campaign or the brand platform for the master brand having this idea of expect greater kind of playing off of that building on that idea here for the campaign just made a lot of sense and does a really great job I think, of what people should start to expect from UC Davis and the impact that that will have. So we're going to show you a video in a minute. But for a little setup on this, we knew we wanted to create a really nice anthem video for our campaign launch and we wanted it to be, you know, creative, dramatic, engaging, maybe have some surprises in it to go along with our expect greater brand. And as we were planning this out, we had a great concept with Kyle and his team and we were talking about it during the spring and, and we all thought, Well, surely summer will be great. Just like the flu. COVID 19 will just kind of recede into the background. We'll be able to do our video shoots and production during the summer months and be ready for our launch. Well, most of you know that's not how it went in, particularly in California. It got worse and the restrictions were pretty pretty high on what we could do. So we had to do a little bit of creative troubleshooting and figure out how to get this produced in a different way. But I think we were really happy with the end product and there's even a little bit of that reveal aspect that we were hoping to achieve with Kyle's team. So through that, why don't you go ahead and start the video. That the world's come to expect great things from UC Davis, the bold, the daring, the big ideas that do more than address today. They solve for tomorrow because we've never viewed better as before and after systems are ever evolving and instead of letting them evolve around us, we change with them and lead the charge. We invite you to lead with us. Answering the questions for World has yet to ask. Educating the students who dream of a brighter, healthier and more just tomorrow, shaping the course of what's happening to what can and should be. We keep the big picture in frame with a clear understanding of every detail. Bringing that image into focus. It takes a different way of thinking, a different way of looking at the world. It takes a fresh point of view beyond a single vision, the kinds of collaborations that advance what's healthy, humane and right, the kind of approaches that push the edges of unconventional, the kinds of solutions that reframe what's possible, the kinds of leaders that reveal a new way forward. Big ideas that seem unimaginable at the start simply need the time and space to grow, to uproot injustice, to remove barriers, to break through, and to do it all over again. Better. When the world calls on UC Davis, it expects great things. With your help, we can show the world it should expect even greater greater, expect greater from UC Davis. For the world. One fun fact to add, Becky, was actually the person that you saw sliding into that full body scanner. So she was a real double threat on this behind the camera and in front of the camera. As my way at 5 seconds of fame. Yeah. So that video was a really great way to encapsulate the campaign and also to get those four key pillars in there and give some context around those and some really concrete examples of of what we're doing in each of those areas. But the brand became so much more than that, and we documented the campaign brand in a really robust set of guidelines that that Becky and her team then socialized and started to use to really understand the guardrails on the campaign and where they had the flexibility, but also how to make the most impact in the work that they were going to carry forward. Yeah, And with the brand guidelines, we also were able to create our templates and logos and other assets and put it all on a brand website that is maintained out of the Strategic Communications Department for all communicators across the university. So they had a centralized location where anybody could go to get the campaign branding materials that they may need to use in their own specific area. So then with those guidelines in mind, we were able to train lot of folks on how to start to use all of these different pieces and parts of the toolkit. And we were able to to reach over 100 folks in some onsite training across a bunch of different categories. We held training on multiple days on so that people had an option and also on those campuses so that we tried to make it as convenient for people to participate as possible. It was a good three hour block, and there were a couple of really key benefits that came out of this. One was that campus communicators and the folks that you see on this list who participated, they were really able to get an understanding of how the master brand and the campaign brand worked together, when you might use one, when you might use the other, and then to really practice using the expect greater brand and tailoring it to their own particular area. Because the School of Education is going to have a very different priority for their fundraising goals than the College of Agricultural. Environmental Sciences. So this really gave them an opportunity to do some hands on work about how they might apply, expect greater to their particular area. The other thing we did is we had this training about six months out, so it was in the spring before the campaign launched. And, you know, I had some people come to me and say is not a little far out, why are you doing it so early? But there was a benefit to that. It was a twofold benefit. First off, people were aware of what was happening and what was coming. So it wasn't like development was coming to a unit a month before a campaign launch or a week before a campaign launch saying, Oh, by the way, here's a campaign mark. You need to put it on all your materials, because we're launching a campaign that doesn't go over very well. So we wanted people to be well prepared, have plenty of time and be really thoughtful about how they would be incorporating the campaign into their own initiatives. And and plans for their unit and and then the other thing was really just being able to apply it in their own area with that hands on work and budget. So they got a budget too. So that was really the other key thing is budgeting happens in the spring. So with that thoughtful planning, if they needed to budget for anything around the campaign, they would have the opportunity to do that as well. And I'll say from from an agency standpoint, it was, I think, really