Advancement

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5 Reasons Advancement Offices Should Care About Career Services

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We just returned from the CASE Summit for Leaders in Advancement in New York, where we were struck most by one session—"Colgate Professional Networks: Alumni Affinity Groups Reimagined for Maximum ROI."

The gist: positive career outcomes aren't just good for students and alumni, it's also good for your institution's advancement office.

In their presentation, Michael Sciola (Associate Vice President of Institutional Advancement) and Jennifer Stone (Director of Annual Giving and Director of Colgate Professional Networks) explained how Colgate's investment in professional networks help students and alumni achieve career success.

We thought we'd take a moment to revisit why investing more in constituent career outcomes is a good idea for advancement.

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Inputs vs. Outcomes: Are You Using the Right Data to Measure ROI?

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Higher ed professionals face increasing pressure to collect data on the performance of our work, and to use that data to calculate their return on investment. Our directive these days seems to be "All data are good data."

That may be true. But not all data are the right data.

We discussed the topic with some of our customer schools last week at a roundtable hosted by Andy Shaindlin, founder of Alumni Futures and Vice President at GG&A. Andy raised the issue as a cautionary note about our growing obsession with performance metrics.

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How Noble and Greenough School Uses Its Smallness to Its Advantage

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Anyone even tangentially involved in fundraising is familiar with this equation:

Donations = Total Population × Giving Rate

Lower giving rates and smaller populations beget smaller yields.

Small schools, be they colleges or independent schools, have to face the challenge of having a small total population every year. They learn to make the most out of what they have and develop strategies that prioritize depth over breadth.

Noble and Greenough School, familiarly known as Nobles, is one of those institutions. They've created a culture of philanthropy that allows them to be aggressive about asking for support, and they've devoted resources to nurturing individual relationships with their alumni. Their Graduate Affairs Office has also made alumni career services and networking a priority. By building a network on top of an already tightly knit community, Nobles is making its smallness work to its advantage.

We interviewed Greg Croak, Nobles' Director of Graduate Affairs, about Nobles' success.

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There’s No Such Thing as Platform Fatigue—There Are Only Bad Platforms

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When college and university offices consider launching a new platform or app for their communities, they’re often torn between the need to provide a service that their constituents want and the fear of paying for one more thing that nobody uses.

Too many offices have worked hard to launch a new website, service, or app for their students and alumni only to see nobody use it. We chalk it up to “platform fatigue,” the weariness we all feel when we have to sign up for another website with another account and remember another password. Members of our community, we think, already use so many platforms, websites, and apps that they don’t have room for one more. That’s why ours failed.

But I’m here to explain why platform fatigue is a myth and why platforms really fail: There’s no such thing as platform fatigue—there are only bad platforms.

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Why Nova Southeastern University Integrated Its Annual Fund and Alumni Relations

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It's not unusual for Alumni Relations and Annual Fund offices to work together, but not many are fully integrated. Nova Southeastern University is one of those exceptions.

We asked Jason Lyons, Associate Director of the Annual Fund, and Rachel M. Mojica, Associate Director of Alumni Relations, to tell us about their CASE District 3 presentation, "Excite, Engage, Evaluate! Alumni Relations and Annual Fund Collaboration." They explained why Nova decided to integrate its Annual Fund and Alumni Relations offices and how that change is paying off.

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Why Elon University Created a Dedicated Position for Alumni Engagement Officers

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Bridging the gap between advancement and alumni relations can be hard—even when one office is asking something of the other.

To solve this problem, Elon University created a unique hybrid position: the Alumni Engagement Officer. Elon has used its AEOs to increase rates of attendance, volunteering, giving, and retention.

We spoke with Tricia Teter, senior alumni engagement officer, and Jill Hollis, coordinator of alumni engagement and special events, to tell us more about the Alumni Engagement Officer position and the strategy behind it. They recently presented on the topic at the CASE Divison III Conference in Nashville.

"It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are." —Wendell Berry