SMU Young Alumni took a red-hot rivalry – the Iron Skillet – and rustled up Fry the Frogs. The one-minute video, which was posted on SMU’s YouTube channel several weeks before the SMU-TCU game, blends old-school Mustang spirit with up-to-the-minute digital technology.
As the Mustang Band plays the fight song in the background, SMU “stars” explain that national rankings, like the U.S. News & World Report’s Best Colleges, use alumni gifts as a quantifiable measurement of school pride. President R. Gerald Turner and Head Football Coach June Jones are among those who appear in the humorous, fast-paced film.
“The Young Alumni Board wanted to reach members in a way they communicate,” says YA President Jonathan Childers ’02 ’05, a business litigator with Gruber Hurst, Johansen & Hail, LLP, in Dallas. “We thought this would be an exciting and relevant conduit for engaging our audience.”
The YA Development Committee’s Katy Blakey ’06 sparked the idea during the board’s spring meeting.
“What gets people more motivated than the SMU-TCU game? We started bouncing around ways to use that excitement and came up with the video idea,” she says.
Jonathan Childers
The video is a testament “to the power of the group,” Childers says. Shelby Stanley ’10 shot the core video, and committee chair Thomas Kincaid ’05 and Ryan Trimble ’05 solicited homemade video snippets from alumni across the country. Luke Alvey, president of SMU Student Filmmakers Association in Meadows School of the Arts, edited the footage. From start to finish, it took about a month to produce.
As a first-of-its-kind effort, the video gets rave reviews. Almost 2,500 viewings have been registered on YouTube.
“We’re really excited and impressed by the results,” says Holly Myers ’01, assistant director of Young Alumni and Student Programs in the SMU Office of Alumni Relations. “As of September 23, we had 650 Young Alumni donors, which is 400 more than at the same time last year.”