great and really important to train that far ahead of. I think what that allowed us to do was to get people familiar with the brand in advance of starting to work with Becky's team to create the actual tactics that were going to be produced. So that allowed the feedback that we received on those tactics to be really thorough and really robust and push to make the work not only stronger overall, but more in line with with the brand as as the folks that were going to be using it every day, saw it coming together. So as I mentioned, we built out a comprehensive marketing communications plan all to support the public launch of the campaign. And what you see here are the key elements for that. And we're going to walk through some of the visuals for these in the in the upcoming slides. But for an overview, we knew we needed a campaign website that was probably our heaviest list and really one of the most important pieces that was going to be the hub of what we were doing. We also have a separate site, which is our transactional site for for people who choose to make a gift online that needed to be rebranded as well. So we actually had a couple of websites that we were working on for launch statements. We wanted both print and digital versions again, to have that flexibility during the pandemic, to have either one available. The anthem video that you saw already and getting that produced email marketing, we had kind of two workstreams for that. One was really to market our virtual launch. So to get our closest friends and supporters excited and engage and to attend the virtual launch and it wasn't going to be in person. So we really developed a drip campaign leading up to the launch and, and then at the virtual event itself. And that was one whole workstream And then we knew we wanted to develop a way to continue communicating with the donors after the launch and throughout the duration, the campaign, so we could tell those great impact stories and let them know about gifts that were happening or, you know, information and and milestones. So we wanted a way to be able to share that with donors on the in the long term as well. Social media. We built a social media plan for communicators and those stats for our owned channels at UC Davis. And then we also had a paid media plan. We did decide to invest in some paid media that we could really capitalize on the public launch. We were pretty sure that we were going to have some earned media around that and we wanted to enhance that with a paid media opportunity. So we did some digital display, digital video paid social media streaming audio and some out of home. The environmental display was really to bring the campus, the campaign to life on our two campuses and to bring some visibility to our internal audiences and visitors so that that was reinforcing what they might be seeing in these other campaigns. And then finally, we built a full suite of digital assets for really development team and gift officers. And, you know, those are things like email signatures, letterheads, zoom backgrounds. So as they are meeting and connecting with donors, they've got that campaign presence as well. So the first piece of of this that we wanted to share was the campaign website, and we've included a brief scroll through of it here. I encourage you to go and visit the site as well. But really here we were trying to make this site as user friendly as possible to get donors or interested parties as much information as we could very quickly and succinctly in a way that they could absorb it. And so you can start to see, you know, those four campaign pillars coming into prominence here, really in the top half of the page, the visual language around each of those starting to be hinted at before you dive deeper and then some really deeper messaging around what to expect from the gift, what to expect in from the campaign itself, diving into some of those early success stories and examples, and then also having some areas where we can tout events and areas where we can start to learn more. And this is really where we began to just build a great collaboration between the OLOGY team and our in-house team in development marketing. Our senior graphic designer worked really closely with Kyle because the images that you see, we're all very thoughtful and really important that we were getting the right things there. So just helping with photography choices and placement of know certain things in certain ways and was really a collaboration that developed in many of the pieces that you'll see. Also with this website, we made a commitment to the college schools and units who had a fundraising priority. We did commit to them to build them an individual campaign page. So each college, school and unit, there were about 20 of them that had a fundraising goal. We built an individual page for them so that they could highlight their own priorities in their area, their particular fundraising goal. And you saw that little graphic at the beginning of our Web site that keeps folks updated on where we are tracking toward our $2 billion goal. Each unit also has that tracker on their page with, you know, their goal and how much they've achieved toward that. It also gave them an opportunity to highlight a gift story or an impact story in particular to their area. So that was a way that we really built some good connections with the college schools and units and ensured that we were giving them presence on the campaign website. And they in turn were promoting that campaign and cross promoting through their websites as well. And shout out to Sam the lead designer on Becky's team. He was a great partner and all this and really did a great job carrying the work forward. So in addition to the website, Becky mentioned the key statement, and the thing that we wanted to do here was to create a really rich and engaged experience as these cases statements were starting to be distributed. So you can see it a little bit here, but the cover is actually di cut in a rectangle so that the word great is showing through. And similar to some of the things that that you saw in the video as far as these reveals, we wanted there to be reveals here that that thing that might be great, but you can expect even greater from UC Davis. So what we did throughout this as we were telling these stories is we found opportunities for one spread to interact directly with the following spread. So what you're actually seeing here in the lower right hand