How college planned its Giving Day fundraiser during the COVID-19 pandemic

In March 2020, life as we knew it ground to a halt. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was huge, changing almost every aspect of college life. In this new interview series, we speak with different members of the Green Templeton staff about their experiences of working during a pandemic.

Today’s interview: Development and Alumni Relations Team

The Development and Alumni Relations Office develops and maintains relationships with the college community, including students, alumni, fellows and friends, through communications and events, and raises funds to support both the student experience and advance the wider college. The team has been largely working from home since the first lockdown restrictions were announced in March 2020.

In this interview, Sophie Schirmacher, Alumni Relations and Regular Giving Officer, and Samantha Novak-Mitchell, Data and Research Officer, speak about embracing new technology during the pandemic, and planning and implementing the college’s second annual Giving Day entirely virtually.

When did you find out you’d be working from home for the foreseeable future?

Sam: ‘We started working from home a couple of days before the government’s first lockdown announcement. I remember at the time looking at the cases rising in Italy and thinking, ‘This is coming.’ It was quite scary when they were locking Italy down. We gathered up boxes of files as we didn’t know how long we’d be at home or what we’d be doing. We thought if it wasn’t business as normal then perhaps we could catch up with some filing.’

Sophie: ‘We had a graduation on the 29 February that I attended. At that point there were no masks but people were using hand sanitiser and we’d been told not to shake anybody’s hands. Then with offices closing, there was a general sense of panic nationwide and people not knowing what was coming. None of us really knew how long we’d be working from home. Maybe a few weeks? Then some employees across the UK started getting furloughed and I was one of them for a while.’

Samantha Novak-Mitchell

Sam: ‘I was on furlough for three weeks and then came back. It was weird as I wanted to talk with the team but the furlough rules at the time were really strict and we couldn’t talk to furloughed team members about anything work-related. I worked normally for a while and was then part-furloughed, which was actually the trickiest part for me: going from full time working to a reduction in hours. It was hard to readjust from doing a little of everything and almost in crisis mode to then having to figure out how this will work sustainably and not in firefighting mode.’

How have you found working from home?

Sophie: ‘I think you can sort of get to a breaking point sometimes. The reality is we’re often working longer hours than we would do in office and you don’t have those watercooler chats or organic conversations, so creativity and that exchange of ideas can feel almost impossible. I think it has been difficult and you do feel isolated. If we didn’t have Teams or those touch points for the chance to say ‘how are you?’ or normal things you’d chat about in the office, it would be very hard. I think it’s really important to keep talking with your colleagues. It can feel quite artificial sometimes and you don’t want to force it but it’s important. Ceri, our manager is brilliant and very aware of the challenges of working from home, so always ensures we are okay.’

Sam: ‘Ceri implemented a coffee catch-up most days which is meant to replicate that ‘how are you?’ morning chat. I think that’s really helped in our team’s closeness and knowing what’s going on with each other. The only downfall is that, unlike in the office if you’re busy with something and can say, ‘I just need to finish that’, when it’s online meetings, you join in, even if it is not as convenient a time.’

Has your way of working changed at all?

Sam: ‘I think rather than the work changing, it’s the way of working that has changed. I’ve noticed the team are much more comfortable with digital tools now like OneDrive or shared spreadsheets or working on documents together. Before the pandemic, when we were in office, we used a lot of printed spreadsheets and documents. It feels like everyone has got better at working online, and we have learnt to use shared OneDrive documents!’

Sophie: ‘Partly as we’re too stingy to buy our own printer ink! No, you’re absolutely right. It’s made us all much more aware of sustainability and not using so much paper. It’s been a learning curve. Sam has battled valiantly to teach me how to use our database DARS (Development and Alumni Relations System), better.’

Have you missed being in college?

Sophie: ‘Yes because you rarely see people outside of your team. You’re in a departmental bubble and don’t have those natural chats with other departments. We also aren’t able to meet any students in person so there’s a whole cohort of people who have been here for a year and we haven’t met in person, which is a real shame. You want to build those strong relationships with students before they become alumni. I miss the extras, the social and human side of college.’

COVID-19 safety measures at the entrance to Green Templeton

Sam: ‘There is a nice thing about the delineation between work and home and switching off, and being in a space that has markers of ‘this is work, this is home.’ Being able to connect to colleagues and people outside our team and find out what’s happening and what’s going on is so important. I am looking forward to going back in. I think I’m nervous as well because there is an element of it being quite easy to focus and get stuff done at home, and when you’re in office it may be a little bit more upheaval at first. But it’s a net good because of what you do benefit from.’

How did you keep alumni engaged during the lockdown?

Sam: ‘We started an Alumni Update during the first lockdown. It was initially weekly and then went fortnightly. We emailed alumni, donors and people who had come to events with updates on how our college members were involved in front-line COVID research. It was such a good engagement tool. We saw open rates for emails go up to 60 per cent and got fantastic feedback. Now we’ve settled on a monthly update and we’ve redesigned it with different sections and can set our own agenda from a development side. Pre-COVID, our newsletters contained a lot of information pulled from existing information created by other teams, but now we can create our own agenda while also pulling in important stories from around the college.’

