Alumni Relations

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Scaling Networks to Empower Our Students, Alumni, and Institutions

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Pick a career services professional at any school, and you’ll find that they’re busy.  Too many students to help, too little time.

Not to mention alumni. Many career services offices don’t have time to serve alumni, and even those that do often only have one or two people serving a population of thousands—or tens of thousands.

No matter how many one-on-one meetings you have or events you throw, when you’re operating on that kind of scale, there’s no way that traditional methods can help all the students and alumni who need it.

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In 2018, Patch Your Leaks Before Building New Programs

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In 2018, Patch Your Leaks Before Building New Programs

When your ship is sinking, is it better to try to patch the leaks, or to build another boat?

In higher ed, whether we realize it or not, our first instinct is often to build another boat. When our existing programming stops drawing crowds, we look for new programming to bring them back. What we should do instead is ask ourselves, "Why did this stop working?" and then try to fix it.

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Announcing Switchboard's New Higher Education Innovation Fellows Program

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Higher Education Innovation Fellows

We talk a lot in higher ed about how to better serve our students, alumni, and other constituents. But we seldom focus on how to better help the professionals who serve them.

That’s why Switchboard is launching the Higher Education Innovation Fellowship program.

The Higher Education Innovation Fellowship (HEIF) is a year-long program where fellows will learn from leaders across disciplines (e.g. technology, behavioral economics, nonprofits, and higher education) and practice innovation in higher education.

The fellowship includes six months of curriculum, nine days of innovation workshops at Switchboard HQ in lovely Portland, Oregon, and a six-month applied campus innovation project where fellows will put one of their ideas into action with the one-on-one guidance of a coach.

This program is designed for ambitious emerging leaders in higher education who want to learn best practices to scale innovation at their institutions. Professionals from all experience levels are welcome to apply. With a focus on constituent-facing leaders, the fellowship is designed for professionals who serve  current students, alumni, parents, and friends of their institution.

We know that improvement and innovation in higher ed requires that institutions invest in the people who serve students and alumni. Higher ed is the key to economic mobility for many students and families we serve; they deserve us at our best. We’ve designed the fellowship to that end.

Learn more.

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Reorganizing Advancement Is Not (Itself) Enough to Drive Success

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Reorganizing Advancement Is Not (Itself) Enough to Drive Success

Over the last few years, I have helped a number of organizations review the way they deploy their advancement teams. I also led the reorganization of a newly combined alumni relations and annual giving team at a leading private university.

Through these experiences I’ve noticed a couple of frequent expectations among the leaders driving the reorganization process. One expectation is that the newly arranged team will be more efficient. The other is that they’ll be more effective.

Below are some thoughts on both these ambitions. And I close with a comment on one key factor that all organizations require, even if they’re not changing their reporting lines.

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How College of the Holy Cross Exceeded Its Giving Day Participation Goal by 50%

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How College of the Holy Cross Exceeded Its Giving Day Participation Goal by 50%

Giving days are an appealing supplement to traditional giving campaigns. Their compactness and immediacy makes them satisfying both for our alumni and for those of us who organize them.

But investing all that time and energy into one day can feel like a huge gamble. That's why we talked to folks at Holy Cross about how they exceeded their participation goal by 50% in their most recent giving day campaign.

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