corner of the photo of the solar panels is a dye cut that shows through to the next spread. So when you turn the page, you get a greater picture of what's happening and a greater sense of the impact that a gift to this campaign pillar would have on the work that UC Davis is doing. And these are spreads that you're looking at represent one of our pillars, prepare changemakers. And I would just reinforce and I know many of you who are communicators know this, but every photo, every quote, every program highlighted on these pages that you see was very strategically selected to showcase the breadth of UC Davis, the diversity that we're so proud of on our campus, and the key big ideas and initiatives that we were putting forward in each of these pillars. And because of the pandemic and because we knew that not every gift officer was going to be able to meet with potential donors in person, we really wanted to create a digital version of the case statement that had the same engagement and power that the printed version did. So we used a platform called Ready Meg as a way to bring in some animations and some transitions as you scroll through the site that not only are great avenue for that, that great visual language to come in, but add a lot more context and a lot more meaning to these stories that we're telling. So what you can see here is that the structure of this page matches up directly with the structure of the case statement and the cadence and and how we're introducing all of these things. And we were able to incorporate that idea of a reveal that we used via the die cuts in the printed piece with some of these transition elements here. As you scroll down where one piece of a photo continues with you down the page and then finds its home in a photo lower on the page and really being able to to create this complimentary piece that we knew was going to be really, really hard working in, in the sense that we were going to be sending this out to a lot of prospective donors and there would be a lot of eyeballs on. What this really did for us is allow are our gift officers to meet donors where they were. So because there weren't there wasn't the opportunity as many one on one meetings during 2020 due to the pandemic. This gave officer gift officers an opportunity to mail a printed copy of the case statement, or if they did perchance have a chance to meet with somebody, they could hand them that. But if they were doing a virtual visit, this was a really good tool that they could use with a donor to share the case with them. So this was just again, doing a little bit of flexing to adapt to the situation that we were in. And I think it's just awesome to have both versions of the case statement because they're both really compelling and dynamic. And then the email marketing campaign that Becky mentioned was I think a really great way to get timely information into the hands of the people that that needed it the most. And so we helped develop some of the templates for these emails as a way to house this information and feel overtly branded in the way that it was being distributed, but also creating enough flexibility for Becky and her team to fill in the most important urgent content to get out there. Yeah, and we you really took those templates and developed it into what you see here, which allowed us to fold in a couple of existing new newsletters that we already had. We kind of wanted to start putting everything under our campaign brand that we would communicate with donors. So we, we were able to do that. Now whether we are telling, you know, an individual story as you see here or a pillar story for our campaign and a gift story, this this gives us the opportunity to communicate with donors and have it branded as part of our campaign in the long run. As part of that, that social media push finding really succinct ways that we can start to get these stories boiled down and engage with. So pulling some some things that you saw in the anthem video, pulling some things directly from the case statement, wrapping all that in some some language that harkens back to the big idea and the campaign platform overall, but also as a way to get those four key pillars out there into the world in a way that we knew those familiar with Davis would want to engage with. As I mentioned earlier, we had two plans for social media. One was, you know, our organic social media for our owned channels and then some paid social media opportunities. So what you see here is, a couple of examples from that paid media that we did for the campaign. So of course, this is our Instagram stories that you're looking at, and I'm going to just run through some additional slides and give you examples of some of the other media that we did through that campaign. Yeah. So here we have a couple of Facebook options as well as a LinkedIn option as well. And on on our side, this was a really great challenge and trying to understand how the voice of the campaign adapts via social media channel, feeling a little bit more buttoned up on LinkedIn, feeling a little bit more fun and engaging on Instagram and maybe being a little bit more meaningful on Facebook. And of course, we were measuring everything that we were doing in our paid media plan. And Facebook by far was our top performing social media site. And this that meant posts that you'd actually see here on the left was the top performing Facebook post. So it was very popular with our audiences. And so those were the kinds of things we were watching and we can use in future efforts. And then as part of the paid media also, there was a big out of home push. And so being able to really distill this campaign down into something that's going to be readable and easy to understand on a billboard as as you're driving by was was a tough challenge. And because the campaign is so big and so broad and has so much packed into it, but these were really great exercises for us to kind of distill the campaign brand down to its most basic essentials to hopefully be really impactful and drive some traffic to the site. We made the decision to invest in some out of home particular early around the launch of the campaign. Again, just to reinforce everything that was going on at that time. So this billboard that you see here is located in Midtown Sacramento, close to the health campus. And then we also had a number of billboards on the interstates going in and out of the Davis area and capturing both Bay Area traffic that might be