Welcome to Creating a School-Wide Culture of Alumni Engagement. I'm Stephanie Reaver-Chu, the Director of Alumni Relations at Latin School of Chicago. And I'm Teresa Souter, Assistant Director of Alumni Relations and School Archivist. In Alumni Relations, we're all working hard to engage alumni to the benefit of our schools. While all of us, I'm sure, are always looking for new ideas, hence the CASE conference, I'm sure we're all proud of the good work we do on behalf of our schools and our alumni communities. All the thought and the effort that goes into our programs, our communications, our relationships, and our solicitations. I know here at Latin, we were merrily rolling along, feeling pretty good about things, getting good feedback from alumni. And then... And then one day, we overheard in the hallway an admissions tour group going by, led by a student tour guide. They came by our office and the admissions tour guide said, and here's the alumni office. You don't really need to know about them. And we were like, what? No, you absolutely need to know about us. But it was really a wake-up call. We realized that we needed to be just as intentional about creating relationships and communicating with our internal audience as we are with our alumni. So this is when the work of really beginning to work on building these relationships began. So today, we're going to walk you through how to start building relationships in your internal community. You're going to walk away with some takeaways. We're going to give you zero and low budget cost ideas for really increasing the visibility of alumni programming throughout your school. These are all going to be ideas that you can scale, whether or not you're two people in alumni relations or 10. We're also going to show you ways that you can build these often siloed audiences. Sometimes we have faculty and alumni and students, and never the three shall meet. But we're going to show you how to build bridges between those silos, while at the same time, amping up your alumni program. Going to give you some great ways to demonstrate the value added of an alumni program to key stakeholders, such as your trustees, your parents, your students, and your faculty. And we're going to also show you some ways that you can show current students how alumni are involved in the life of the school. So I want to tell you a little bit about Latin. We're a long established JK through 12 urban day school with three distinct divisions and three buildings. And a little bit about our alumni program. We're really fortunate that we have about 30% of our alumni population living in the Chicagoland area, which in the past has been a real advantage because we have alumni at our fingertips to come in and meet with students and talk. But as you know, the pandemic has leveled that playing field and we are all accessible to all of our alumni via zoom now. That's something we'll definitely be holding on to as we move out of the remote learning sphere. So in order for our school community to see us as valuable partners, they first really need to know us, know who we are, know where our office is. So we started with a really simple goal. First step, and I'm sure many of you are probably already doing this, but it's to really be present. Greet your students as they walk by your office, say hello. Be sure that you're creating a student friendly office space. We have lots of pictures and color in our office. We also started creating really inventive displays on our door. You'll see in the next slide, our Calvin and Hobbes series. Every January we make a Calvin and Hobbes snow person theme, which has become really famous kind of in the middle school. They bring people by to see it. Also, it's important to be helpful. At the start of each year, we stand up in the all faculty and staff meeting and we say, Hey, we're the alumni team. If you need help finding classroom speakers, club speakers, don't hesitate to reach out to us. That's why we're here. And then also in a pinch, let them know that you're available for field trips or recess duty. If the sixth grade team approaches you and says, Hey, we need you to disguise yourself and hide in plain sight in the park. You do it. That's what Stephanie and I are doing here in this photo. So be a destination. If you're centrally located enough and you're fortunate enough to be in one of the buildings, offer to be a pickup or a drop-off spot, especially as those seniors get closer and closer to graduation. If it's signing a card for their Dean, or maybe they missed picking up their senior treat in the cafeteria. The alumni office is a great place to be. Also, we try and attend events as much as we possibly can. Teresa does an amazing job. We have a life size cutout of our founder, Mabel Slade Vickery, and she makes appearances in costume at the Halloween parades. And she's out and about at basketball games and all over the place. Thanks to Teresa's dedication to getting her out and about. We try and make announcements whenever we can in person. So we get in front of the students. And not only did we ask the admissions folks to make sure we're on the prospective new families tour. We also beg every single year to make sure that the new faculty and staff swing by our office as they're getting acclimated to the school. And buttons. So 10 years ago, we decided we needed a way to make our alumni visible when they were on campus and when they were at events with other people. Lucky for us, orange is one of our colors. It