Case Study: McDaniel College
Discover how McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland provided a donor recognition virtual event showcasing their new Student Center in place of a live event. Also, learn how the college shared this new space grand opening with faculty, staff, and the students.
Primary Areas of Service
• Video Production
• Virtual Tour Design
• HDR Photography
• Branding
• KPI Analytics
• Overview
McDaniel College is a 160-acre campus located in Westminster, Maryland. With a student body of approximately 2,800 undergraduate and graduate students, McDaniel is a well-known educational institution. US News ranks it as the #1 Best Value Regional University in the North. The campus has a robust alumni family tree and is supported by philanthropists and donors.
In 2020, backed by notable philanthropic donors, McDaniel College broke ground on the ROJ Student Center. This new addition to the campus houses dining areas, collaboration rooms, entertainment areas, and student services offices. Specific donors financially covered the new center and its various areas and spaces.
The college needed a way to showcase this new Student Center and highlight the many unique amenities. Additionally, the college wanted to recognize and honor those philanthropists’ generosity that allowed the new center to come to life. Once the new center was complete, Covid19 had surfaced, making in-person gatherings impossible.
• The Shining Star Interactive Approach
Shining Star Interactive created several deliverables with a very tight timeline to assist the college in presenting the new Student Center and honoring the sponsoring donors.
Our creative team produced a 20-minute video showing a walk-through of the new student center. The video highlighted the new spaces and called attention to each of the named donors of those spaces. Additionally, the video included an introduction from the College President and a personal commentary from the center’s primary philanthropist, Bill Roj, whom the center is named.
To complement the video and bring a sense of personality and engagement to the new center opening, the Shining Star team also designed a 360 virtual tour. The virtual tour allowed alumni and constituents to experience the Student Center, seeing firsthand the impact their financial contributions made.
The college wanted to know if the donors and alumni supporters well received the video and the virtual tour and enjoyed the content in its entirety. Our team embedded specific KPIs (key performance indicators) to track the video and virtual tour’s viewing and use.
All of the filming, video production, virtual tour photography, and design was completed in a very compressed timeline to accommodate the college’s need to get the content published quickly to meet specific deadlines.
Donor and
philanthropic
outreach.
Honoring
those who
made it
possible.
• Results and Conclusion
McDaniel College provided its philanthropic community and supporting alumni with our video and virtual tour during an online celebration event. Within hours, both the virtual tour and video were not only being enjoyed by the event attendees, but they were also being shared among business colleagues, family, and friends.
Both the virtual tour and the video viewing statistics exceeded the entire online guest count and continued to grow for weeks after the celebration. The impact on donor relations was impressive. Many of the named donors commented on how happy they were with the presentation and manner the College showcased the new Student Center.
