, ,

Why Alumni Career Communities Matter

, ,

Why do students go to college? Most academics would be horrified to discover that it’s not to get a great education and become educated citizens of the world.

Today’s students still want high quality academics, but they take the educational benefits of college for granted. What students really expect from today’s college, as reported in the Higher Education Research Institute’s survey of incoming freshmen, is to get a leg up. Three of the top four reasons for coming to college (and the percentage of students who cited that reason) are related to careers.

4 Colleges and Universities Doing Podcasting Right

Podcasts are an excellent way to keep alumni engaged and advertise your institution to a broader audience. They hold listeners' attention, increase their affinity for your school, and make your institution useful to them. (See our blog post on what schools can learn from public radio for more on this.)

Here are 5 schools that successfully use podcasts to keep their communities engaged.

,

What Alumni Relations & Advancement Can Learn from Public Radio

,

Alumni relations and advancement offices aren’t the only ones thinking about engagement these days—every company, website, and media outlet is, too. And that means competition.

One institution is engaging its audience particularly well—it’s a bright spot in an otherwise gloomy-looking industry. Public radio is excelling where other news outlets and media are declining. And it has insights to offer those of us in higher ed who are also competing for our audience’s attention.

Don't "Go Dark" — How UBC Manages Communications Between Fundraising Campaigns

What should happen to our communications with our audiences when a major fundraising campaign ends? Do we let them slow to a trickle? Or can we find other opportunities to stay in touch? 

Richard Fisher is presenting on the subject at the upcoming CASE District VIII conference. He's Chief Communications Officer in the Office of Development and Alumni Engagement at the University of British Columbia. We asked him to share his thoughts on fundraising communications between campaigns.

CASE D2 Preview: "Measuring Alumni Volunteerism"

If you don't already have a developed system for quantifying alumni engagement, it's easy to feel like you're falling behind.

But rather than stressing about coming up with a perfect system, Carrie Collins, Chief Advancement Officer at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, says it's best to just get started.

We asked Collins to give us a preview of her presentation at the upcoming CASE Division II conference, "Measuring Alumni Volunteerism."

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