Hats Off To Donors Part 2

As a follow-up to my post the previous week, I wanted to share some of the results of the Hats Off To Donors event held by the external affairs office in the law school. Just before the event, we agreed on some measureable results we wanted to achieve.  The following are the goals and the results:

Goal for attendance: 25% of law students, which equaled 110 people.

Result: Success - we had 150 to 175 law students in attendance.

Goal for number of thank you cards to be written: 500 cards

Result: Success - many students signed several cards, and many cards were signed more than once. Total number was 721.

Goal for Twitter stewardship contest entries: 75

Result: We had 24 unique submissions. Apparently students weren’t interest in getting $500!

Overall, we deemed the event a success. The students that attended said they had a great time. One of our deans brought a karaoke machine, which sounds terrible, but was actually really great. And as always, free food and drink always makes an event more palatable.

Since a big part of the event was to be to Twitter contest, I thought it made sense to include this on a blog, as it is an effort the law school made to engage one specific audience. I was disappointed by the activity on Twitter, though I don’t exactly know what I was expecting, or even how to determine what I was expecting, but I was expecting more.

What I liked about this idea is that is solved so many problems. We needed a way to give the students money. Scholarships didn’t work in this case, so we had to have them apply for something. That something was a contest asking the students perform a substantive task to help thank the donors. The donors would feel good. We would thank the donors. The students would feel good, and they would win $500.

For this contest, we had some good ideas. We had some terrible ideas too, but I have pasted the tweets from three of the winners – the fourth disabled his Twitter account the day after, but he tweeted that he would hand deliver gift baskets to a number of donors on his Spring Break trip to California. Here are the rest:

In the end, it was an interesting experiment and I’m glad we did it, if for no other reason than to help offset the student debt load…but I am excited to see what happens with the rubber duckies thing.