Here at the University of Arkansas we do not offer email for life so shortly after graduation, the time changes from one year to the next, their University email account expires. Also all their information will likely end up addressed to the parents as that is most accurate address for the students until they figure out where they are going (not all but most); yet we don’t always get that one. Thus, we needed to come up with a way to get at least an update email address and if possible information on where they were planning to go next (physically, professionally and academically).

Students love free stuff!

Therefore, we’ve taken the concept of a Free T-Shirt and added a little unique campus twist to it (as everyone should). Our twist is based around our unique campus tradition called “Senior Walk”. This is the tradition where we engrave the names of all our graduates in the sidewalks across the campus for all future students to see and to show our pride in our graduates. However, since graduates cannot take the sidewalk with them we’ve created a t-shirt with “My Name Is On Senior Walk” print largely on the back so that they may wear it with pride and show off their achievement.

Collecting their information before they go!

The first thing that we had to determine was what information we really wanted to collect from the students and why we needed it. As you may know, no one likes to fill out long forms. So this year we came up with the following form (a modified version of the 2010 print form).

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The number one benefit of going to an online form is that we can require a Non University Email address on the form. Therefore this year no online submissions will include a University email address and we’ll hopefully have better luck staying connected with them via this channel.

The program works!

The first year we ran this program, back in 2010, we were able to get over 500 graduating students to updated their contact information and connect with an Alumni Association staff member one-on-one to discuss their future plans along with how the Alumni Association would be here to help them.  However, this year by taking the form to an online application we have already gotten over 700 graduating students to update their information and they will still be meeting with an Association staff member to talk one-on-one and get their t-shirt.

How do you get an online form to drive one-to-one connections?

This actually came about as a two part issue: we wanted one-to-one interaction and we could not afford to snail mail everyone a t-shirt (although we do mail a few for the distance education students). Therefore, we knew we’d still need the students to come and pickup their free t-shirt which would also allow us the opportunity to talk one-on-one with them about the Association. Yet, how to know if they submitted the online form?

Meet our friend the “FREE TEE” coupon!

We developed a redemption coupon for graduating students to claim their “My Name Is On Senior Walk” t-shirt. The coupon served a multitude of purposes the smallest of which was to redeem the t-shirt. More importantly it included:

1. The student’s name (it’s always good to address them by their name) but that is more to mark them off the list of recipients than anything else.
2. “Fayetteville, AR” on my example above is the Destination City Post-Graduation which allows our staff members to know where they are headed and talk about our alumni groups that are in the area and of more interest to the students.
3. “Find Job” on my example above is the Plans Post-Graduation which also allows the staff members to have a more personalized one-to-one conversation with the students about their plans and how the Association can help them.
4. The QR code stores the Post Graduation Address information of the student and also offered a “green” option for the students that didn’t want to print out the coupon. Our campus is big on sustainability.

In short the redemption coupon was developed as a resource for the staff members talking with the students so that they could have a more personalized one-to-one conversation with our graduating students and start building a long lasting relationship with our upcoming alumni.

The program doesn’t end there…

Although this is the end of the data collection story for getting new grads information before they leave campus and disappear off our radar, it’s only the beginning of the relationship with our newest alumni. The relationship must be continued with a marketing and communications plan tailored for our new graduates (using the information we just collected) to help us keep them connected to their Alma Matter. However I’ll save that story for another day.

However, unlike what you typically find when someone is talking about social media integration/marketing campaign I’m not referring to the act of putting your message everywhere and simply shouting it to the world. This is quite a common tactic for marketing groups to say that they have done a social media campaign simply by pushing their message everywhere they possibly can. Yet, if you’ve spent a little time in the social media world you know that simply won’t suffice anymore. Instead, I took this opportunity to help the Association integrate the true value of social media, one-to-one connections, into the event and increase the understanding of why we’ve been taking this “everyone is a person” approach to our social media marketing efforts.  I’m glad to say that all our efforts are continuing to pay off.

