Day for the Knights
Thursday, April 7, 2022

There are a few goals: fundraising, participation, and social. For the first two, we are hoping to raise $100,000 for student scholarships and have 100 percent participation from faculty/staff and the campus community in some form. Most importantly, DFTK is a day of celebration and pride for Marian University and its mission. Thus, we will have numerous events/activities around campus that day to engage our community.

There is a level of participation that will work for everyone (faculty/staff/students/parents/alumni/community)!

1. Make a gift (even small amounts add up!)
2. Create a team and facilitate support from your constituents.
3. Help create content that promotes your favorite program/school/project/team (social posts/video)
4. Participate in the party—dress up, decorate, generate excitement and enthusiasm on campus.
5. Spread the word. Follow, like, interact, and share university social posts with your friends and family.

You play three different roles: liaison, cheerleader, and collaborator. The information we give you should be spread to your respective departments/area/teams, and we hope that you will use that information to drum up excitement among your colleagues, peers, constituents, and alumni. We also want to work with you to customize DFTK for you and your team—if you have ideas (or a lack of) we are happy to talk with you about what you can do so your team makes an impact on DFTK.

While the advancement office will be primarily advertising the Marian Fund (student scholarships), we encourage all teams to pick a fund(s) that would better resonate with your biggest fans! The only rules are (1) we are not fundraising for small projects, we are looking to fundraise for scholarships, (2) the scholarship should be pre-existing, and (3) each team should limit the number of funds to three.

Let us know! We can check if it will work. But, we encourage you to have backup ideas in case it does not work.

Plenty! While we are all working towards one goal for the day, we will have multiple challenges going as well, all of which are accompanied with some sort of prize. We vehemently encourage friendly competition, rivalry, and wanting to win.

Competitions will be based on percentages of participation and celebration of effort and creativity. Even the smaller teams can compete fairly against larger ones.

While we will be sending out the official categories shortly, expect them to include things like, “most new donors,” “most current student donors,” and the coveted, “best-in-show,” which is an overall presence and participation award.

There are a few ways—social media, email, calling, texting. It really depends on the audience you’re trying to reach.

We are sending out a digital toolkit—this will include social media samples and designs, prompts for spotlighting your faculty, staff, students, or alumni, letter/email templates that include language you should use in your ask, etc. These will likely be used for your wider audiences. If you need a list pulled for those contacts, please let us know sooner than later.

If you are close with alumni or campus donors, it may mean more to reach out to them directly, instead of sending a mass communication. For these, we encourage you talk with them as you normally would, explain what DFTK is, and ask as you would any other project.

Otherwise, watch the MU and MU-Alumni social media pages for promotions—share what you see, and spread the word to your personal social networks. If your team has its own MU/MU-related social networks, we encourage you to share there, as well as create your own content for those pages.

If you don’t have social media, you probably know someone who does. We ask that you encourage your colleagues/peers to share what they see to they’re social networks (there’s no way all of you don’t have social media).

If you are having trouble creating the social media promotion yourself, we’re happy to help. However, we are creating a lot of the base social media promotion for this event too—so we may not have a ton of time to make what you want a reality. So before coming to us, we ask that you look at your team and see if anyone has social media/design experience—you never know, your student employee, boss, or woman who has an office next to yours may actually be a much better designer than you initially think. If none of that seems possible, then we can talk.

You do not need to be the person running social media + promotion either. If you want to recruit students (digital ambassadors) to help with yours, that would be completely fine.

While we encourage teams to come up with big activities around campus to have fun and engage our current students, we recognize that it may just not be feasible with every team. The best plan for those who don’t want to be flashy is to approach your physical presence more subtly—have your team wear Marian gear or a specific color that day, have fliers hung up in your office spaces, or attend the events that are going on around campus. We want you to have as much fun on DFTK as us and our students.