Master Class: Advocacy Amplified-Scaling a Peer-to-Peer Program

How UT Austin and St. Paul’s School Built High-Performing Peer-to-Peer Programs

Peer-to-peer outreach is one of advancement’s most powerful tools. The data is unambiguous: people are far more likely to give when a peer asks. Building a high-performing program around that insight takes real work. It asks volunteers to do something most advancement professionals learned by trial and error—confidently asking the people they know to support a cause important to them.

So what does a great advocacy program look like at scale? Last year, two GiveCampus Partner schools set out to answer that question from opposite ends of the size spectrum—one with 530 students, the other with 52,000. They landed on the same three principles—all of which are laid out for you in the Master Class below.

Meet the Schools

The University of Texas (UT) at Austin is an R1 institution at the Texas state capital with roughly 52,000 students and more than 500,000 living alumni. UT’s annual day of giving, 40 Hours for the Forty Acres, is exactly what it sounds like: 40 consecutive hours of fundraising tied to the school’s iconic 40-acre campus. Pablo Mora, Associate Director of Peer-to-Peer and Campus Fundraising, leads the charge—and last year did so while onboarding a new solution—GC Online Giving—in a 3.5-month sprint. UT ran its 2025 giving day on GiveCampus, using the platform’s built-in advocacy, outreach, and crowdfunding tools to power its peer-to-peer outreach.

St. Paul’s School (SPS) is an independent boarding high school in Concord, New Hampshire, with 530 students and roughly 9,000 living alumni. SPS has been running giving days on GC Online Giving for seven years and also uses GC Volunteer Management to recruit, train, and track their class agent network. Their 2025 Be the Greater Good campaign was a 36-hour challenge that drew alumni, parents, faculty, and friends. Amanda Ruggles, Director of the SPS Fund, led the effort.

Two schools. Two scales. Two timelines. One advocacy playbook.

As Pablo put it: “[We provide] two very different perspectives from one very small school and one very large school—and you’ll see a lot of interesting similarities and differences in how we have both engaged with our advocates very effectively.”

Two Pivots, One Realization

Both schools came into 2025 with a problem.

UT had 3.5 months until their giving day and a brand-new platform to onboard—GC Online Giving. Their 40 for Forty campaign had to be rebuilt from scratch on a system the team had never used before. The year-long advocate training program Pablo had built over time remained intact; the sprint was about translating it onto new infrastructure and getting an entire university community—students, faculty, staff, project leads—up to speed on tools none of them had seen before.

SPS had a mature class agent fundraising structure but had hit a wall on advocate participation. Year after year, the team had run into the same uneven pattern—some volunteers were eager to dive in, while others quietly stepped back. There was no clean way to grow the pool without asking everyone for a multi-year commitment.

Both teams identified the same bottleneck: teaching volunteers how to ask.

What follows are the three principles UT and SPS both leaned on to successfully scale their advocacy programs. 

Principle 1: Educate

You can’t shortcut philanthropy literacy.

UT’s volunteer infrastructure is intentionally informal but deeply educational. Crowdfunding and giving days are interwoven, and project leads—the students, faculty, and staff running individual fundraising campaigns—are treated as advocates from the moment they apply. That training is a year-long process: four crowdfunding cohorts (two in fall, two in spring), each with multiple consultations, strategy walkthroughs, and toolkit reviews. By the time 40 for Forty launches, project leads have been coached through the cadence, audience targeting, and ask language for months.

Pablo’s framing is direct: don’t assume volunteers already know what philanthropy is or how to ask for money. Asking for money, as he put it, is one of the hardest things people do—right up there with asking for a date.

That conviction is personal for him. “I’m a first-generation college student. When I got to college, I didn’t know what philanthropy was—I just thought it was a fancy word,” Pablo said. The advocate-training infrastructure he’s built at UT is, in a real sense, the program he wishes he’d had access to as a student.

SPS approaches the same problem from a different angle. With a smaller, formal class agent structure (Main Agents, Form Agents, Form Directors), the team builds advocate capacity through repeated, layered touchpoints: virtual training sessions hosted with their GiveCampus Partner Success Manager, packets mailed to volunteers’ homes with hold-in-your-hand examples and toolkits, plus email reinforcement so no one shows up to the day with hesitancy about “What do I do?” or “When do I do it?”

The shared insight: schools that get advocacy right invest in education the same way they invest in any other professional skill—repeatedly, over time, and with resources that volunteers can continue to revisit as needed. 

Principle 2: Remove Barriers

Once volunteers know what to do, every additional click between them and the work presents a risk of losing them.

This is where one of SPS’s biggest unlocks happened. When their Partner Success Manager introduced a new GiveCampus feature—advocacy links that didn’t require recipients to create an account—Amanda’s team said yes immediately. The mechanics were simple: upload a list of constituents who had raised their hands as advocates, receive personalized giving links in return, and pass those links along for advocates to share via email, text, or social. Every gift made through those links was automatically  tracked back to the right advocate—no password to remember, no account to set up, and no friction.

That single change is what allowed SPS to grow from a dozen advocates the prior year to 47 active advocates in 2025, and from 12 peer-advocated gifts to 197.

For UT, the 3.5-month online giving solution sprint made removing barriers more than a philosophy, but a full-on necessity. Their usual process for advocate outreach ran through Salesforce Marketing Cloud—something Pablo’s team would normally spend seven to eight months building out. That wasn’t realistic in the window they had. So instead, they leaned on GiveCampus’s built-in advocacy email templates and let the platform do the heavy lifting. They embedded toolkits directly into those emails, so volunteers had the resources they needed without hunting for them.

