Today, after approving Melinda’s comment on the post about the Merril College of Journalism’s failure to put up an online giving form as promised, I checked the site. Still not up - a month after I first checked and saw that it would be there “this week.”
So, being the engaged alum and development professional that I am, I wrote an e-mail to the college’s development director. I tried to be kind - “I hate to be a pest, but I want to make a gift to get my name on the wall, and with this being my line of work, too, and my heart being vested in the success of the College, I find the situation troubling.” - but the truth is, if I was working like that here, I would be in hot water. Like, scarringly hot water (Maybe that’s why we raise three-quarters of a billion dollars a year, easy). One of the basic tenets of this sort of development is that you never, ever put up any roadblock that could stop someone from making a gift, and you spend a lot of time guessing what could possibly be a roadblock. This one, however, was pretty basic. If I can’t access the online form, I’m not going to give.
She responded right away, quite kindly, promising to have the site up by the end of the day. In about three hours, there it was. So, of course, I had to make my gift, and I did.
For my class this semester, Internet Strategies, we are tasked with building a campaign to raise money online using a real organization as an example. Maybe I will use the Knight Hall campaign for the project.