coming through Davis and heading toward Lake Tahoe and also capturing traffic leaving Sacramento and going toward Davis. So got some key areas and were able to get this message out there for a couple of months after our launch. And as part of this, too, we knew getting in front of the campus communities and on both campuses was going to be important to make them feel like they're an integral part of this campaign and also as a way to get some of the language that can be a little bit more inward facing or a little bit more familiar to our our internal audiences out there in a really fun way. Yeah. So what you'll see in the next few slides are some examples of our environmental installations on both the Davis campus and the Sacramento campus. So we did a number of light poll banners, which you just saw. We did a great rap and splash in our conference center on the UC Davis campus. This is really the hub of development where Development Administration is many of the staff. There are a lot of board meetings held in this area, donors who visit. In addition, because it is a conference center, there are conferences held there year round from all kinds of areas throughout, is sponsored by areas throughout campus that we have a lot of traffic in this area. So it was a great opportunity to bring some campaign splash to a high visibility area. We also wanted to bring visibility to our alumni center, which is also another area that gets a lot of visitors. So you see the campaign represented here with some hanging banners, really focusing on the student aspect of preparing changemakers, because this is the alumni center. So that was a lot. And huge kudos to Becky and her team. And again, big shout out to Sam for helping to pull a lot of this together. He was also really integral in getting all of us environmental to spec and looking good on campus. But I think in some cases even more important than than the work that we helped to create is is the return on investment that that Becky and her team got. Yeah. And I'll just tag team before we move on and give that shout out to Sam as well who's our senior graphic designer. A lot of what the way we work with ology is, you know, they might give us a template or a batch of work for, say, some light bulb banners. And Sam really took that and ran with it. And we ended up, I think, producing 200 banners to get up around campus and customizing them for different areas of campus. So, you know, we customize those expect greater headlines for the area of campus we might be on so that it made sense. And again, we through that opportunity, we're getting by in with our colleagues at the other units and helping them feel part of the campaign and see how the campaign can relate to them. So really, one of the pieces of advice I have for those of you who are going to partner with a creative agency like we have done is just really maximize that, you know, take that great work. But that doesn't need to be the end of it, take it and build from it and run. And there's so much more that we have been just building off of from the initial work. But yes, return on investment. So of course, were not doing all of these work streams and marketing tactics just for fun. We really wanted to measure what we were doing and see if we were making an impact, seeing results and engagement that we were hoping for and we were really pleased with our results. So here are some numbers to share with you. You know, we had over 16.6 million impressions. These are results out of that paid media plan that I'm sharing with you or 80,444 clicks, our website traffic increased more than 650%, with over 100,000 page views are paid. Social CTR was 1.73 and the industry average is 0.45. Our digital video also did very well with a .93 This year compared to 8.30. So we were really pleased with those results. We also looked at results from our email drip campaign and people to our launch and we were pleased with that as well. So we had over 2800 people RSVP for our virtual launch event and from that number, over 1500 actually did visit the launch event. And we sent a survey out right after the event and more than 500 people responded to that as well. And you can see here, we had over 4000 video views of that anthem video through our launch activities and the social media and all of this really went toward those goals that we were hoping to achieve at the beginning that I shared with you, which is informing and engaging our audiences. So we felt that we really were able to do that. And with our launch we were just pleased because if we had done this launch in person, we really would have been at capacity. We couldn't have had more than a thousand people there. More likely it would have been around maybe 750. So we're really able to double the number of people who could participate in that virtual or in that launch event doing it virtually. So we achieved what we wanted to in informing and engaging audiences. We drove people to the website where they could learn more, be motivated and hopefully take action. And then that third objective, of course, was how will this maybe impact fundraising and will this keep the momentum going There? And it's coming. We also we're pleased with the results that we could tie directly to the launch activities. More than 9 million was raised from that October 10th, 2020 date through mid-January. As we were tracking that time period so we can track that over 9 million was directly tied to those launch activities. So we felt really good about that and that we were, you know, we had achieved our objectives of bringing visibility to the campaign and really kicking it off with a lot of momentum that we now want to carry through the coming years until we achieve our final goal. And I'll just add that these results were were really validating for us and work that that we collaborated with Becky's team on. You know, at a certain point we hand things off and it's, it's not ours anymore. We, we helped get it to that point. But then Becky and her team ran with it. And seeing these results coming in was just really rewarding for us and I think really made us feel like the work we had put into this made a really direct impact on the success of this campaign. So the last little bit we wanted to share with, just to leave you with four key takeaways based on our experience working together. Yeah, and we'll each share kind of a take away from the perspective of, you know, our own institution or organization. So for UC