Printed alumni directories are largely a thing of the past.
But for one school that gets requests from alumni for printed directories every week, resurrecting the practice became an appealing way to satisfy their constituents and update their contact information at the same time.
Davidson College's Director of Alumni Relations Marya Howell explained why her office decided to take on the project.
The concept of Donor Lifetime Value isn't new to advancement offices—an alumna doesn't give just once to her alma mater; she gives many times over the course of her life. Even some alumni relations offices think about Alumni Lifetime Value.
But it's rare that either office invest in that lifetime value.
A seismic change is occurring in higher education. Some schools are not surviving, and only the innovative are thriving. To stay competitive, schools need to prove their worth to an increasingly skeptical audience. Career services can be on the front lines of that fight. Those with the ability to meet the needs of their students and alumni at scale have the competitive advantage.
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.
