The campaign was not restricted to the campus. Buchman divided the town into ten sections, and made each the responsibility of a team of helpers whose job it was to invite everyone to the meetings. It was to be, he said, an 'everyman-out campaign'.

On the first day, all the stores and the town's solitary cinema closed to encourage people to attend. The college band played in the town before the meeting began and then marched to the hall. There were mass meetings addressed by well-known speakers on topics like 'The Secrets of a Victorious Life'. The town was 'running over with notables' according to one professor and, for that week, 'the college lived and talked and argued nothing but religion'.13

The following year, Buchman brought in 150 outside helpers from most of the major East Coast colleges. Each was given a student 'secretary', whose job was to see that their time was used to the full: frequently they conducted interviews until midnight and beyond. Some, like Professor Henry Wright of Yale, relished the intensity of the campaign. 'I spoke pretty nearly steadily for three days,' he wrote to a friend; 'it was a glorious work.'14 Others found the pace decidedly testing. 'It took me a week to get over that strenuous day at State College,' one visitor wrote to Buchman. 'I wouldn't have missed it for a hundred dollars, nor repeat it for five hundred. You ought to confine your invitations strictly to Pennsylvania Dutchmen who are as steel-framed as you.'15

'Sooner or later', noted Fred Lewis Pattee, the Professor of English, 'there appeared on the campus every college religious leader in the nation to study Buchman's methods.'16 His methods were not only studied, but applied. Thus the Yale University publication, The Week, on 3 March 1915, traced the genesis of a religious awakening in Yale to this same campaign. 'It really began at the Pennsylvania State College last year under Frank N. D. Buchman', the article stated, and concluded, 'This new evangelism of the second decade of the twentieth century is transforming our colleges.'

Thereafter, there were campaigns on the Penn State pattern at Yale, Illinois State, Williams, Cornell and other colleges, as well as student conventions in Rochester and Kansas City; Estes Park, Colorado; Eaglesmere, Pennsylvania; Silver Bay, New York; and Northfield, Massachusetts. To most of them Buchman was able to take teams of men whom he had trained. It was an old dream coming true. 'When I came to State College, I had the whole general line for our Eastern colleges in mind,' he wrote to an associate in China three years later. 'If you had asked me how that would have worked out, I could not have told you. Bill Pickle, the grandson of the Governor, the coach of the football team, and all the other fruit that came could not be planned in advance. When, however, other colleges saw that there was sustained change in Penn State, they asked that these same principles be carried back to their institutions, but we must remember this was a programme of seven years. It had to grow naturally. Any plans "stuck" in to Penn State would have died a natural death.17

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