With little to show but enthusiasm, the development staff at the National Constitution Center managed to fund a dream.

By Margaret Battistelli Gardner

“Of course, it was much easier to do the outreach piece than it was to [build the center],” says Suzanne L. Seiter, vice president of development at the NCC.

The challenge: to get people from around the country to invest in something that, at the time, was nothing more than a paper model and some flashy graphics. And the graphics were, indeed, flashy. Creative agency AEI Digital, whose offices overlook the NCC, took the blueprints for the museum and used video-game technology to create a 3-D “fly-through” of the center that put viewers right in the middle of the action.