stands out beautifully. Thus started our career as button pushers. Alumni can't get past the front desk without being encouraged to don a button. And they're great fun to pass out at homecoming and at the big basketball games where we get a decent amount of alumni turnout turnout. So the great things about this, you know, everybody in the community can immediately recognize an alum when they're in the vicinity. And this is a terrific help to faculty members, especially as they're scrolling through all the people they know and they know they know a face. It helps distinguish those alumni for them. It's a really inexpensive way to give something to alumni to take home, even if they throw it in a drawer or put it up on a bulletin board, you know that they're going to see it from time to time and think about their alma mater. And of course, orange is awesome for visibility. Looks great in the photos. So once we were doing all these things consistently, we really dug into building the familiarity with our work. We're going to walk you through a constituent by constituent approach to being relevant, maintaining visibility, and being seen as valuable partners in the school community, all while doing great work for your alumni. So let's talk about students and then faculty and then parents. And we decided to start with students since they're our future alumni. And what we did is create alumni week. This happens one week in April. So it's about six months before homecoming and reunion weekend, which is usually in October. And it's one week of programming and lower middle and upper school. And it's solely to educate our students on alumni and the alumni program, with the main purpose being so students know what alumni means. We also want them to know who our alumni are. And we want them to know and be able to recognize what being an active and engaged alum looks like. So we start in JK. In JK, we invite alumni parents who are also, we invite alumni who are also parents of a JKer to come into the classroom. So on Monday morning of alumni week, they sit in circle and they learn a new word, alumni. They explain what alumni is, and that throughout the week, they're going to be parents who are also alumni, who will be wearing that orange button, who will come into their classroom. So in JK, they come into the classroom during free choice time. They color, they perhaps read a story. Now this evolves a little bit. In first and second grade, our alumni parents still come in to visit, but now they bring in memorabilia. They bring in their yearbooks. They show pictures of what Latin looked like when they were in school. They talk about similarities and they talk about differences. It's very interactive. The students get to ask questions. In third and fourth grade, by this time, they know what alumni means. They've interacted with some alumni parents. Now they get to have a personal experience and relationship with an alum. We call this the great pen pal project. So during this week, I go into the third grade classroom and I match a third grader with an alum who will be celebrating their 50th or 40th reunion weekend in the fall. I bring in a yearbook page, the alum's yearbook page. The student takes some time to look at the yearbook page, to think of questions to ask their alum, and this is done in coordination with the third grade letter writing unit. So we talk about how to write a letter. What are some questions you might ask? What are some things you might share? So the students draft a letter and they send it off. Our office mails them. And then we have a great pen pal exchange. And this culminates in October during reunion weekend at the pen pal meet and greet. It's under the alumni tent during our alumni barbecue. We reserve a couple of tables specifically for our alums and their fourth grade pen pals. We bring out yearbooks, both old yearbooks and modern yearbooks. We also have some great conversation starters and our students and their families get to finally meet their pen pal. And I mean, look at these photos. This is what I call cuteness overload. This is one of the most adorable projects we do. But what's been really exciting to see in the almost 10 years we've been doing this is that some of our pen pals have forged long lasting relationships. Here's one example. This photo was taken in 2013 at the pen pal meet and greet. You see our alum, Frances, on the left. She flew in from Israel. This is her pen pal, Vivi, on the right. And here they were last year. Vivi and her family actually took a trip to Israel and they got to meet up with Frances in Israel. So absolutely wonderful to see these relationships. So by the time our students are in middle school, they know what alumni means. They've met some alums and they've perhaps even met their pen pal in a meet and greet. Now it's time for them to learn about alumni programming. And we do this through alumni week trivia. It's one question a day for the middle schoolers. A question might be name one notable alum and explain why they are notable. Or perhaps how many alumni donated to your Latin fund last year or your annual fund. Or how many alumni are also current parents. Whatever you want them to know. Fun trivia. We keep it simple. We have it on the screens, on the monitors, but we also literally I print out on paper in orange and blue our school colors the question of the day. I post it on our office door. I post it throughout the middle school. Now note that students are required to come to the alumni