Texas Tech University System

Vision & Tradition Campaign Celebration Video

Capturing the impact of a billion dollars

With its billion-dollar goal, Vision & Tradition: The Campaign for Texas Tech motivated historic levels of giving for the Texas Tech University System and transformed its universities. The key to capturing this grand story in video was to go small, letting people share their memories of how the campaign impacted their lives.

Process

Early in the development process, we attempted to create a scripted video that told the story of the campaign’s impact. Early in the writing process we realized such an approach would be impractical on a project of this size. More than 20 new facilities were built as part of this fundraising initiative, and that only represented part of the billion-dollar total. It would take a documentary-length video to tell the story with any kind of detail.

The Vision & Tradition campaign celebration video demonstrated the impact of the billion-dollar fundraising effort through personal accounts and sweeping imagery.

To tell the story on a more manageable scale, we pivoted to personal interviews with individuals who had been impacted by the campaign. This constrained the narrative and brought to the forefront the human lives shaped by the generosity of hundreds of thousands of gifts. It gave us an opportunity to tell the broader impact of the campaign visually and created a lens we could use to see the individual impact of a fundraising effort that was often spoken about only in superlatives.

For the interviews, we spoke with Texas Tech University System Chancellor Kent Hance and eight other students and faculty members who benefited from the campaign. Their stories formed the core structure of the video. To build on their accounts, we scheduled b-roll shoots in the following days that illustrated the stories they shared.

Coming full-circle

The 2010 brand video announcing the Vision & Tradition Campaign connected with alumni and donors on a strong emotional level. We wanted to recall some of those themes as we wrapped up the philanthropic undertaking, thinking of both videos as a pair of bookends on either end of this multi-year fundraising story.

Brianne Hight, who was featured as the current masked rider throughout the brand video, had completed her undergraduate degree and was attending graduate school. Telling her story of how scholarships had impacted her education was a natural way of revisiting her story.

We also reviewed library footage from the 2010 video and included alternate shots of memorable scenes. This created a few touch points with the original video where viewers could revisit these moments from a new perspective. In a way, these video echoes are a subtle nod to the campaign’s theme of tradition.

Results

Overall the video was enthusiastically received by system leadership, alumni and campaign donors. As the anchor for a gala event celebrating the 8-year fundraising effort, the video celebrated a historic achievement for the Texas Tech University System while retaining the human connection. Through grand imagery and personal stories, the piece tells the story of a higher education system on the rise and underscores the life-changing impact that giving makes in the lives of individual students and faculty.

Team