Alumni Relations

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How The Ohio State University's College of Engineering is Breaking Down Silos in Advancement

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How The Ohio State University's College of Engineering is Breaking Down Silos in Advancement

High turnover and a lack of collaboration between units are the norm in higher education, but they aren't conditions we have to accept.

When Patrick Lynch started in his role as Director of Strategic Engagement and Alumni Relations at The Ohio State University's College of Engineering, he felt called to act after a number of his colleagues left within six months. He shared his experience working to create a culture of collaboration at the CASE District V Conference in December.

We asked Patrick to revisit that presentation and talk about his work for this extensive Q&A. In it, he touches on how he and his team are fostering collaboration, creating a share sense of purpose, and making changes internally that are improving their relationships with other teams.

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Want to Engage Alumni? Ditch the Funnel. Embrace the Web.

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Want to Engage Alumni? Ditch the Funnel. Embrace the Web.

The funnel is a strategy that informs much of what we do in alumni relations, advancement, and alumni career services. We use it to move people from where they are to where we want them to be—engaged alumna to volunteer, engaged alumna to donor, engaged aluma to mentor.

I will explain how it is flawed by way of comparison. I invite you to consider an alternative metaphor: the engagement web. 

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How Concordia College's Engagement Strategy Doubled Young Alumni Giving

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How Concordia College's Engagement Strategy Doubled Young Alumni Giving

Launching new strategies and programs is always daunting. We often feel like we have to have everything ready to go right out of the gate. (Not to mention the fact we don't want our colleagues and supervisors to think that we're winging it.) 

But in reality, we have to start with small prototypes, adjust our expectations, and test and tweak our programs to fit our audience before we can scale up. That's how Concordia College, a liberal arts college with 2,500 students in Moorhead, Minnesota, doubled its young alumni giving rate in three years. First it simply began targeting online outreach to young alumni, and then gradually moved into young-alumni-specific events, and eventually established young alumni engagement committees run by volunteers.

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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.

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