This year’s Giving Blueday was UM-Dearborn’s biggest ever. The platform crashed several times and strained the back up plan, but that couldn’t stop the philanthropy of UM-Dearborn’s alumni, faculty, staff, friends and students. Together, we came together to make an incredible difference for students on our campus. Preliminary results show UM-Dearborn raising more than $130,000 from over a thousand gifts on March 16, far surpassing any previous Giving Blueday. Across the university, UM-Dearborn had the second most donors overall this year.
There were many people behind many causes this year. Several campus leaders came together to match over $11,000 for the UM-Dearborn Go Blue Guarantee, an endowment that will provide free tuition to the state’s best and brightest. The entire match was exhausted and well over $40,000 was raised for the endowment. Our Alumni Society Board, Alumni Affiliates, and many alumni shared our stories online, and the #GivingBlueday hashtag continues to have a prominent UM-Dearborn presence online.
Our students’ philanthropy shined, too. Our sponsored student organizations — Alpha Kappa Psi, Beta Alpha Psi, the Criminology and Criminal Justice Collective, the First Gen Student Org, and the Society of Women Engineers — combined raised over $7,500 from more than 130 donors. And many of our sports teams also had strong Giving Blueday campaigns, with volleyball and women’s soccer both seeing 50 or more supporters each.
Due to the technical difficulties on Giving Blueday, donors were given a second day to give and a $25 match on March 17. With the need to use multiple platforms, reconcile multiple days of many gifts, and iron out any other technical issues, we had to pause on announcing the winners of two challenges. On campus, the four colleges participated in the College Competition, where the college with the highest percentage of faculty and staff donors will earn extra scholarship dollars for their respective college’s scholarships. For the UM-Dearborn Athletics teams, the team with the most Giving Blueday donors would get an extra $1,000 donated to their team’s efforts. We expect to announce those winners as soon as we’ve received final totals.
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Story by Eva Gogola
