Last Thursday, 1,369 donors made gifts for BowdoinOne Day, the College’s annual giving campaign, exceeding the College’s target of 1,200 donors for the day.

Rather than a multi-week campaign concluding in April, as it has been in past years, this year’s BowdoinOne Day was a single day of giving. The campaign was centered around the theme “Bowdoin Heroes,” so donors made gifts in honor of people who played a formative role in their Bowdoin experience, such as roommates, coaches, teammates, professors and staff.

BowdoinOne Day provided a boost to the College’s already thriving alumni fund. This year’s alumni donor count is now 6,083 individual donors, up more than 50 percent from the 3,937 donors at the same date last year.

Senior Vice President for Development and Alumni Relations Scott Meiklejohn said he expects this number to continue to rise until the fiscal year ends on June 30.

“We’re just barely finished with two-thirds of the year—so March, April, May, June—that’s a lot of territory for us to cross,” Meiklejohn said in a phone interview with the Orient. “We always experience a lot of gift volume in June, a sort of deadline behavior that I think is pretty common in fundraising. People are aware that the end of our fundraising year is June 30.”

Meiklejohn said that the “Bowdoin Heroes” theme seemed to resonate with many donors, emphasizing that the focus of BowdoinOne Day is much more on participation and community-building than on setting a specific monetary goal.

“You just saw this awesome smorgasbord of different kinds of people: family members, roommates, teammates, faculty, coaches, Bowdoin dining, Career Planning,” Meiklejohn said.

“It was Bowdoin-y, it was authentic,” he added. “It reflected the community that I think a lot of people feel they’re a part of.”