The Grove City College Office of Advancement’s work to highlight alumni veterans and recognize the College’s generous supporters earned high honors recently from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) and the Telly Awards.
The Veterans of Grove City College project, an online gallery dedicated to Grove City College alumni who served in the armed forces, won a prestigious CASE 2022 Silver Circle of Excellence Award in the Engagement/ Targeted Constituency Engagement category.
The project includes the Veterans Wall of Honor, a searchable online directory of those who served from the college’s earliest days to the present, a history of the College’s long association with the nation’s armed forces, including serving as a training center during World War II and hosting an Air Force ROTC program for 38 years, photo galleries, wartime newsletters, and other digitized resources.
"The Veterans of Grove City College project was an effort to find and connect with our alumni who served or are currently serving in the United States Armed Forces. Our goal was to engage with this targeted community of alumni to collect their stories for the purpose of honoring their service to our country,” Director of Archives and Galleries Hilary (Lewis ’09) Walczak said.
CASE judges were effusive in their praise for the project, which they called a “great, organized way to honestly re-embrace this community of alumni.” The project can be viewed here.
The Telly Awards, which recognize excellence in video and television across all screens, selected the Advancement Office’s “Grove City College Letters” video for a 2022 Silver Telly Award for non-broadcast general fundraising video. Produce by Pittsburgh-based Awesome Films, the five-minute video features scholarship students thanking donors in their own words in a variety of settings around campus.
“The students’ real words of heartfelt thanks made up the script for this video. It helped our donors to hear the actual voices of these scholarship recipients, and to see the faces of those they have impacted through their generous giving. It made it so personal. We helped make a connection through video that was just not possible in person in early 2021 due to the pandemic,” Joanie Baumgartner, director of Advancement Communications, said.
See the video at giving.gcc.edu/scholarships.
“It’s such an honor to get to collaborate on meaningful projects like this with people who are so excellent at their jobs. When these creative initiatives are so well-received by our amazing Grove City College alumni and donors, we are thrilled. When our projects also attract the attention of other professionals in our industry, that’s just icing on the cake,” Baumgartner said.