What It Takes to Break Records Year After Year: The Story of Occidental College's Success

A Giving Day Tradition, Rebuilt for What's Possible

Day for Oxy, Occidental College's annual giving day, is a beloved tradition. The college community comes together to support critical initiatives that further Oxy's mission. Donors give. Staff manage. The campaign runs.

Operationally, Day for Oxy was always a challenge. Gift processing stretched across weeks. Staff hardly had time to celebrate the day's success. Instead, they were managing the mechanics, ensuring proper counting and donor recognition. The full potential of the community's generosity was not being realized.

The advancement team at Occidental wanted more. Not just a better giving day. A fundamentally different one.

Year Two: Occidental Broke Their Own Records

What happened in 2026 makes this story even more worth telling.

Occidental came into their 2026 Day for Oxy with a stronger grasp of the platform and a sharper vision for the campaign. The advancement team brought their own creativity to the experience. The foundation was already there, and now they could build on it.

The 2026 campaign drew 2,602 donors, surpassing their donor goal of 1,887 by nearly 40%, and raised $2,143,565 in a single day. That is more than $300,000 and 120 additional donors beyond the record they set the year before.

Two consecutive record-breaking campaigns. It raises an obvious question: what does 2027 look like?

A Unified System Built for Long-Term Growth

The infrastructure behind these results deserves its own explanation. With QSS™ for Agentforce Education, the team unified a branded donor journey with advocate sign-up, challenge tracking, leaderboards, and live totals, all on Agentforce Service Portal integrated with Agentforce Education and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement.

Donors could watch progress unfold in real time. Advocates had tools to mobilize their networks. The challenge structure kept energy high throughout the day, giving donors and advocates a shared goal to work toward. Advancement gained real-time transparency through dashboards, while automated workflows reduced back-end processing time from start to final reconciliation.

Salesforce Recognizes the Success of the 2025 Day for Oxy

Sleek's collaboration with Oxy on their day of giving earned a 2025 Salesforce Partner Innovation Award in Education, one of only two awarded in the entire education category. The Salesforce Partner Innovation Awards recognize partners driving measurable agentic enterprise transformations for their clients.

The award is an honor for Sleek, and one for which we need to recognize the role played by our friends at Oxy. Together, we selected the right tools and implemented them strategically. The Oxy team's initiative and willingness to embrace a new platform delivered real results for donors and staff alike.