More Human, More Trusted: How Hopkins School Reinvented Its Day of Giving

About Hopkins School

Founded in 1660, Hopkins School is the nation’s third-oldest independent school, serving about 724 students in grades seven through twelve in New Haven, Connecticut. The school’s Office of Advancement is led by a director of advancement, with dedicated leads for leadership giving; alumni and parent relations; and annual giving, stewardship, and development operations.

The challenge: A giving day site that didn’t feel like Hopkins

When Hopkins School’s contract with its former giving day provider came up for renewal, Sue Zarnowski, Hopkins’ Director of Annual Giving, Stewardship, and Development Operations, took a hard look at what the platform was and wasn’t doing for donors.

The giving day pages worked. But they didn’t look or feel like Hopkins. A donor clicking through from an email could just as easily have landed on a page built for any other school in the country. “It didn’t feel like a website,” Zarnowski explained. “It felt like one long page of scrolling. If one of our donors was going to that site, it was unfamiliar to them.”

Zarnowski wanted donors to recognize Hopkins the moment they landed on a giving page, and to trust it enough to give. She also saw a chance to cut costs on contract features the team wasn’t using, and to return to Raise, a platform she’d used and valued in a prior role.

The solution: One connected suite for giving, outreach, and stewardship

Hopkins moved its Day of Giving and annual giving efforts onto a connected advancement suite, adopting Advance, Raise, and Gratavid together rather than stitching together separate systems. The three tools now work in tandem to overhaul how the school stewards every gift, from a first-time donor to a longtime member of its loyalty society.

A Day of Giving site that finally looked like Hopkins

Working closely with the Gravyty team, Zarnowski rebuilt the school’s Day of Giving site herself, studying other institutions’ pages before deciding what belonged on Hopkins’. The finished site featured a real-time leaderboard, a donor wall, and a giving thermometer, along with dedicated pages for young alumni, current parents, and reunion-year giving.

Donors could also split a single gift across multiple challenges, a feature Zarnowski credits with pulling in more money overall as donors redirected their giving once they saw where the need was greatest.

That flexibility showed up in donor behavior, too: 79 donors made two separate gifts during the campaign, a jump in “double gifts” over past years.

The site accepted early gifts through QR codes ahead of the campaign and gave the team real-time data on when donations peaked, insight Zarnowski plans to use to time outreach for future campaigns. 

For the first time, Hopkins layered Double the Donation into the campaign, matching donors to their employers’ corporate giving programs and helping the team lock in five employer matches it might otherwise have missed.

When one donor asked that a gift amount stay private, the team worked with Gravyty to make dollar amounts anonymous by default while still showing donor names on the wall, a balance that held up for the rest of the campaign.

That familiarity made the campaign easy to talk about, too. In an effort to maximize the Arts Challenge, Hopkins’ Director of the Arts capitalized on the series of concerts that week to ask audiences to pull out their phones and give on the spot, using a simple link that was easy to say out loud and easy to remember.

Gratavid turns thank-yous into relationships

Before Gratavid, a gift of $2,500 or more earned a donor a letter carrying the head of school’s wet-ink signature. It was appreciated, but it told donors little about where their money actually went.

During this year’s Day of Giving, Hopkins’ head of school personally recorded 55 personalized video thank-yous for donors who gave $2,500 or more. 

Every program area with its own Day of Giving challenge, whether financial aid or athletics, recorded its own thank-you message explaining how the gift would be used, a direct response to donor survey feedback that supporters wanted more transparency about where Hopkins Fund dollars go.

Each video matched the messenger to the mission: donors to athletics, for example, heard directly from the director of athletics. That fund also drew the strongest engagement of any challenge, with an 88.57% watch rate across 75 videos delivered, while arts and greatest need donors wrote back directly to say thanks.

Video stewardship now extends well beyond the giving day. In FY26, Hopkins’ concert choir recorded a video for every donor in the school’s loyalty society, recognizing three or more consecutive years of giving, and a video birthday message from a longtime faculty member is in the works. 

In December 2025, Hopkins piloted an initiative where scholarship students recorded thank-you videos for their donors; one video sent to an entire graduating class raised more from classmates than a standard mailed acknowledgment ever had. The students recorded six videos, resulting in a 100% view rate, an 80% response rate, and one gift.

This summer, the team is building a new touchpoint for every endowed scholarship: a letter introducing the student to the donor behind their scholarship, paired with a video from the donor explaining what inspired the gift.

Turning early adoption into growing momentum

The rollout built real traction from the start. Zarnowski said Hopkins’ advancement team quickly put Raise to work. Raise launch initially focused on post-gift relationship-building and stewardship, and next steps include migrating the team from legacy processes to the full Raise experience for donor outreach.

Hopkins has scheduled additional Raise training for the advancement team in late August, and Zarnowski plans to deepen her own use of the platform — building an even stronger foundation to unlock the rest of what Raise can do for donor outreach.

The results: Growth built on trust

The numbers tell a clear story of growth, both in overall giving and in the personal touches that drove it:

• 55.7% increase in Day of Giving dollars raised, year-over-year
• 1.3% increase in Day of Giving donor participation, year-over-year
• 70+ total personalized Gratavid videos recorded by the head of school, drawing personal thank-you replies from donors

Much of this momentum reflected genuine new giving rather than simply moving dollars around. A majority of gifts to matched challenges represented new money, driven by a very organized and excited team. 

Donors responded to the new giving day site with unprompted trust, too. There were no complaints, and feedback consistently praised how easy and trustworthy the experience felt. That real-time visibility into giving patterns is now shaping strategy going forward, with Hopkins using live data to time outreach for future campaigns.

What’s next: Building on momentum

With a new supervisor who started in May, Hopkins’ advancement team is having more strategic conversations about the shape of its calendar: whether to front-load the annual fund, add matching challenges tied to specific programs for Giving Tuesday, and better space out reunion-year asks ahead of the school’s next reunion in June 2027.

Zarnowski has also started automating Hopkins’ first-time donor emails, so every new donor gets a timely thank-you and tax receipt before the next stewardship touch begins. From here, the team plans to keep building Raise adoption across the office, launch a dedicated website for general giving outside of the Day of Giving, and roll out donor-recorded Gratavid messages tied to every endowed scholarship.

Solutions spotlight

Gravyty’s connected advancement suite combines Advance, Raise, and Gratavid to give institutions one unified approach for giving, outreach, and stewardship. Instead of juggling separate tools, advancement teams get a fully branded giving day and annual giving experience, a shared system for managing donor outreach alongside their CRM, and personalized, scalable video messaging for gift acknowledgment and cultivation. Together, these solutions help teams move off spreadsheets and disconnected point tools, so they can build donor relationships more efficiently and consistently across the full advancement lifecycle.