2010 Award of Excellence in Social Media Integration Strategy – CASE III

We received an Award of Excellence in Social Media Integration Strategy from the CASE, District III awards program for the Pride of Arkansas Tour Social Media Integration Strategy.

Entry Materials:

• Formatted Entry Submission with Results
• POAT Pre Event Social Integrated Messages Examples
• POAT During Event Social Strategy and Examples
• POAT Post Event Marketing and Social Connections Examples
• POAT Online Statistics Summary

How did you make it happen? What’s the secret to making it work?

In short the marketing was focused to be more personalized one-to-one type messages as the old fashion saying people go to events where they know someone else that will be there is still true to this day (especially with alumni events). Thus, we used a multichannel personalized messaging approach including personal emails, Facebook sharing, tweets and more by key staff members who were traveling to familiar locations.

For example, Tammy Tucker, director of communications, returned to Helena, AR, her hometown, during one of the stops and she was able to reach out via personal emails and social connections to let her friends in the area know that she was coming and that they could all attend and come visit with her and the University. This allowed Tammy to reinforce her connections with her hometown along with introducing them to a person so they would feel a stronger one-to-one personal connection with the University of Arkansas.

Of course we also did all the mass marketing tricks that you are probably used to doing to but added a social media feature for sharing and spreading the word with it.

We didn’t stop there!

We also integrated social media into the actual events and post event activities, starting with on-location event tweets by the association staff members at the POAT events. Along with tweeting, staff also maintained blog articles and photos of each event location. Flickr played a key role in helping us share our POAT photos online with everyone along with allowing staff to upload them from the road.

Wrapping it all up!

We finished our integration strategy with post event follow-up emails to all those who had registered with information on viewing the photos, reading the blog articles and taking a short survey to help us improve it for next year. These emails were segmented by the registration levels to speak directly to the recipients and encouraged them to engage online via the blog comments and share their stories so they could be a part of the event – especially if they didn’t attend. This quickly became known as a possible solution to the “alumni event paradox” where alumni want more events but are unable to attend them.  We also had social thank you messages sent out across Twitter and Facebook when one-to-one connections were made.

To be upfront I’m all for a multichannel marketing and communications approach as it allows our audience the opportunity to select how they wish to hear about our events, news and other topics of interest to them. That being said “Email is NOT dead!” One should never put all their eggs in one basket as that will eventually lead to a disaster. Diversify and concur!

A recent study by Chadwick Martin Bailey found that Email Still Tops Facebook for Keeping in Touch as 86% of survey respondents said “they used email to share content, while just 49% said they used Facebook”. It shows that only 18 – 24 year olds use social networking sites more than email for sharing information; however email still came in a close second.

E-Communications have changed & we must strive to keep up!

Although e-newsletters will continue to exist the concept of what an e-newsletter is has changed. The idea of the old fashioned “alumni e-newsletter” where you scrolled through it forever to read the content and that was the only place to get it is long since “DEAD”!

In today’s social world where content is created quickly by anyone and shared amongst everyone the idea of hiding content in a restricted area is passé. Although that is not to say some things shouldn’t be supper protected (credit cards, SSN, etc.) but when it comes to “news” & “events” I’m pretty much a share with everyone (in the target market) type person. After all the more people that know about it the better, right?

The style of e-newsletters has become more of a directional tool for our recipients with short excerpts enticing readers to view the full story in an interactive, rich media, online environment. The most important change is that the content can exist anywhere and still be utilized in an e-newsletter. Be it on the Association’s blog/news site, another site maintained by the University, school or a department, a social network or even directly to an alum’s personal blog story. Today owning the content directly is no longer as valuable as it used to be (although still good for SEO & market awareness). Sharing content of others that is of interest to your recipients has become far more important – think about the Facebook Share & Twitter’s ReTweet features.

So you are telling us to “repeat” ourselves? No! I’m telling you to share the information with a different audience; your e-newsletter subscribers. After all, it’s not like your email list will be only 18 – 24 year olds and you’d be surprised to learn the number of people that didn’t see your last Tweet, Facebook post or other social update. With today’s always on communications there is a great amount of noise and the e-newsletter can help you get past it.

