Sifting through the dozens of mentoring, networking, and career platforms out there is hard. It's tough to separate marketing speak from reality and to find the best fit for your team and your institution.
We know because we help dozens of schools through the process every year.
Here are the two biggest mistakes to avoid while evaluating which platform is right for you.
Higher education is changing fast, whether you can see it happening or not. Where we at Team Switchboard sit—the intersection of alumni relations, advancement, and career services—it can be especially hard to keep up.
There are a few go-to publications we all read for insight, like Inside Higher Ed, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Times Higher Education, but there are dozens more sources of in-depth coverage of higher education.
Here is a list of nine think tanks and publications whose work we read regularly to stay informed.
Alumni mentoring was the big buzzphrase in alumni relations and career services in 2016.
But the rise in such programs has some people asking, "What is mentoring anyway?" Is it a Karate Kid-style, one-on-one relationship that the institution has to set up from scratch? Or is it something more organic? What can mentees expect to get out of it, and what should mentors expect to do?
To help answer these and other questions, we picked six articles that cut past the hype and clarify what alumni mentoring programs look like at their best.
Fundraising at a small institution is a fundamentally different enterprise than fundraising at a large one. Truisms fail and trends aren't always applicable.
That's why Keystone College shared its small-shop advancement strategies at the recent CASE D2 Conference.
Heather A. Schield is Vice President for Institutional Advancement and Frank Ohotnicky is Director of Advancement Services at Keystone. We asked them to reprise their CASE presentation for the Switchboard blog.
Santa Clara University’s Alumni Association set an ambitious alumni engagement goal for their new Switchboard. They wanted to sign 1,000 people up for the platform within a year—a high bar for any new program.
When they reached that goal in just six months, we knew we had to share how they did it.
Their blueprint can be used by any office that is serious about reaching their goals.
Let's face it—sometimes managing volunteers can feel like more work than the volunteers are helping your office can get done.
It's important to have a strategy for integrating them into your work, whether you work in alumni relations, advancement, or elsewhere.
Loreal Maguire is Director of Volunteer Programs and Laura DenBow is Senior Director of Volunteer Programs in Cornell's office of alumni affairs. We asked them to share how Cornell integrates alumni into their advancement strategy.
