What the 2026 CASE Circle of Excellence Winners Reveal About Great Advancement Storytelling

North Country School is a kindergarten-through-ninth-grade boarding school in the Adirondacks, built around a working farm with horses, pigs, sheep, ducks, and chickens. This year, the institution won a Bronze CASE Circle of Excellence award for their “Chickens Take Hollywood”  Giving Tuesday Community Campaign. A few categories over, the University of Maryland picked up a Silver award for a single photograph of Kermit the Frog delivering the University’s 2025 commencement address, shot from behind to preserve the surprise (and later named one of CNN’s Year in Pictures 2025).

Different budgets, different audiences, same result: recognition for work that made someone stop and pay attention.

CASE just named 493 winners across its 2026 Circle of Excellence awards, spanning nearly every corner of advancement work—fundraising campaigns, magazines, video, donor stewardship, alumni engagement, and more. We spent some time in the full list, and a few patterns emerged about what makes advancement storytelling award-worthy, regardless of your budget or team size.

We did a shorter recap last year, spotlighting two standout Partner campaigns from the 2025 Awards. This year, we wanted to look for any trends across the whole list to see what these winners have in common.

The numbers, briefly

The 493 winning entries came from roughly 247 institutions: large public flagships, small independent schools, community colleges, and university foundations alike. Awards run from Bronze up through the rare Grand Gold, which CASE reserves for entries judges consider game-changing. Only 14 Grand Golds were awarded across the entire competition.

That range, across every institution type and every award level, is what makes the patterns below worth studying.

What the winners have in common

Storytelling formats dominate the list

Look at where the wins concentrate: video, magazines, and long-form writing show up again and again. Judges reward a well-told story as consistently as they reward a well-run campaign.

Small teams punch above their weight 

Although CASE builds some categories specifically for smaller shops with fewer than 10 staff, the Flash Campaigns/Giving Day Campaigns has no staff-size tier. CASE judges every entry against fixed criteria, not against each other—which is how, in the organization’s own words, “it is possible for a small institution to receive the same recognition as a larger institution with more resources.” North Country School’s Giving Tuesday video, mentioned above, won in that category, judged by the same standard as Giving Day entries from major universities.

Winning titles are hyper-specific

Some of the most memorable titles in this year’s list are tied to a campus, a mascot, or a moment:

• William & Mary’s “Ale Mary” is a custom-brewed beer named by the University’s women’s giving society, with a can label honoring Queen Mary II, the school’s namesake.
• Mid-Peninsula High School’s “Ollie’s Day” is a yield video narrated from the perspective of the admissions office’s resident dog. 
• Jacksonville State University’s “Coach Kelly Lego Minifigure” is a custom donor gift marking the arrival of the school’s new head football coach. 

These winning entries all have a distinct institutional voice and personality.

Winning across categories

A handful of institutions had standout years, picking up multiple awards across different categories:

• University of California, Davis—10 wins spanning podcasts, video, leadership, and donor stewardship
• University of Maryland, College Park—nine wins across photography, writing, magazines, and Giving Day
• North Carolina State University—eight wins touching advancement services, marketing, fundraising, and video
• Bowling Green State University—eight wins, including a Giving Day video and a run of social-style content built around campus culture
• Virginia Tech—six wins across branding, magazines, and community-building initiatives
• University of Tennessee Foundation—six wins spanning marketing, publications, writing, and student engagement

What distinguishes this group from other winners on the list: most of them won across genuinely different disciplines in the same year. The University of Tennessee Foundation’s six wins touched fundraising, marketing, publications, writing, design, and student engagement—six different disciplines, zero overlap. Virginia Tech, UC Davis, and Maryland show a similar range, with strength distributed across much of the advancement operation.

Bowling Green State University took a different path. Six of its eight wins came from video alone—evidence of a program that’s built deep, repeatable strength in one specific craft.

Independent schools showed the same pattern at a smaller scale. These five schools won twice this year, each across two different categories: Milton Academy (Communications and Magazines), North Country School (Fundraising and Publications), The Webb School (Communications and Fundraising), Northfield Mount Hermon School (Magazines and Writing), and American School of Guatemala (Marketing and Communications).

The GiveCampus connection

Here’s where we’ll admit some bias: about one in 10 active GiveCampus Partners was recognized with a CASE Circle of Excellence award this year, including nine of the 14 Grand Gold honorees. In fact, a number of the institutions mentioned above are Partners. So are the schools behind the four examples below, each powered by the GiveCampus platform.

North Carolina State University’s “Loyal Like Lloyd” won Bronze in Donor Stewardship. The video centers on Dr. Lloyd Bostian, who has given to NC State every year for 70 years, and was part of a campaign thanking donors with two or more consecutive years of giving. Donor retention climbed from 50 percent to 58 percent year over year, and judges called it “a great example of donor storytelling.”

Bowling Green State University’s “BGSU One Day” won Silver in Video. The video anchored the University’s 36-hour annual giving day, which drew 5,367 donors from all 50 states and raised more than $2.7 million for the second consecutive year. Judges called it “a smart, fun giving day video that showcased diverse giving opportunities and achieved strong results at an affordable cost.”

Colorado State University’s “What’s on Your Plate?” won Gold in Fundraising’s Flash Campaigns/Giving Day Campaigns category. The Giving Tuesday campaign supports Rams Against Hunger, CSU’s meal-swipe program for food-insecure students, and raised $148,179 against a $110,000 goal from 1,235 donors. Judges noted that “many universities shy away from raising money for this kind of cause because it highlights that students often cannot afford basic necessities like food,” and called CSU’s approach “thoughtful, respectful, and so relatable.”

The Westminster Schools’ Gold-winning “The 2025 EveryCat Challenge” marked the tenth year of the school’s fall fundraising tradition, uniting the community around a goal of one gift per student. It raised $3,071,797 against a $2.5 million goal from 1,901 gifts, run across a series of GiveCampus giving pages built for faculty, staff, young alumni, and reunion classes. Judges called it “an excellent model for a well-integrated campaign that delivers clear value.”

GiveCampus is proud to partner with these schools and to host the campaigns behind these wins. But the spotlight belongs to the creative advancement teams who did the work. Part of why we built the GiveCampus platform is to give those teams more time to do what they do best: tell the stories that move people to act.

What you can borrow from this year’s winners

Every team can take something from this list, Partner or not:

1. Enter the small-team categories. If your shop is lean, there’s likely a category built for exactly that. CASE’s judging criteria explicitly include judicious use of resources, so a lean team’s efficiency is part of what gets recognized
2. Go deep on one specific story. The winning entries almost never try to represent “everything great about our institution” in one piece.
3. Treat video as a baseline. It shows up across nearly every category this year, from fundraising to student audiences to research storytelling.

Great advancement work comes down to knowing your story cold and being willing to tell it with passion and personality.

Curious what your fundraising program could look like with more time back for creative and impactful work that wins attention? Schedule a demo and see the GiveCampus platform in action.