Oklahoma State University

The Code Calls: Where character meets opportunity.

A new president.

An ambitious $2B fundraising goal with significant donor support.

A community with immense pride and a shared code of values.

In summer 2025, Oklahoma State University arrived at a pivotal moment with real momentum, and it needed branding equal to the institution it had already become. Something that could unify Oklahoma’s largest university system under a single idea, elevate national reputation alongside a well-earned in-state identity, and serve enrollment, brand, and advancement campaigns from the same foundation.

Services

Campaign Teaser
The Insight

Deep discovery across cabinet leadership, faculty, students, enrollment, and development teams surfaced a consistent truth for OSU: Cowboy culture was real, lived, and loved. The Cowboy Code, the institution’s shared set of values, was the community standard. OSU had spent years celebrating that culture internally and needed to amplify its message more fully externally.

OSU had been underselling an identity its own community already believed in—that Cowboys carry a distinctive sense of purpose and character while finishing every day knowing they’ve given it their all.

The insight that clicked?

Doing the impossible routinely is what Cowboys do.

Declaring the Cowboy standard clearly, consistently, and with the confidence the institution had earned became the brand promise: Where Character Meets Opportunity.

Icon Library
The Solution

Most brand engagements produce a platform. Most fundraising campaigns produce a case for support. OSU asked SimpsonScarborough to build both at once, under one unifying idea, designed to serve brand, advancement, and enrollment from a single strategic foundation. That integration was the assignment from day one, and it shaped every decision that followed. 

The brand platform that emerged was built around four pillars: Living the Cowboy Way, Creating Life-Changing Opportunities, Leading with Humility, and Powering Progress. These pillars gave the institution a confident, ownable position that no one else could match. 

The Code Calls, OSU’s unified fundraising and branding campaign, emerged from this foundation. OSU and the SimpsonScarborough team brought it to life across a full suite of deliverables: campaign name and wordmark, a new verbal and visual design system, campaign guidelines, campus communicator trainings, a storytelling training for system-wide marcom leadership, and tactical creative production.  

A brand pulse benchmark survey was also conducted before launch to establish a reputation baseline to track perception over time. Every element was built to carry the brand and the fundraising campaign forward as one coherent, scalable effort. 

Digital Ads

Instead of a traditional fundraising campaign that lived solely in the advancement lane, our campaign was designed to reach every Cowboy: alumni, donors, students, faculty, staff, campus communities, and people around the world.

Megan Horton
AVP for Brand Management

The Results

The Code Calls launched in November 2025, with the initial announcement of OSU’s historic $2B comprehensive fundraising campaign.

In the first six weeks, the campaign generated:

  • 229m
    // impressions
  • 161.7m
    // in earned media reach
  • 1.9m
    // website views
  • $100m
    // raised since launch
  • 53.4k
    // new gifts, a 17% increase from the previous year
  • +18%
    // increase in first-time and young alumni givers

The Code Calls generated significant excitement and support among OSU’s key audiences, moving beyond brand amplification to community building.

Campus communicators across OSU’s five–campus system are now evolving their marketing materials to leverage The Code Calls, and campaign resource development continues through brand and storytelling trainings, a campaign microsite, concepting for enrollment collateral, and new video storytelling.

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