office to submit their answer. And then we do a drawing at the end of the day. Now this culminates at the end of the week on Friday and the most popular middle school assembly of the year. And I'm not kidding. In the 10 years we've been doing this, this has become the most anticipated middle school assembly. The Roman cup trivia challenge. We bring in a team of about four alumni and they face off with a team of four eighth graders. And it's a mix of middle school curriculum questions and alumni trivia and history questions. They go up on stage at the 25 minute assembly. Jeopardy style. You see Stephanie there. She's leading the questions. And at the end it's bragging rights. So you see the alums have one on the right here. They're holding the trophy. And it's just so much fun. The students have a great, great time. Now in upper school. So they know what alumni means. They've experienced a relationship with an alum. They've learned all about our alumni programming in middle school. In upper school we want them to understand what being an active alum means and looks like. And we also want them to start thinking about how they will, how they will stay involved when they're an alum. And we do this through the hidden Roman game or contest. It's pretty simple. Each year we choose about eight to ten alumni that we want to feature. These are alums who are involved in some way. And on the back of their picture I simply print out how this alum is involved. Meet Ming-Tai Ha, class of 98. He's a class rep. Meet Dr. Davis, class of 43. Dr. Davis helped plan his reunion this year. Or meet Shamit Roy, class of 74. He hosts regional gatherings. And we hide these throughout the school. So students know they're excited. They're on the lookout. When they find a hidden Roman they have to bring the hidden Roman to our office. And they have to tell us who the alum is and why they were featured, how that alum is active. But then they also have to share with us how they will be engaged when they become an alum. And we actually put this in Razor's Edge so that five years from now with the class of 2021 when I need a reunion planner I can go back and see and I can call up and say, hey Stephanie, remember five years ago when you found that hidden Roman? You told me you'd be active by being a reunion planner. Quick story to share. Best find ever. This student not only found the picture of this hidden Roman, but he recognized that this alum was also a parent. And he waited until the parent was in the building and he brought the picture and the actual parent to our office. So it was just adorable. Alumni Week is really nothing but wins. Our youngest students learn what an alum is and why they're important to our community. Students and alumni, they get to engage in these fun and meaningful activities. And students start understanding what we will ask of them when they're an alum. And they start thinking of ways that they'll engage with us later. And let's face it, it is great photos, it's great stories, it's great fun. Everyone in the school community now looks forward to this week. When COVID hit, we were able to do this. We had to modify a little bit. We went online. We had Zoom circle time that the alumni parents in the lower school were able to visit. We also did trivia online, a trivia question of the day on our intranet. And we also featured an alum of the day on our intranet rather than doing the hidden Roman contest. So beyond Alumni Week, we also spend a lot of time thinking about how to connect alumni and students in lots of other ways. Getting the students face to face or screen to screen with alumni is the staple of alumni relations programming all over. We look for ways to make these introductions as relevant and meaningful as possible for students and authentic and really easy for alumni. We've long used these opportunities to re-engage alumni who've moved back to Chicago or who didn't maybe have the best experience when they were students at Latin, but who are intrigued to see what's going on at the school today and meet the students. It's one of the most important avenues we have for showing our commitment to representation and inclusion and for engaging alumni from underrepresented communities and for students to see themselves reflected in the alumni community. Now I'm sure we all reach out to student clubs and affinity group leaders to try and make some matches and offer up our services to find different speakers. Like if you're like me, maybe it was saying just that, hey Latin Alliance for Women, may we connect you with Lauren Besser who started the group 10 years ago. Or maybe you've even helped a club like our Women in STEM group. They were starting a college alumni mentoring program and we helped advise them on how to create a structure so that it would be the most successful it could be and helped recruit those college alumni so that they were set. It's hard to tell which of these women is the alumna, hint it's Ariel in the middle. Maybe you also help individual students find alumni like Mark Yoon to advise a senior project team on their new kind of fantasy sports league app or Christina Harris to be interviewed in an independent study project on cybersecurity and TikTok. This year we went a little deeper and instead of relying just on our own and admittedly incomplete knowledge of our alumni and what they do, LinkedIn is great but it certainly isn't everything. We decided to do some more specific outreach. As part of our efforts following the tough summer