One More Look: Making the Case Online for Scholarship Donations
A follow-up to my post from last week, Offline Fundraising Priorities Online:
An article in today’s Wall Street Journal, “Colleges Turn to Donors to Meet Aid Pledge,” opens by mentioning a $300 million scholarship fundraising endeavor that’s underway at the University of Chicago. Scholarship support is one of three “Human Capital” priorities in “The Chicago Initiative,” a $2 billion campaign.
Chicago’s campaign page outlining student aid goals is rather dry and ordinary. The content looks it could have been pulled directly from printed resources.
However, if you follow the link on the campaign homepage that directs you to the Odyssey Scholarship Challenge (which oddly isn’t a link on the scholarship priority page), you’ll find a micro-site with some really good content, including a video where a student explains the challenge. He does a great job of making the case for why more funds are needed even after Chicago received the $100 million Odyssey contribution.
Speaking of missing links … I didn’t find a link on the Odyssey site back to the main campaign site. As Michael says, links are free. It’d be nice to see more of them here.
On the whole, the Odyssey site makes a compelling argument for investing in scholarships, as well as gathering and presenting quite a bit of information about the Odyssey program. Beginning this fall, more than 1,200 UC students will benefit from these scholarships. Over the next few years, it’ll be interesting to see how the Odyssey site shares those students’ stories and evolves as it seeks to engage alumni, donors, and would-be donors in support of the Odyssey challenge.
Dartmouth had a similar opportunity about four years ago with a Kresge challenge grant that supported Kemeny Hall. Check out that micro-site to see all the content Dartmouth ended up posting, including a full honor roll.
Discuss this article
