From the Nominator

Our $2.25 billion comprehensive campaign, Expect Greater: From UC Davis, For the World, impacted every corner of our large university. How better to showcase that than with a map? We wanted to give our community a fun, interactive snapshot that they could explore to see the many ways donor generosity has strengthened programs, student support, professorships, and capital projects at University of California, Davis. Serving as a capstone component of our campaign-close website, UC Davis Development and Alumni Relations created an interactive microsite using ArcGIS StoryMaps, transforming a geospatial tool into a compelling platform for philanthropy storytelling to inspire and engage donors. The map covered gifts across UC Davis’s main campus and Sacramento Health campus. Again, the goal was to showcase the Expect Greater campaign’s impact in a visually immersive way, allowing users to explore how philanthropy fuels research, scholarships, and medical advancements. Collaborating with an ArcGIS expert from the Department of Environmental Science and Policy, we developed a plan to reformat existing content, develop new content, and build interactive maps to tell the story of the campaign. This partnership allowed us to leverage specialized expertise to enhance storytelling in an innovative way. Our digital-first approach also provided a practical financial benefit—by leveraging an existing technology, we avoided the costs of printing a traditional impact report while maximizing donor outreach. The microsite delivered exceptional engagement, with average time spent on the site 135% higher than the average of our top 10 stories of the year.

From the Judges

UC Davis cleverly repurposed a mapping tool for campaign storytelling. We like the practical use of internal expertise and data-driven impact. A smart, digital-first approach with room to deepen emotional resonance.