of alumni students and parents sharing their experiences of exclusion and inequity at our school on Instagram, we reached out to our BIPOC alumni and those from underrepresented groups to ask how they might be interested in working with today's students and didn't ask for any upfront commitment, just an idea of what they might be interested in. The survey we created asked just those kinds of things and whether they would be willing to talk with just affinity groups or students who share their identities or more broadly to classes and other groups that weren't necessarily identity based. We also asked if they'd be willing to serve on our new alumni affinities committee. This is a successor to our alumni of color committee which we have had active for the last four or five years. The alumni of color committee was really focused on the alumni community itself. This new committee has a focus on the current students and serving them so it's a little bit different. Importantly we asked people to share their affinities that matched up with our student affinity groups but we also asked them to share any other identities that they'd be willing to connect across including religion if they were the first people in their in their families to go to college. We also asked what topics they'd be willing to talk about first whether it was their experience going to college or other identities or studies or their careers that they're in now. So we had this great questionnaire. We sent it out to anyone who'd ever attended our alumni of color events. We also sent it out to anyone who had listed one of the affinity groups on their yearbook page when they were seniors where students tend to list all the things they've done in their years at Latin. And then we sent it out in our monthly e-newsletter to all alumni. We now have self-reported demographic information for some at least some alumni that helps us make even better connections for student and student groups and uncovers expertise that we wouldn't otherwise have known about. We were able to go back to those affinity student group heads and not only say here's a list of people who are interested in talking to you but here are a list of topics that they can talk about. So of course we've got a lot of wins out of this which is terrific. We know more about our alumni. We can make better matches. Students can see themselves represented in the alumni community and can meaningfully connect with alumni who share their identities and their interests. And we've empowered alumni to tell us what topics and how they want to engage with us and with students. It's really alumni directed volunteerism and it's an outstanding opportunity of course to engage people from across the globe. A challenge of course sometimes we have more interest from the alumni than we have capacity to absorb into the student groups and that is something we continue to work through. So let's talk about branding your alumni programming. We were doing a very successful as far as panels go career panel for juniors. We were given one assembly block to create something for the junior class and it was okay. It was fine. I mean it was really good for what it was but it was a panel in an auditorium with an entire grade of students. So we wanted something that was more dynamic, more interactive, more interesting but it still had to fit into just one assembly block of 35 minutes. So looking at our opportunity of having a lot of people locally on people local and on hand and now of course all over the world we decided to create a multi-panel tiny little basically conference in those 35 minutes. So we recruit anywhere from 35 to 40 alumni have them sit on 18 panels and it's focused on what it actually means to do the kind of job you're doing and what that career path looks like because we know it's so rare that people are going straight from point A to point B. So we are fortunate enough to get the help of advisors to work with preparing students so that they will ask really good questions in their small groups. The result is each student graduates having met 8 to 12 alumni in areas that they've selected that they think are interesting and that these alumni both demonstrate and explicitly state that they're happy to be helpful when they can as students and young alumni have questions about careers and about job searches. We also expanded the brand beyond the people who we were bringing in just on this one day. Anytime we hear somebody's coming to speak at Latin or is visiting a friend we tend to jump on that bandwagon and we can very quickly throw together an informal lunch bring the alum on campus put a button on them and have them speak about the same kinds of topics. So wins 8 to 12 alumni that they've been the students have been face to face in with so many alumni on campus at once it's a great opportunity to provide robust representation and giving students those windows and mirrors as alumni talk about their backgrounds and experiences. This is really the baby steps to those really crucial job search skills of networking and informational interviewing you're showing them how easy it is to do in a group setting and then we walk them later through what it's like to do that more one on one. Faculty love this, they love to suggest alumni to us and they love seeing the alumni come back. And as a matter of fact, communications, our communications team just launched a podcast series, they're just 10 minute bits, and we asked if they would include alumni. Now they're