Overview
2017 marked ten years since North Carolina created its Education Lottery, and by then it had raised billions of dollars for schools statewide. To mark the anniversary, I designed "Proud Moments": a microsite built around a $20,000 sweepstakes that asked North Carolinians to share a personal moment involving education, no matter how big or small, for a chance to win.
The Problem
A decade of lottery funding for education is, on paper, a budget line: a total raised, a list of programs funded. That framing doesn't make anyone feel anything. The campaign needed to turn an abstract statewide total into something personal enough that people would actually stop, share their own story, and vote on someone else's, while still making the real scale of the funding (down to the county level) easy to find for anyone who wanted it.
The Solution
The site centered on a simple loop: submit your own proud moment, then browse and vote for favorites, with a $20,000 prize as the incentive to participate. A short explainer video ("Watch & Learn What a Proud Moment Is") set expectations up front for what counted as a submission, since "share a proud moment" is vague enough to need an example.
Submissions populated a mosaic-style wall mixing user photos, quote cards, and prompts ("What would you do with $20,000?") so the grid stayed visually varied rather than reading as a repetitive list of entries.
For anyone who wanted the numbers behind the anniversary, an "Across the State" page paired an interactive North Carolina county map with filters by category (Academics, Athletics, Clubs, Music, Arts) and county, surfacing the lottery's actual cumulative funding since its 2006 launch: over $70 million for teachers' salaries, nearly $59 million for school construction projects, and over $45 million for prekindergarten programs. The homepage carried its own version of that specificity in miniature, a live per-county ticker (Forsyth County: $350,027 raised for education since 2006) that made the statewide total feel local no matter where a visitor was from.
The Outcome
The site launched as part of the NC Education Lottery's 10th-anniversary campaign in 2017, giving a decade of lottery-funded education spending a front door built around real stories and real county-level numbers instead of a single statewide total.
Let's press record.
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