Alumni Relations

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One Well Timed Email Can Increase Your Userbase by 35%

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One Well Timed Email Can Increase Your Userbase by 35%

Building robust online communities isn’t easy, but that doesn’t mean it has to be complicated. Santa Clara's recent engagement campaign is a prime example of one effective way to do this work.

Santa Clara's Switchboard first anniversary coincided with the start of their academic year. They wanted to connect with the broader community around the start of the new academic year, and they had the idea to showcase their Switchboard's first-year milestones as a means of generating buzz and providing proof that their Switchboard was worth the community's time and attention.

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How Skidmore Launched Its Podcast Entirely In-House

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How Skidmore Launched Its Podcast Entirely In-House

An estimated 67 million Americans listen to podcasts each month, and 42 million of them listen to podcasts weekly.

So it's no surprise that more colleges and universities are getting into the podcasting game, whether it's to target prospective students, engage sports fans, or build brand awareness.

But starting a podcast can be daunting. It's easy to listen to podcasts, but recording, producing, and editing one is a complicated process. That's one reason it's so impressive that Skidmore College took the leap into podcasting all on its own, without any external production help. Now, their podcast, This is Skidmore, is three seasons strong.

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5 Things to Read to Help Polish Your #GivingTuesday Campaign

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5 Things to Read to Help Polish Your #GivingTuesday Campaign

Giving Tuesday (Tuesday, November 28) is around the corner, but there's still time to finalize some details in your months-long planning process. 

It's a little late to implement most Giving Tuesday advice out there, so we picked out five resources you can still use to bolster your work in the month that remains.

Step Away from the Print Alumni Directory – Once and For All

Step Away from the Print Alumni Directory – Once and For All

Back in the late 1990s, I worked at a large public research university. We sat through a sales presentation by a vendor of printed alumni directories, and when he left, we said to each other, “OK, but I guess this will be the last printed directory we ever do.” This was the dotcom era, the CD-ROM was the latest and greatest way to store and access large amounts of information, and we believed that before long, the digital wave would submerge the printed alumni “phone book” at last.

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Why Alumni Trust in Higher Education Is Failing—and What We Can Do About It

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Alumni giving rates are down nationwide, and a majority of Americans say that colleges and universities put their own interests above their students'. Things aren't looking great for fundraising and alumni relations in higher education.

We all have our own assumptions about why it's happening. It's obvious to us, common sense, even if there isn't always the research to back it up. But in the absence of data, there's little we're empowered to do about it.

Fortunately for us, there is some research as to why alumni trust in their alma maters is failing. In this post, we'll break that that research down into five action items.

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The Missing Middle: Advancement and Alumni Relations's Ongoing Generational Deficit

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The Missing Middle: Advancement and Alumni Relations's Ongoing Generational Deficit

Advancement and alumni relations had a formula for engaging alumni that worked for decades. But young alumni these days are breaking that mold.

Their giving rates are lower. They attend fewer events. They give for different reasons, care about different causes, face different economic challenges, and have different perceptions of higher education and its worth than their older counterparts.

Yet for all our self awareness and new strategies, we're still only scratching the surface when it comes to solving the problems underlying the young alumni engagement deficit. The problem lies in how we define "engagement" in the first place.

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