How do you Balance the Workload?

The second part to this topic is usually related to “workload” as we all know that alumni professionals (all Higher Ed even) are amazing at doing way to much in one day. Often times we end up victims of our own success. Is there not something we can do to lessen the workload on ourselves? Yes!

Technology today has created several features that can help us shorten the workload and spend less time creating the e-newsletters and focus on that which is more important “the recipients”. Oh wait, you expected me to say content? Sorry, but remember the recipients determine your content now, you are just sharing it, and therefore you must focus on them before the content can be determined.

That is right; the e-newsletter today has become a sharing tool like that of most social networks. Once you think of it that way it’s rather easy to find ways to simplify the workload while still creating an amazing and engaging e-newsletter.

RSS to Email

This is probably the most important tool that will help you save time and energy. This tool has been around for a while as Feedburner has a very simplified version of this tool allow blog subscribers to get email updates when new articles are published on the site.  However, that was only the beginning and this tool has evolved to allow for the creation of blog recaps like this one by eROI.com. Notice how you can have multiple feeds put into one e-newsletter style formatted message. This is a feature that most major email marketing providers are adopting, so I expect it to become more popular and easier to use soon.

Yahoo Pipes

Need to mesh up multiple feeds to get the right RSS for using with the RSS to Email feature? Yahoo Pipes is a tool that will allow you to do just that. Not only can you mesh RSS feeds but you can take other XML feeds and combine them all together to get one pretty RSS feed results.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn & Flickr

You didn’t think I’d forget about these did you? You’ve got tons of options with these and the content that is already being publishing on them. Did you know you can get RSS feeds for all your updates to any social network? Imagine how you could mesh that in with the other tools.

Do you know of other tools that can help makes e-newsletter great?  Tell us about it in the comments below.

photos/icons credit, Bright Meadow

However, this year there was a slight switch with how the discussions happened as the planning committee wanted to try out “round table” discussions. Since this was my first time facilitating a round table discussion I must say it truly was an amazing and exciting experience. I actually got to facilitate three tables on “social media & fundraising” each one only lasting 25 minutes (kind of like speed dating). Therefore, since 25 minutes is not much time to discuss social media (I mean you could spend days on the topics) I promised my participants this article to recap and follow up on all the unanswered topics that came up.

If you’ve got additional questions just leave me a comment at the bottom or shoot me an email if you’d like to discuss it in a more one-to-one setting.

The Most Popular Topic was “Time”

Many participants expressed a concern over how social media pretty much requires having a dedicated staff member to just update and maintain a social presence. Although I will agree that having someone responsible for coordinating social media efforts for an office is a good idea, I’m not totally sold on having one person be responsible for maintaining the whole thing.

Although it appears to be the simplest solution and avoids adding additional workload to anyone on staff currently I really don’t think you could hire or promote someone and expect them to know the answers to all the questions that come up for an organization. We all work on parts and only together can we have all the needed answers.  Thus, I suggest a two step option instead.

First off is to create coordinator/monitor positions. Having people responsible for listening to social networks and sharing that information back with the appropriate staff person internally allows answers to come quicker without taking double the time (it becomes just another email to respond to). Although this method does require that everyone in customer service positions in an office be comfortable (able to use it at a basic level) it does seem to be best customer service model currently in social media (i.e. @Twelpforce or ATTCustomerCare).

Secondly I recommend integrating social media into organizational procedures rather than seeing social media as its own area (department, unit, etc) in an organization. We used the idea of how it fits into a press release process. It only adds one step to the process of writing an article and sending it to media outlets (papers, magazines, etc.) by adding in your own social outlets as a media stream. You’ll find out that it saves time and is easier to change a preexisting process than making new ones. More importantly you will eventually not need to send out to the media outlets as they’ll pick up on your Twitter/Facebook posts and start using that as their source thus eliminating that work load and switching it for social media instead.

Our Second Popular Topic was “Updating & Standing Out”

Although very similar to that of time the key parts that were different in this topic were frequency and making sure to stand out from “white noise”. This is probably one of the trickiest aspects of social media to understand. To me the biggest issue is to make sure you are not just using social media to shout about your message.

