The Georgia Education Advancement Council (GEAC) honored Gail Eubanks with the 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award at its 50th annual conference. She has created opportunities for students in Georgia for three decades – promoting higher education excellence at three institutions: Savannah Technical College, Georgia Southern University, and Savannah State University. Eubanks is the second person to receive this honor from GEAC.
“Gail’s marketing, communications, and advancement work has received national recognition annually for the past 20 years at our College alone,” said STC President Dr. Kathy Love, who introduced Eubanks for the award. “She manages volunteers and her staff with ease, professionalism, and respect. Her advancement leadership has set records at our college for funds raised to support scholarships and programs.”
Soon after stepping into the role of executive director for institutional advancement and communications at Savannah Tech, Eubanks managed College’s first-ever major gifts campaign, leading efforts to raise more than 7.2 million dollars in five years.
This major gifts campaign included a refreshed employee-giving campaign to benefit the College’s faculty and staff scholarship. Helping Everyone Realize Opportunity or the HERO campaign became a nationally recognized initiative for best practices in fundraising, marketing, and design.
Employee giving participation was less than 1% before the HERO campaign and has averaged more than 72% annually in its eight years with an impressive 92% participation in 2019. Even during 2020 with COVID, she found creative options to maintain support with a slight dip in giving, which was only down 5%.
With the exception of the COVID year in 2020, Savannah Tech’s Foundation has maintained giving levels near the annual amount received at the conclusion of the major gifts campaign.
One of the major gifts campaign priorities was culinary arts and heritage tourism, which included a downtown location to expand training for the College’s culinary arts program. She shepherded the decade-long process of finding the perfect location.
The Foundation initially purchased the building at 7 West Bay Street for the college, so she managed the due diligence process on behalf of the foundation to verify it was worthy of purchase including environmental engineering, testing, structural analysis and managing the process for state because the state would ultimately own the building.
During her tenure working with the Savannah Technical College Foundation (2011-2022), the Foundation:
- Has awarded more than $5 million for scholarship awards and program support;
- Raised an average of $608K annually;
- More than doubled its net assets from its lowest in 2011 to its highest in 2018; and
- Earned the statewide distinction for best practices for board engagement, “Role Model Board” by the Technical College System of Georgia for seven consecutive years.
Founded in 1972, GEAC, Inc. (Georgia Education Advancement Council) is a statewide organization for those at public and private colleges and universities who work in educational advancement including the areas of alumni, development, public relations/public affairs, and communications. www.geac.org.
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