The Spir­it of Gen­eros­i­ty: Cre­at­ing a Donor Wall For a Life­time of Iowans at The Iowa State Fair

Plan­ning for the unknown future of a new donor cam­paign is a tremen­dous fac­tor when it comes to plan­ning and design­ing donor recog­ni­tion. Robin Tay­lor at the Iowa State Fair Blue Rib­bon Foun­da­tion had one bet­ter. She want­ed to build a donor wall with no (or very few) donor names to start. Essen­tial­ly, a blank slate for the ​“Spir­it of Gen­eros­i­ty” to grow. It is designed to hon­or the char­ac­ter and gen­er­ous spir­it of Iowans and gives ample oppor­tu­ni­ty at many giv­ing lev­els with dona­tions start­ing at $100. ​“Spir­it of Gen­eros­i­ty” cam­paign.

The design inspi­ra­tion came from a stained glass piece the client pre­sent­ed. From here, Envi­ron­men­tal Graph­ic Design­er Andrej Stein­bergs set forth cre­at­ing the full design and deter­min­ing the best mate­ri­als based on the appli­ca­tion, and the exe­cu­tion of fab­ri­ca­tion with the pro­duc­tion team.

Andrej explains, ​“cov­er­ing such a large area with a seam­less appear­ance was tricky. Due to mate­r­i­al size lim­i­ta­tions we had to break the instal­la­tion up into 13 pieces. This was accom­plished by using the ​“lead” or the gaps between stained glass sec­tions as a break­ing point rather than more con­ven­tion­al and notice­able ver­ti­cal and hor­i­zon­tal seams. The final design fits togeth­er like puz­zle pieces. As donor pan­els are added, the ​“lead” or gaps between them will still be exposed cre­at­ing a nat­ur­al and dimen­sion­al reveal. To achieve the stain glass look the design includ­ed use of frost­ed clear acrylics with sec­ond sur­face print­ed tex­tures and col­ors. We were thrilled with the design chal­lenge and the final installation.”

Inspir­ing Iowans With Signage

“All of the com­po­nents of the wall show­case what Iowa is all about. Each piece lends to what our state has to offer, from archi­tec­ture to nature to indus­try” Tony Squire, our Cen­tral Iowa Sign Expert. 

In addi­tion to look­ing beau­ti­ful and hon­or­ing donors, this wall also has an edu­ca­tion­al com­po­nent and take away infor­ma­tion on how to get involved. To do this an extra touch was added by inte­grat­ing a sto­ry­board that gives con­text to the design and a lit­er­a­ture pock­et to encour­age bet­ter under­stand­ing and engage­ment for future poten­tial donors.