Davis, I think the momentum from the campaign brand really benefited growing out of the master brand strategy and it allowed institutional efforts around outgrow the expected to really naturally evolve into expect greater messaging the campaign and give us a way to really invite donors to be part of the the movement and to motivate them to support it in. And from the ology perspective, I think maintaining that momentum and having that overlap between the brand and the campaign allowed us to utilize our resources in the best way possible to to have one team working on both of these projects and have that really deep knowledge. And I think that had a direct impact on the strength of the work and how it really touched on every aspect of UC Davis and was relatable by everybody across the campus. So Family Matters, with our brands being so closely aligned as as Kyle explained earlier on, as as a sibling might be aligned to his family, we really had that visual connection between the brands and the flexibility for us through the campaign branding to highlight UC Davis strengths and really promote our mission to face urgent challenges and meet them in the world. And it really allows us to exemplify our commitment to diversity and equity and inclusion, which is so important to the university and it allows us to encompass the full breadth of the university, which in turn allows the different college schools and units to really flex expect greater to work for their particular area as well. And as I mentioned earlier, there is no single right answer for how a brand and a campaign should relate to one another. But I do think that at UC Davis, it was so important to capitalize on the momentum of this master brand refresh that was happening, not muddy the waters at all, not create a conflicting message, but really have a campaign that worked to complement what was happening at the master brand level. And I think it's really important as as you're all embarking on these campaigns to sit down and determine what the exact relationship between the master brand and the campaign that you want to have moving forward. This take away really is validating the input that you can get from a diverse university community. And that was really key to our success. The socialization across key stakeholder groups was essential for buy in and adoption. Also, that campus wide training that we did with communicators and others involved in promoting that campaign was really important. And then the teamwork and collaboration between UC Davis and ology was really important as well. You know, we just had a lot of creativity and expertise, both the UC Davis marketing team and all of this team. And I think just really collectively, those minds all together and working and collaborating well together is what made this successful. Yeah, and I think this is really a case of, of the trust that we had in each other and understanding that Becky and her team and our team at ology could trust one another to be good partners and for them to understand the landscape at UC Davis and put us in front of the right people to talk to, but then also for us to kind of be able to get personal with them and understand their skin in the game and understand what they all want out of the campaign just to build that alignment. And to Becky's point, also training to that large group of people is essential in a campaign of this magnitude. Being successful and being consistent across the board. Yeah, and I think it's important for those of you on the on the webinar to understand, you know, there was give and take on both sides, and that's part of any relationship. And I don't want to just seem like there were there were no bumps. But as Kyle said, you know, we, we would bring back that feedback or they would hear directly from UC Davis about a particular area and make adjustments as needed. And then likewise, you know, ology could push back when they felt that we might be off track. And that is part of a relationship that give and take and and working through it together to get to the point that is going to be what is the final product and then being in control remotely. So, you know, I would just say you can do it. You know, I know you may have heard that saying you can do hard things. And and this was something that had never been done before. So we were all kind of just flying blindly and we were going to do a campaign launch remotely. And there I don't know if any or many had been done at that point. So we just did the virtual pivot again. We knew that digital presence was going to be super important. We were building an interactive launch event and we had a way for gift officers to follow up afterward with donors and with flexible materials. And we were able to bring a lot of people to our website and continue to do so so they can learn more about the campaign and engage with it and hopefully become supporters as well. And this switch to the remote work environment and the remote fundraising environment really caused us to be nimble and to think on our feet and to challenge, I think, some of the preconceptions or the the the truth around what fundraising can and should be. So this idea of being able to to be smart, to be nimble and to do what's right for the environment at the given time, I think was was key in this campaign being successful. Yeah, I agree. Flexibility was the name of the game, but in the end we were really pleased and we are just continue to see a great engagement from UC Davis supporters who just really want to be involved in what the university is doing to make a difference. So thank you all for your time and attention. We hope you got a lot out of this. I wish there could be a Q&A because I'd love to field some questions, but yeah, thank you for your time. Yeah, thank you for your time. And again, I echo Kyle's comment. It would be nice if we could have Q&A, but I would encourage any of you to reach out to either one of us. If you have questions, we will be happy to answer them that way. But thank you again for your time today. Thank you so much, Becky and Kyle. This concludes the webinar. Today's program is Copyright 21 by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education with all rights reserved. For additional information on Case on Demand webinar, please visit dot case dot org. Watch on demand.

CASE

online webinar

collaboration

campaign brand

UC Davis

marketing communications

donors

engagement

website traffic

fundraising outcomes