Pomona’s Claremont McKenna College (CMC) is one of the nation’s top liberal arts colleges. Their mission is to prepare the world’s future leaders for careers in business and politics in the hopes that they may pursue thoughtful and productive lives. With that positioning in mind, CMC embarked on a historic campaign called “The Campaign for CMC: Responsible Leadership.”
CMC selected STAUFFER to undertake this project based on our reputation with many other top colleges in the country. Their goal was to create a site that facilitated and fostered a culture of continuing philanthropy through storytelling and transparency.
The campaign was designed to ensure a bright future for the college and its students by building upon the best aspects of its past and mission: “Honor Our Leadership Mission, Prepare Future Leaders Through Integrated Sciences, and Expand Transformative Student Opportunities.”
Storytelling took center stage in this project. Told through a microsite that detailed the numbers, figures, and aspirations of how donors' money would be spent above the fold, we then unfurled the backstory of CMC with a timeline of the history of CMC’s Responsible Leadership initiative, showing the various donation milestones reached since 2015. By linking the present, the future, and the past through a visual narrative, we told the story of a college that grows and reacts to the needs of the people.
As of 2024, the campaign has raised over 1.1 billion with nearly 11,000 donors. It is the first liberal arts college in history to reach those fundraising goals in a single comprehensive campaign.
The STAUFFER team worked closely with CMC’s team to build a site for the campaign designed to grow the number of donors and engage audiences through a forward-facing design language that provides clear pathways for users to explore and contribute to the campaign.
Using Drupal, the campaign site’s infrastructure comprises a series of building blocks that will facilitate quick updates and the creation of new CMC sites in the future.