marketing it under the Life After Latin umbrella as well. Great reach for the student, the parent, and the alumni committee. So let's talk about bridging the gap. We want to build links not just within classes but between classes to expand the community. So like many of you, we offer a panel where we have our college students come back and talk to current students about what their transition to college was like and what the end of their college process was. That's typically in January. Unfortunately, this year we did not get to do it given that the class of 2020 is having such a different experience than we expect even the seniors next year to have. We also have a program where we connect our most recent graduating class in the summer before they go off to school with the alumni who are going to be on campus with them or have just graduated. And then we talk about trying to nest programs to boost our visibility. That great panel that we do bringing the college students back was happening on the same day that we were offering our how-to network program for our college students. And we finally last year got wise enough to pull those both together under one single umbrella and we created College Romans Day. Speaking of the how-to network event, just a tiny bit about it because we've had great success especially with transitioning this to a Zoom program this year. We wanted to make it easy for college students to network and to learn how to leverage their Latin community. So we consider this the second in our networking suite of programings of program. In December we had a terrific rock star networker offer how-to tips in a really exciting and engaging Zoom program. And then we followed that up in January with 12 alumni who each ran two breakout sessions of two to four students where they shared a little bit more about what they do beyond their bios. But they actually asked the students, the college students, where they were in their career decisions and job searches and brainstormed with them for their next action steps. Another win with parents and a really easy engagement opportunity for alumni. So what about the faculty? How do we go about showing the faculty the benefits of alumni programming? And one of the easiest ways to do this was to just simply help the faculty. But moving beyond field trip help and recess help. So what we did, we've been able to establish a few curriculum partnerships. So actually after we got up and announced to all faculty that we're here to help, we had a faculty member approach us. And they said, you know, every year I teach the novel a separate piece. It takes place in the 1940s during World War II at a private school. But is there a way we can make it a little more engaging, something different this year? And we said, hey, yes, we're here to help. So what we did is I brought in archival material and our yearbooks from the 1940s. We also have an online yearbook database. We gave students access to that. So the students spend a day diving into what life was like at Latin in the 1940s. At the end of the day, they choose one photo from the yearbook or from the archival materials. And they're tasked with writing a first person short story about the photo, using that photo to create a narrative. We also reached out to alumni who were students in the 40s and asked them to share their experience. Now, not only did alumni share their experience with students, we had an alum, Dr. Richard Davis from the class of 43. He decided he wanted to write a short story, too. So he wrote a short story called The Cheerleader. And it was about a football game where he was injured. And the cheerleader cried over him as he was being carried away on a stretcher, clutching his letter jacket. The students loved it. And they asked, well, what happened? So then he wrote a poem follow-up. And in the poem, he explained how he asked the cheerleader out for a date. But as you see here, the students you see on the bulletin board are their stories after researching Latin in the 40s. And they feature Dr. Davis's story in the center. And this is something now that we do annually for this English class. Now, another class heard that we were doing this. And they approached us and said, can we do something similar for the Vietnam era? And we said, absolutely. So it's Latin in the 70s. Now, our school newspaper is called The Forum. And I brought in old copies of The Forum, not just yearbooks. Because I knew that at this time, the student newspaper was really very much into discussing the Vietnam War. They were very critical about this administration. They were critical in questioning things going on in the world at large. They were really using the student newspaper as a place for dissent. Now, the students were really struck by this. Because the current student newspaper is great, but it really just focuses on things happening in the school. It really wasn't hard-hitting journalism. However, after reading this, the students decided that they wanted to contact some of the alums who wrote for The Forum in the 70s. So we put them in touch. We had an alum come in. She was interviewed by the class. And they also exchanged emails back and forth between editors from the 70s, the current newspaper editors. And this brought about real change in our school. The current editors of The Forum wrote this article. And it was a call to action. They wanted the student newspaper to return to what it was in the 70s, a place where students could openly express dissent. And they