Complementing Your Online Presence with an Offline Presence

A strong online presence is vital to any attempt to get a community to adopt a new platform, but an offline presence can make the connections users form online tangible in a more powerful way. Some community managers use meetups to build community. We insinuated ourselves into our college community’s daily routine with public “office hours” held twice weekly in the library lobby.

(That’s Brent holding office hours. Note his positive demeanor and our tasteful sign.)

In our ongoing quest to convert community members into Switchboard users, office hours were a must. They projected the message that, no matter what the time or need, Switchboard is there to help.

We also regularly used our office hours as the staging ground for larger efforts, like the Valentine’s Day project pictured below. (We took on Valentine’s Day as the adopted holiday of our Switchboard. Grounding our Switchboard in the community calendar well complemented our efforts to ground it in our community’s space.) It’s a lot easier to get someone’s attention when they expect you to be there.

Most importantly, our office hours made Switchboard a part of the landscape, so to speak. Our community’s Switchboard wasn’t abstract anymore; it wasn’t only a website. It was present in the real world, and members of our community could ask us questions and make recommendations. Our being there to help and receive feedback helped the community feel ownership of Switchboard. We weren’t administrators—we were public servants.

The face-to-face interactions we had with members of our community, the traditions we founded and relationships we forged, taught us that Switchboard is less about interface than it is about love. (The two, of course, aren’t mutually exclusive, perhaps even the opposite, but you get the point.)

Columbia Giving Day and the Trifecta of Love, Belonging, and Generosity

Love was a central theme at this year’s AMA Higher Ed symposium. Examining the role of love in branding, storytelling, and internal collaboration, speakers emphasized that love is integral to a college or university’s identity. Deborah Maue writes in her reflection on the symposium,

If there’s any doubt about the power of emotion in college choice, think back to your own experience. What do you remember about your visit to the school you ultimately chose? The number of books in the library? The average SAT score? If you’re like me, you remember a feeling. A feeling of belonging.

We want to use this as a backdrop as we examine Columbia Giving Day. Two-year-old Columbia Giving Day is a 24-hour rush of giving, content, and online ambassadorship each October. In 2012, Columbia Giving Day raised $6.8 million from 5,000 donors in fifty states and thirty-nine countries. This year, Columbia raised $7.8 million from nearly 10,000 donors in fifty states and fifty-three countries.

Columbia Giving Day’s success is due to not only top-notch online ambassadors, reminders about the event embedded everywhere in the online Columbia ecosystem, and a flood of earned advertising, but to the love, belonging, and generosity that the campaign cultivated.

The Columbia Giving Day campaign video highlights the accomplishments of Columbia students, how Columbia uses alumni donations, and the shared experience of students and alumni. The video isn’t an advertisement; it’s a call to action, and a reminder that Columbians share a connection, that they belong.

By creating a single day for alumni, students, parents, staff, and faculty to donate to the university, Columbia made giving a collective, social experience. When donors made their contribution, they had a chance to think not just about their own connections to Columbia, but about their connections to other Columbians who were doing the same thing. Columbia also hosted Giving Day events on campus to make that communal experience tangible.

In doing so, Columbia was able to attract a broader base of donors and engage important demographics, like young alumni:

Update on #columbiagivingday from our fund chair. Largely driven by young alumni participation, giving was up by 58%! ^h

— Columbia Engineering (@myCEYA)

November 8, 2013

An impressive 40% of donors on the first Columbia Giving Day had never given to Columbia before. For those first-time-donors, Columbia Giving Day is now a tradition.

That returns us to where we began: the trifecta of love, giving, and generosity. Columbia founded Giving Day only two years ago, and the results are already astounding. If colleges can start cultivating a culture of love, belonging, and generosity while students are in school as well as after they’ve graduated, their communities will only get stronger.

Ask and Offer: Making the Language of Generosity Familiar

Last week we discussed part of the outreach campaign we ran to convert our alma mater’s community to Switchboard. In that post, we named Instagram as an easy way to build a sense of community among a distant and disparate audience. But Instagram is just so boring. If you want to excite the people you’re trying to convert, you have to be creative.

Yes, we dressed up as Gumby. Or, one of us did. During the annual “Working Weekend” at Reed, Brent dressed up as Gumby and asked visiting alumni, and current students, to write down what they could teach each other and pin it to his costume. We got offers to teach everything from how to play Carmina Burana on guitar to how to understand Heidegger’s Being and Time. That offer came from the college’s president, who is pictured with Gumby below.

On top of having the obvious benefit of keeping “Reed Switchboard” on the minds of those who participated, the Gumby campaign also got people to adopt the Switchboard mindset. “What can I offer my community? What does my community need?” Each paper pinned to Gumby was an offer that the pinner could, potentially, post on Switchboard. And every person who read that offer, and all the others pinned to Gumby, saw what their community had to offer.

This wasn’t just a stunt to attract attention, it was about involving community members in the creation of a Switchboard, a Gumby Switchboard that stood in as a metaphor for the real thing.

Switchboard isn’t hard to understand. “Ask. Offer. Succeed.” is intuitive. But people don’t always realize right away what they can offer their community. “I’m not an expert in anything,” they might think. Or, “I don’t have a job to offer.” Gumby was an exercise in self-confidence, in a way. We wanted people to think, “I have something to offer.”

Because they do. Everyone has something to offer—it doesn’t have to be a spare bed or an internship. It might only be barrels of snack mix.

Changing what people think of when they hear the word “offer,” changing it from the uppercase ‘O’ “Offer” to the lowercase. If the language of generosity is everyday, generosity will be, too.

Edifice Rex—Why a New Career Services Office Can Only Do so Much

You may have read this New York Times piece, “How to Get a Job with a Philosophy Degree,” the other week. To summarize it, Wake Forest University has spent $10 million on a new Career Services building that “looks like Google” and hired nearly thirty additional Career Services staff to help students prepare themselves for and find employment—and to help justify the expense of attending college to their parents.

The narrative is similar to many that are unfolding across the country. The economy has changed and is changing. The cost of education is rising and schools must justify their model. And so on.

Usually, when a school decides it isn’t as dedicated to something as it should be, the solution is obvious. Not enough emphasis on the performing arts? Build a new performing arts building and hire faculty. They throw money at the problem.

And that’s what Wake Forest is doing in the article above. Their method has some merit. More staff can help more students with more things: scholarships, resume writing, grant applications, navigating difficult alumni databases, and so on. But there are too many possible career paths for even a few dozen staff to advise students on all of them.

We’ve always maintained that alumni affairs is career services. Schools need to recognize the immense amount of expertise and goodwill that exists in their population of alumni. Thousands of alumni can talk about jobs and life choices that a few dozen career services staff can’t—and they can offer more than just advice. For a student, a connection with an alumnus or alumna is meaningful on its own. But more concretely, alumni can offer mentorship, connections to jobs and internships, and places to stay. They can offer the support of a community. 

When a school spends a lot of money, we view that money as a proxy for devotion to solving a problem. The more a school spends, the more we think it cares. But not all problems can be solved with money. As Thoreau wrote in Walden:

“Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made.”

Money is an easy metric by which to judge success, but how can we measure community? Maybe community isn’t something we can measure; maybe it’s something we can only do.