Social media is a vital part of any modern fundraising campaign—both for a campaign's launch and keeping it going.
For large universities, coordinating social media strategy across campuses, schools, and departments can be incredibly hard. It's Marisa Larson's job to do that as Development Communications Coordinator at the Kansas State University Foundation.
We all know intuitively that young alumni are different than their older counterparts, but we often lack the data to explain how—or to explain what we can do about it.
Now we have some data to help.
The Alumni Attitude Study surveyed over 500,000 alumni at 200 universities and colleges between 2001–2012. The survey asked alumni of all ages questions about their giving habits and relationships with their alma maters. The data explain why young alumni giving patterns are different than those of their older peers.
We make a lot of assumptions about alumni giving without the data to back them up. To help us test those assumptions, here are three graphs from rigorous surveys with hundreds of thousands of participants.
The data reveal that young alumni give at much lower rates than their more established counterparts— as many of us already know at our own institutions.
They also help us understand how we might improve those giving rates by addressing alumni's frustrations and needs.
Back in the day, institutions served as the central hub for students, alumni, and employers.
For lack of a better metaphor, the role that schools played was like that of an old telephone switchboard. They connected people who needed something with people who had something. (Can you guess how we picked our name?)
When your institution is shopping around for a new platform for its students and alumni, the first question on your mind is, "Will this work?"
That question is harder to answer than you might think. It can be tricky to define what the success of your new platform should look like, and to decide which data are relevant when measuring that success.
It's not uncommon for shops to pick the wrong data to evaluate the success of their new platform. Thinking that the platform is performing better than it is, they lock themselves into ongoing contracts that don't actually deliver the results they expect.
In this post we highlight four common mistakes that shops make when evaluating the performance of their platforms and how to avoid making them.