Sophie Schirmacher

Sophie: ‘We were very fortunate we had lots to say during COVID as so many of our college members were so involved with the COVID challenge. The alumni newsletter was born out of COVID and it’s become such an important communications tool, and having that regular communication with our alumni has been really great. We also launched an Alumni Lecture Series, which is a series of 4 or 5 online talks every term on a wide variety of issues that alumni and all members of college are invited to.’

Sam: ‘We’ve had a lot of people saying it was wonderful and great to see what college members were doing during the pandemic, others said they were remembering their days at Green or Templeton or Green Templeton. I think one of the challenges will be that we’ve now hit engagement with a big group of people and we want to maintain that engagement. We did an alumni survey last year to see what people want to hear about and talk about it, but it becomes a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy that the people who respond tend to be the people who already like what you are doing and are engaged, so our challenge is to figure out how to engage with the rest of the group. It’s a fun challenge for the next year.’

Sophie: ‘We have built up good relationships with a lot of our alumni during the pandemic. Recently I even got an email from an alum asking if I was okay as they hadn’t heard from me in six weeks! It was very sweet.’

The college’s second annual Giving Day took place in June. What were the challenges of planning the college’s largest fundraiser in a lockdown?

Sophie: ‘Giving Day was due to be held in February or March but we delayed until June in the hopes lockdown may have lifted. Some other colleges did their Giving Day in full lockdown and, in a way, it sounds absolutely madness, but I wonder if that was easier as they knew they couldn’t do anything in person, whereas we were in a situation of being able to go into college but with restrictions.’

Sam: ‘Planning Giving Day in advance was a real challenge for us. We knew at any moment lockdown might get worse again and people may not necessarily want to come into college or may not be allowed to, but equally in June some restrictions had started to lift and things were slowly opening up. So we were trying to reconcile the two situations while never knowing what was going to change or when.’

Sophie: ‘The real success of last year’s Giving Day was the opportunity for the entire college community to get involved in some way. We wanted to replicate that this year but with COVID, it couldn’t work the same way because of restrictions on people coming on site. Trying to do the whole 36 hours virtually was very complicated we had to be really inventive to figure out how to get everyone involved virtually and reach our global alumni. We had alumni locked down around the world, others in countries with no restrictions and with life as normal. We also had 36 hours of virtual airtime to fill which required a lot of content.’

How challenging was it finding content for a virtual Giving Day?

Sophie: ‘Technically, it was a new thing for everybody and as you’d expect, things occasionally snowballed and we had to cut it back a bit. The whole Giving Day involved so much technology and the time of so many college members. We ran 36 hours of content entirely on Zoom. And on top of that we had to arrange it all virtually with no face-to-face meetings. We replicated the rowing from last year’s Giving Day by having a socially-distanced and COVID secure row-a-thon and the students were just extraordinary organising that. It was really nice to do something tangible and give students and alumni the chance to take part. We had students and alumni taking part from their own homes around the world, too. We also had a hugely successful step-a-thon which was a staff member’s idea and had lots of staff taking part.’

Sam: ‘As it was virtual and our alumni are around the world, we had content scheduled throughout the day and night. We did have some confusion from one person who questioned why we’d scheduled a lecture for 2am in the UK and not a more sociable hour!’

Giving Day brought together the community mainly online in 2021

What lessons did you learn from planning a fundraiser in a pandemic?

Sophie: ‘We had to delay Giving Day because of the pandemic but we’ve learned not to have future Giving Days in Trinity Term around the exams, or just after a Bank Holiday and over Half Term! We had a lot of things against us really but we were very limited in availability as to when we could run it, we didn’t have much of a choice. The timing meant not all students could get involved because of exam commitments or the like, which was a little sad, but for the people who could get involved, they were just brilliant! It was an exhausting 36 hours but we did learn a lot.’

Sam: ‘From the back end part of Giving Day with the data pulling and sharing, I spent more time on communications this year because of a change in approach but in practical terms, there wasn’t any difference in what I would have been doing pre-pandemic. It was just that I was doing it remotely. I do think the Giving Day has shown me that learning new technologies remotely is difficult. You realise how useful it is having somebody sitting next to you showing you which button to press or what to do.’

Were you happy with how Giving Day panned out?

Sophie: ‘We really had no idea how much money a virtual Giving Day would raise for the college. We’d had really good engagement over COVID with so many of our alumni, but it was an unknown whether that would translate to donations on the day. We just didn’t know how much time people would have to take part, if people in different countries with more or less restrictions would have the time to take part or think about making a donation. It’s a bit like waving a stick in the Albert Hall! The fact we raised £57,500 is just brilliant. I would also say that because we’re living in these departmental bubbles, it was an opportunity for us to work with colleagues in other departments – probably too much for their liking! It was nice to engage with other people and I think it will change how we all work together in the future in terms of things like lectures. Different connections came out of Giving Day and I hope it helped people understand what the Development and Alumni Relations Office does.’