For this year’s Battle of the Valleys competition, “half the students, double the heart” seems to be Saginaw Valley State University’s mantra.

Grand Valley State University raised $12,031.29 and SVSU raised $24,540 for this year’s charity competition. Collected sums from each university will go to SVSU’s charity, “Get Outside for a Healthy Inside” and GVSU’s charity, the Grand Valley Children’s Fund.

Last year, GVSU raised $7,022 for the Grand Valley Children’s Fund.

This year, GVSU focused on creating a presence on social media to increase awareness of the charity competition. Though the fundraising efforts totaled less than SVSU’s, this year’s goal looked to get students, faculty and community members involved in the competition through a variety of ways.

Laker Traditions Team programming chair Sean O’Melia said next year, student senate and the Laker Traditions Team organizers would like to see more of an outreach to alumni, faculty and staff in order to raise larger sums.

“Even though we didn’t win the fundraising competition this year, we raised almost twice as much as we did last year,” said Maddie Cleghorn, student senate president. “We also saw a much wider range of support this year with social media posts, donations and event participation from students, faculty, staff, alumni and the community. We are really happy with both the improvement in fundraising as well as the high volume of enthusiasm and excitement around BOV that we saw this week.”

Most of the fundraising success this year came from daily tabling efforts, shirt sales, raffle tickets and mystery bags in the Kirkhof Center.

“The hardest part about fundraising at Grand Valley is that on any given day, students are met with multiple things to get involved with or causes to donate to,” Cleghorn said. “We love that our campus is so lively and that so much is going on, but it definitely makes it hard to have one message come through clearly.”

All the money put into the Grand Valley Children’s Fund will be available to organizations in Kent and Ottawa counties through mini grants. Currently, one organization has applied and the fund will be promoted in the upcoming months.

“Any children’s organization could have one of these mini grants in just a few weeks,” O’Melia said. “I hope more organizations will apply and help children in the local community.”

One idea discussed to raise more money for the Grand Valley Children’s Fund is the option of promoting the fund on a larger scale. By promoting the charity all year long as a standalone option, there could be an increase of funds directed toward the nonprofit.

“All the money we raised was due in fact that the BOV steering committee had such great motivation and dedication to the cause,” O’Melia said. “If people are disappointed with the results, I encourage them to get involved with BOV next year through student senate or the Laker Traditions. From this year, it was shown that the bigger the team, the more money we can raise.”