They also engaged with volunteers through the GiveCampus Advocacy Dashboard. During their campaign, logged-in advocates could watch a progress bar tick toward their next incentive and see the exact moment they qualified. That visibility, paired with automated incentive tracking on the back end, meant the team could ship advocate swag faster while volunteers stayed motivated by their own progress.

The shared insight: every barrier you remove—login screens, missing toolkits, opaque incentive tracking—converts more enthusiasm into advocate action.

Principle 3: Open the Door

The most surprising advocates aren’t always the ones you target.

UT’s audience strategy was tight: invite the alumni who’d given consistently for the last three giving days. The team sent 750 invitations, expecting that group of repeat donors to be the engine. The big surprise came from a different segment entirely. Staff and colleagues Pablo had assumed would simply make a gift quietly—the way they always had—instead opted in as advocates and started sharing campaign links with their own networks.

SPS saw the same thing. The team created a brand-new “Giving Day Advocate” role—a volunteer-lite position designed to lower the commitment bar from a multi-year class agent term to a single day of outreach to 10 classmates. Twenty alumni said yes. But just as importantly, advocates the team didn’t expressly recruit started showing up too: faculty members, parents, friends of the school. As Amanda put it: “We had people come out of the woodwork that we didn’t expect.”

How did the schools make that opt-in possible? By making advocacy visible. Both UT and SPS used custom content sections at the top of their campaign pages to explain what advocacy is, what’s expected, and what advocates can earn. They published incentive tiers up front, showing advocates exactly how many gifts they needed to generate through their own outreach to unlock each reward.  They also linked toolkits, social assets, and stewardship guides directly from the page.

The shared insight: when you treat advocacy as something anyone can opt into—and you make the invitation impossible to miss—the number of people who say yes may surprise you.

The Receipts

What happens when education, frictionless tools, and broad invitations come together? You get high-performing advocacy programs! The results of each school’s respective giving days speak for themselves. 

UT Austin’s 40 Hours for the Forty Acres:

• $1.9M raised total / $613K online
• 3,261 donors
• 108 active advocates
• 1,190 advocate gifts → $131K in advocate dollars
• One student advocate raised 111 gifts on his own

St. Paul’s Be the Greater Good:

• $882,000 raised
• 876 donors
• 47 active advocates (up from a dozen the year before)
• 197 peer-generated gifts (up from just 12 in FY24!)
• $41,875 in peer-generated dollars / $441,715 in peer-and-match dollars combined
• One advocate raised 56 gifts

UT pulled in six figures from advocate-generated dollars. SPS jumped from 12 peer-generated gifts to 197. Results like these come from building advocacy as a system rather than treating it as a one-off ask.

What to Take Back to Your Team

If you’re rethinking how your school activates peer-to-peer outreach, the playbook UT and SPS developed comes down to a few core principles:

• Treat advocacy like education. Train volunteers the way you trained yourself—repeatedly, over time, with tangible materials. Don’t assume they know what philanthropy is, much less how to ask for it.
• Lower the barrier to participation. Use “no-login” advocacy links, micro-volunteer roles, prebuilt toolkits, and real-time dashboards. Every friction point you remove keeps more volunteers engaged.
• Make advocacy visible on every campaign page. Custom content sections, strategically placed incentive tiers, and one-click toolkits serve the advocates you didn’t formally recruit just as much as the ones you did.
• Equip with assets, rather than asks. Style guides, social media kits, sample messaging, and stewardship templates give people something to work with—so all they have to do is copy, personalize, and send.
• Steward quickly and openly. Dashboards, leaderboards, swag, and genuine thank-yous help advocates feel the impact of their work, which is what keeps them coming back.

What a Modern Infrastructure Makes Possible

GC Volunteer Management has been the most widely used solution in education fundraising for nearly a decade, built on a simple premise: a request from a peer changes outcomes in a way an institutional ask cannot. Platform data supports that. Donors reached by volunteers are 18 percent more likely to renew and twice as likely to give in the first place. Volunteers reactivate long-lapsed donors at 2.4 times the rate of anyone else—and across schools on the platform for a year or more, they’ve brought in more than 4,300 first-time donors in the past two years.

This summer, GiveCampus is launching a reimagined GC Volunteer Management—rebuilt from the ground up with a $10 million investment—and it makes running a program like UT’s or SPS’s significantly faster and easier.

For program administrators, the new experience comes down to three steps: create a task, assign volunteers, and dispatch. Build the task, select your audience, send it. No spreadsheets, no separate email blast, no CRM round trip. The whole setup takes about a minute.

For volunteers, the experience is just as streamlined. They open the app and see a task-driven interface showing exactly who to contact, why it matters, and what to do next—one button to begin. When an email, call, or text leads to a gift, the platform records it automatically, in the same GiveCampus system as online giving and events. Volunteers can track their own impact in real time; program administrators can see what the program is generating without waiting on a reconciled report.

If you’re joining us at GCPC this August, you’ll get a deep preview of the reimagined GC Volunteer Management there. Can’t wait?  Schedule a demo now to see how it can help you activate peer-to-peer advocacy at any scale.

Watch the GCPC Session On Demand

Want to hear Pablo and Amanda explain their strategies in their own words? Watch the session for a deeper dive into the toolkits, tactics, and “what we’d do differently” reflections that didn’t make it into this post.