We took a look at this topic by starting from the beginning. Yep, I actually asked people if they could tell me “how, why or what” was the original purpose behind Facebook (as Facebook seemed to be the most popular network at each table). I’m glad to say that everyone got it right as they said “college students connecting with each other – friend to friend”. To the extent of using it as a way to share photos, important updates (I’m getting coffee at Starbucks) and events that they wanted their friends to attend. Low and behold every group came to the concept that social media was never about pushing a message out to the masses but believe it or not all about building and extending friendships beyond the physical (face-to-face) realm.

Thus, what we find is that frequency is less important then the context of the message. If the message is of value within context to those that are your friends then you’ll stand out and you won’t need to repeat yourself over and over (aka shout). But can business actually have friends on Facebook? Some of you may be say he’s about to say it’s the customers and you are correct. If you look at what you are in business to do (let’s say you put on functions for children while the parents cannot be around) then you’d better believe the parents want to know and see what they are doing, the same as grandma wants to see photos from the grand kids on vacation. Therefore we don’t need to worry as much about making sure we update once every 2 hours but rather focus on what is important – our cause – and then people will be looking and waiting for us to post something.

It’s also important to try and match up what you are sharing with the appropriate social networking platform. Although you could put everything everywhere that is almost like the spray-and-pray mass print model which we know is no longer functional. Instead we should make sure to put fun activities and photos on Facebook as that is what they expect there and news announcements and last minute updates on Twitter as it’s built around to the point (80 to 90 characters) instant communications.

The Last Big Topic was “Fundraising – what do you mean”

That’s right I totally throw some people off with the concept of “social media & fundraising” in the round tables. I actually had someone say that she came to the table simply because the time included what they thought was polar opposites and just didn’t see how they would fit together. Which when you think of fundraising in the normal sense (campaigns & asks for money) she was totally right as they are polar opposites and don’t work together well that way. However, if we shift our way of thinking just a little and remember what social media is all about “a community of friends” then we’ll see they really do fit together perfectly.

Shift the way we think about fundraising? This was actually my exact presentation last year at the conference talking about how we are going from fundraising in the traditional sense to friendraising instead and social media is a great place for that. Here is where I love to use the Susan G. Komen for the Cure as an example as it really does show how come fundraising is actually friendraising. Think about why someone supports the Susan G. Komen for the Cure and let’s take out the traditional marketing options like campaigns & advertising. Why are they supporting it? Yep, it has to do with knowing someone that has been affected by cancer (your family, friend or even the friend of a friend). Thus we are not supporting just because we care but because we care about Jane Doe or John Smith in particular. My support efforts are making a difference for someone that I know.

So where does social media fit into this? Social media is a community of people and within that community is a “group of your friends” or those that find your cause important because they know someone impacted by your efforts. Their stories are our message and all we need to do is have them share those stories with us & their friends (a basic premise behind social media) and then we’ll get more friends for our cause. More importantly though we’ll be able to focus on our key evangelists and they’ll help get us all the others.

Another example that I shared was the Earthquake in New Zealand that Chris Brogan wrote about on his blog because of his friends that were in New Zealand. This is a great example of having someone’s friend relationships turn into a true evangelization for the support of a good cause (all because he was a friend of a victim). Notice that a friend is even given the credit for why he wrote the blog article.

Friendraisers Are Tomorrow’s Successful Fundraisers

It was interesting to see a theme throughout the conference this year about this idea of Friendraising and treating donors as people and not pocketbooks. A shift in the way of thinking about fundraising seems to be happening, moving us away from “asking for money” and working more on creating long lasting “friendships” to make a better part of the world tomorrow.

Although not an entirely new concept (as I was talking about this concept last year) there is new data to support the idea and an ever increasing interest by people (fundraisers and donors) to be treated as people.

However for me I don’t think it can ever be said better than:
“A friend is ___________________.”

photos/icons credit, Aleksandra Wolska