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Customer Stories:

From Quiet January to Campus-Wide Gratitude: How SAIT Built a Repeatable Stewardship Month with ThankView by EverTrue

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WHO:

Stop managing data. Start building relationships. Most teams spend January recovering from year-end. SAIT spent it saying thank you.

At Southern Alberta Institute of Technology — a public polytechnic in Calgary — the donor relations team supports stewardship, campaign engagement, and donor communication across alumni, staff, and the broader campus community.

The connections were already there. What the team wanted was a more intentional way to honor them, not through another solicitation, but through something that made donors feel genuinely known.

THE CHALLENGE:

SAIT’s stewardship initiative began not from a problem, but from an opportunity.

Following year-end giving in December, January was typically a quieter period with fewer structured engagement moments. The team saw a chance to shift that time away from routine solicitation and instead focus entirely on donor gratitude and impact storytelling.

They aimed to:

-Use January as a dedicated stewardship moment

-Test a focused “gratitude month” concept

-Explore segmentation and engagement in a simple, scalable way

WHY EVERTRUE:

SAIT used ThankView by EverTrue to power personalized video communication throughout Thank-YOU-ary.

ThankView helped the team:

-Send segmented, personalized video emails to different donor groups

-Quickly build and distribute content captured from campus activities

-Track engagement data like opens, unsubscribes, and video completion rates

-Execute a fast-moving pilot without sacrificing personalization

The Results:

The Thank-YOU-ary pilot delivered strong engagement across channels and audiences.

-Unsubscribe rates stayed very low, under 1.4 percent

-Staff email open rates exceeded 70 percent

-Video completion rates consistently exceeded 80 percent, with a peak of 98 percent

-Strong participation from students in thank you card writing, including requests to write more than planned

-High internal engagement through a campus-wide gratitude wall

-Clear validation that both digital and in-person stewardship resonated

The Full Story:

At Southern Alberta Institute of Technology, the idea for Thank-YOU-ary came out of year-end planning discussions.

Instead of returning immediately to fundraising appeals in January, the team saw an opportunity to pause and focus entirely on gratitude. That idea became a one month pilot centered on donor appreciation, storytelling, and engagement.

The campaign was intentionally simple and structured around core stewardship pillars, including recognition, engagement, and acknowledgment. It included:

An opening and closing email series with video messaging
Weekly social storytelling highlighting donor impact
A student thank you card writing event for milestone donors
An internal gratitude wall for staff

Segmentation shaped the approach, with tailored messaging for staff, alumni, milestone donors, and general donor groups. The team also explored digital versus physical engagement across different milestone segments.

Engagement came quickly. Emails performed strongly, video completion rates were high, and participation from students and staff exceeded expectations. The thank you card event in particular became a standout moment, with students actively asking to contribute more messages than planned.

What began as a short pilot quickly became something the team sees as repeatable. With strong engagement signals and broad campus buy-in, SAIT now views Thank-YOU-ary as a model that can scale and evolve in future years.

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