From the Nominator

"We leveraged NC State’s Red and White Week Spirit Competition, a well-established student-run homecoming challenge, to launch a new competition integrating a giving component: Red and White Week Student Giving Challenge. 

All student organizations on campus are invited to participate in the Red and White Week Spirit Competition each year, which is hosted by our Alumni Association Student Ambassador Program and has been a part of our university’s traditions since 2009. The competition has always had an emphasis on service, but historically, it has been focused on an organization outside the university. Therefore, integrating the giving challenge into the spirit competition had two main goals: (1) educating students about NC State as a recipient of philanthropy, and (2) increasing the number of donors to the university.   

Each participating student organization was provided with a unique giving link that tracked the number of gifts made through the link. The gifts made on behalf of each organization were tracked on an online leaderboard throughout the 72-hour challenge. The winner was announced publicly at a signature Red and White Week student event.  

Through this peer-to-peer fundraising initiative, our students raised over $24,000 for Feed the Pack, NC State’s on-campus food pantry, and secured over 1,000 first-time donors, including 473 students and 319 parents."

From the Judges

We congratulate the university and the students in putting their focus on a specific goal and program (i.e. the food pantry to rally participation in the initiative). Perhaps the most important thing for this initiative was involvement and participation, with a lesser goal being the dollars raised. The committee felt that a strength of the application/program was that this could be highly replicable at other schools.