In many quarters, the job of presidents increasingly became one of raising endowment money and overseeing campus expansions. The inside joke was that college and university presidents suffered from an Edifice Complex. In the view of many college presidents, the economic crisis of 2008 was a tipping point. In its aftermath, a "new normal" is…

All college and university communications professionals work hard to promote their institutions' strengths and uniqueness. They tout high-caliber faculty, programs, and facilities and point to the achievements of their graduates as examples of their success. But those who work for institutions that are members of a higher education consortium also…

With roots going back to 1986, the Student Team on Alumni Relations or STAR was one of the first student-alumni groups in Canada and routinely attracted capable and enthusiastic volunteers. It offered to appreciative, albeit small, student audiences a suite of popular programs, including job shadowing and goodie boxes parents could send to their…

Traditional alumni relations programs are about prompting graduates to do something--anything--for or with the institution. In this article, the author proposes something different: an outcome-oriented alumni relations programming model, which the author calls "strategic advancement," that focuses on smaller, targeted sets of graduates…

Jeremiah Stevens, director of alumni relations at Lake Forest Academy in suburban Chicago, contends with a bit of an unusual challenge. He must manage and motivate not one but two alumni boards. While alumni professionals may not share Stevens' particular circumstances, they certainly can relate to a struggle to jumpstart a languishing board and…

When yes/no or multiple-choice answers do not suffice--when a qualitative understanding of a topic rather than a quantitative head count is needed--it is time to consider focus groups. They work well when learning why, how, and what for is more important than measuring how many. Focus groups are primarily an open-ended form of inquiry, enabling…

Alumni relations and stewardship officers have the makings of a strong partnership. Alumni relations and stewardship can be a natural fit--a perfect match even--according to Mary Jo Chiara of St. Joseph's College (SJC) in New York. Both strive to cultivate long-term relationships with constituents and build increasing levels of engagement and…

University of Illinois President B. Joseph White describes it in glowing terms like "visionary" and "watershed." More cautious alumni professional peers call it "bold" or even "risky." The "it" here is the decision by the University of Illinois Alumni Association (UIAA) to end the 136-year-old dues…

The education market is becoming more competitive and far more crowded. The economic downturn has caused many families to reconsider their priorities, re-evaluate their budgets, and refocus their attention. Once considered one of the dark arts, whose very tenets were unacceptable in a mission-based environment, branding is now widely regarded as…

The people an educational institution is trying to reach--prospective and current students, alumni and parents, to name a few--are no longer passive recipients of press releases and newsletters. They are on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and any other social media platform that comes to mind. What can sometimes get lost amid the constant…

Realists recognize reorganizations for what they are: opportunities to do things better--to change business as usual to reflect best practices, new tools and technologies, and current challenges in the marketplace. At educational institutions, perhaps no area is as sensitive to those shifts as communications and marketing offices. The advances in…

Most colleges and universities that launch into social media do so by dipping one toe in the water rather than swan diving into the deep end. And while many people define "social media" as Facebook and perhaps Twitter, the term actually encompasses everything from blogs to photo- and video-sharing sites to LinkedIn to any of dozens of…

It's official: Online social networking is mainstream. Once the domain of teenagers and techno-geeks, sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter are rapidly gaining popularity with the multi-aged masses. Last year, in fact, Facebook reported its fastest growing demographic was those 25 years and older. There's no question that this new…