Defy Gravity: The Campaign for the University of Toronto
The University asked us to build the digital front door for the largest fundraising and alumni engagement campaign in Canadian history — a $4-billion effort that needed to inspire before it could ask for anything.
Defy Gravity had two goals: get 225,000 alumni involved as volunteers, mentors, and donors, and raise $4 billion to fund research and support across the University. The site had to carry both asks without feeling transactional.
Visit the campaign site ↗Our key challenge was solidifying a brand identity for Defy Gravity and aligning every internal stakeholder behind it — up to the highest levels of the University. The site had to appeal to a wide range of donors, from alumni to corporate partners to current staff and students, while staying unmistakably U of T.
We’d designed and built several sites for U of T before, so we used that familiarity to set the visual parameters for the campaign and get them approved at every level. That identity became the foundation for every other campaign channel — social, direct marketing, campus marketing, all of it.
The result is a site that inspires before it asks — spotlighting the initiatives the campaign funds, from Black-led research to clean energy solutions, and giving the University an identity strong enough to carry a four-billion-dollar campaign.