About Project

Colorado Northwestern Community College is a small rural college in the northwest corner of the state. When the foundation came to OmniAlly, it had no donor wall and no Hall of Fame. Not an outdated one. None at all.

“We'd had recent conversations about recognizing some of our longtime donors who really hadn't been recognized over the years, for the hundreds of thousands they'd donated. There had been a thank you, and we'd moved on. We were launching a Hall of Fame at the same time, with zero inductees. Both were starting from nothing, so it made sense to ask whether they could start together.”

Keely Ellis

CNCC Foundation

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Recognition Challenges

The site was the student activity building — the college's most public space, home to a coffee shop and the largest banquet hall in town, used as much by the community as by students.

Key challenges included:

  • No existing recognition of donors who had given over decades, some of them six figures

  • A Hall of Fame being launched from zero, with inductions planned every year after

  • Two separate programs that needed to feel related without looking identical

  • A small-town donor base where published giving levels would cause more harm than good

  • A building awaiting a possible state-funded renovation, meaning the installation had to come down and go back up

  • A rural college aesthetic of local stone and natural colour, nothing bold or corporate

Two Programs, One Wall

Building the Hall of Fame and the donor wall as a single installation solved more than a design problem. It let the foundation draw on two funding conversations instead of one, and it gave each programme a permanent home before either had enough content to fill a wall of its own.

"I was trying to start a new fund for our graduate medical students, and one of the physicians I approached told me he'd hit his Beacon membership at $10,000 and his name wasn't on the wall. It hadn't been updated since 2019. That was the point where it stopped being cosmetic. It had started affecting my ability to solicit."

Karynn Carrell

McLaren Port Huron Foundation

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Our Solution

Two displays sit side by side beneath illuminated headers, one for the Hall of Fame and one for the Donor Wall, mounted directly onto the building's existing brick. The two halves share a visual language without being mirror images of each other.

Flanking banners carry the two pieces of text the college wanted permanent: the Spartan's Creed on one side, the mission statement on the other. The Spartan medallion and the CNCC mark anchor each end.

Below the screens, a layered mountain relief in the college's reds and greys answers the landscape the campus sits in. It is the one element that belongs to neither programme and ties both together.

The display is non-interactive, running scheduled content on its own. Scheduling mattered: the college's existing screens had no way to take content down, so material tended to stay up long after it was relevant.

What the Screens Carry

The Hall of Fame side introduces each year's inductees and spotlights current student athletes. The donor side runs the annual donor list alongside ways to give. Both are built to carry more over time — graduating classes during commencement week, returning alumni, event sponsors, players of the week.

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Event sponsors alongside a Why I Give story and a QR code for giving.

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Annual donors beside monthly giving, with a QR code to set up a recurring gift.

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Where the Inspiration Came From

The shape beneath the screens comes from the mountains themselves, a ridgeline simplified until it reads as Colorado, with the college’s own diagonal bands running through the peaks.

What Changed

Donors who had given for decades, in some cases six figures, have somewhere their names appear. For a foundation that had thanked them and moved on, that gap is closed.

The Hall of Fame exists. It launched with its first induction class rather than waiting for enough names to justify a wall, and it has room for every class after.

The wall does more than recognise. During commencement week it can carry graduating students by name. When an alumn comes back to campus, it can welcome them. When a sponsor supports an event, they appear for the season. And one board member who had been describing this idea for the better part of a decade finally got to stand in front of it.