Campaigns that Connect: Nostalgia Inspires Giving
At The John Cooper School, the most powerful fundraising tool isn’t a leaderboard or a matching gift challenge — it’s a photo from 1994.
Cooper is a young school. Founded in 1988, its first graduating class numbered 24 students navigating a campus still under construction around them — no sports fields, a gym they simply called “the gym.” By 2025, that same school enrolls 1,378 students and has 2,616 graduates. The alumni program is run by exactly two people: Kalli Lovejoy and Sara-Kate Johansen.
Without centuries of tradition to draw on, their answer has been to build something rarer: an alumni engagement strategy built entirely on emotion. The mechanism is nostalgia — and Vidigami is what makes it work at scale.
Building Tradition When You Don’t Have Much of It Yet
Cooper opened in 1988, when developer George Mitchell donated 43 acres in The Woodlands specifically for an independent school. Its first graduating class had 24 students. Its most recent had 136. The alumni base is growing — but it is still young, and relatively small by independent school standards.
That youth is both a challenge and a creative constraint. Kalli and Sara-Kate can’t point to a 150-year-old chapel or a century of championship banners. What they have instead is something more intimate: a school where most alumni remember exactly what it felt like to be there. Cooper’s traditions — the Kinder-Senior ceremony, John Cooper Day, the Dragon Tank — haven’t changed since the beginning. A school with 400 years of history couldn’t say that.
Their strategic insight: if you can bring an alum back to a specific, felt moment from their time at Cooper, you can move them from passive to engaged — and from engaged to giving.
How Giving Day Evolved
In 2020, 2021, and 2022, Cooper ran Giving Days with conventional tactics: a logo, a class-year leaderboard, and social media pushes. These worked at a baseline level. Then, in 2023, they started deliberately engineering nostalgia into the campaign architecture.
In 2023, they used Cooper’s original first building as the Giving Day logo and posted throwback photos of the Kinder-Senior ceremony — one of the school’s most beloved annual traditions, dating back to 1994. In 2024, they asked long-tenured faculty and alumni to make the fundraising ask on video, replacing institutional copy with trusted faces. In 2026, they went further still.
We chose two photos that mirrored each other. And then we also divided our photos from Vidigami into different eras of Cooper. So each day leading up to Giving Day, we had the 1990s era, the 2000 era, the 2010s era and then the 2020s era.
Kalli Lovejoy, The John Cooper School
Each day of the 2026 Giving Day campaign surfaced photos from a specific decade. Not a generic montage — the actual faces and buildings from each era of Cooper’s history. Alumni who graduated in 1999 saw their campus. Alumni who graduated in 2011 saw theirs. The emotional specificity is what cuts through.
None of this would be possible without a searchable, organized photo archive.
What Vidigami Made Possible
We really would not have been able to do this without Vidigami. It was so easy to log on, search by year, see exactly what year each photo was from, as well as use that tagging feature and figure out who these alumni were. Because some of them we haven’t met.
Kalli Lovejoy, The John Cooper School
When Cooper joined Vidigami in 2018, the school’s technology department migrated the entire historical archive into the platform — not just photos of students, but images of the campus itself across different eras. What was once buried across drives and folders became searchable by year, person, and era.
For a two-person alumni team, this changed everything. They could pull photos from the early 1990s and identify who was in them using the tagging feature, tag alumni Instagram handles for direct social outreach, and surface images of buildings that no longer exist — the kind of specific visual detail that stops a 1996 graduate mid-scroll.
Consent management is woven into the same workflow. Students with photo restrictions are flagged directly in Vidigami, so when Kalli or Sara-Kate pulls photos for a campaign, they know immediately which images can and can’t be used. No separate spreadsheet. No cross-referencing.
- Giving Day relied on a logo, a class-year leaderboard, and social media volume
- Historical photos existed but were not searchable or organized by year or era
- Hard to identify alumni in old photos, especially graduates the team hadn’t personally met
- Three separate publications required three separate production cycles
- Alumni volunteer pathways limited almost entirely to the alumni board
- Era-based Giving Day campaign: 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, 2020s — decade-specific photos pulled directly from Vidigami
- Full historical archive searchable by year, person, and era — including campus buildings across different decades
- Tagging feature identifies alumni in old photos; Instagram handles tagged for social outreach
- Three publications merged into one: Ignite magazine serves as alumni magazine, institutional update, and report of appreciation simultaneously
- Volunteer pathways expanded across 13 cities, Dragon Tank, alumni games, Young Alumni Professional Development Series
What the Numbers Said
The 2026 Giving Day, set for April 1st, was still ahead at the time of recording. But the trajectory told a clear story: fewer alumni donors giving the same total dollar amount as prior years — pointing to higher average gifts and stronger commitment per alumnus. Volunteer engagement was on track to nearly double compared to the prior year.
If we can continually do that and keep them engaged, then everything else sort of falls into place.
Kalli Lovejoy, The John Cooper School
The underlying philosophy is worth stating plainly. Cooper doesn’t only reach out to alumni when it needs something. Their goal is constant belonging: city gatherings in 13 cities, alumni games, a print magazine that features alumni alongside current students, and programming across every career stage from college panels to the Young Alumni Professional Development Series.
Alumni want to see what’s going on in the school, and current parents and Cooper kids want to see Cooper alumni because they are the final product of the Cooper education.
Sara-Kate Johansen, The John Cooper School
That framing — alumni as the final product — shapes every communication decision. The nostalgia campaign works because it makes that connection feel real again, not manufactured.
Watch the Full Webinar
Hear the complete conversation with Kalli Lovejoy and Sara-Kate Johansen — including their full Giving Day strategy, city gathering approach, and Q&A.
Full Webinar: Campaigns that Connect
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