did. It has since changed. One quick thing we do in middle school, which is so fun, is we have the annual Shark Tank exercise. So in computer science, the students spend one week developing an app. At the end of that week, we bring in some alumni sharks. These are alumni who are in the tech industry. They come in. The students pitch them their app. And then the sharks kind of tell them what they think of the app. So lots of fun. Some of the partnership wins. This is truly immersive alumni student engagement. It is one-of-a-kind curriculum enrichment. You are not going to get this anywhere else. They have to come to us, to the alumni office, to bring alumni into the classroom. This is a terrific way for faculty to connect with alumni beyond the cocktail party. They see themselves as partners in educating the next generation of Romans. And alumni have felt great pride in bringing about change in the school, such as the change in the student newspaper. And it's a wonderful communications piece. So being relevant to alumni at their various life stages is one of the guiding principles of alumni relations, right? And it also applies to developing relationships with faculty. Stay relevant and add value. One of our very favorite questions from anyone, but especially from faculty, is who do you know who fill in the blank? We take this as an opportunity to expand on their ideas as often as we possibly can. So when the choral director reaches out looking for a sound recording connection to record the head of school reading Invictus, we were able to say, hey, any chance we can bring the music technology class along to see the experience of the recording studio and to get a chance to talk to this alum about how he had gotten into the business. So we're always asking why when people want to know, who do you know? Well, what's the purpose? What are you trying to achieve? So that we can kind of push those boundaries and see where else we can add value to what they're asking for. We also like to get out in front of them by asking or offering introductions as we come across interesting alums, like Dr. Obed Garcia emailed me last night and said, hey, I just finished my PhD and I'm going to be working in the Biomedical Data Science Department at Stanford. I'm happy to talk about genetics. And I was able to email the head of the science department, the head of the history department, the head of the computer science department and say, look at this great alum we have who's really eager to to be engaged. And I got an email right back from the biology teacher saying, oh, absolutely, we're going to be talking about genetics this spring. I'd love to have Dr. Obed Garcia with us. One favorite example of how we do this is with Latins Project Week. Every faculty member has to design a week-long experiential learning project that happens the week before spring break, except for this year, we're not doing that. But when the list of approved projects come out, Teresa and I put our heads together and we brainstorm, how could we bring alumni into this? How can we be relevant? These are local, national and international experiences. And we know that we can either deliver 18 students and two faculty members to a remote alum's doorstep on some occasions, or we can help actually create some real connections through the actual project. So for example, there was an amazing race national project that was supposed to happen last March. And Teresa and I lined up alumni in Philly, DC, New York and Boston. Not only did they help advise on what the challenges would look like, but they were hosting those challenges in their offices and around the city. Don't tell any of our current students, because I think we're going to try and run it again in the future. It's been a real gift and a real fun experience and a way to connect faculty and alumni across the world and bring students into the mix. So let's switch gears for a minute and talk about parents. No one's choosing Latin for the alumni program. So why does it matter what we think current parents think about our program? It's all about value added. Each and every one of us wants to feel good about what we choose to invest in. And that's true of parents who are choosing to send their children to our schools. Demonstrating our support and care and interest helps reinforce that they made a great choice. And seeing the variety of alumni out and working in the world reinforces the value of our institution's education. The more parents see the alumni program's commitment to students and young alumni, the more we hope that they will encourage their students to stay connected and engaged throughout their lifetimes and perhaps help us when we lose touch with them. So one of the first steps for doing this was to make alumni visible to parents, just like we made alumni visible to students. And we were able to do this by inviting parents to one of our networking events. So it became an alumni and parent networking event. We also invited them to our exclusive networking website so that they can interact and connect and network with alumni from anywhere, especially during COVID. This was essential and all year long. Now this is important because it showcases our fantastic alumni. You know, we usually have some brilliant speakers on our networking events, but for parents to get to be in the room and to get to talk to alumni and see how Latin influenced them is just fantastic. So it really does demonstrate that value added of Latin education. And it's just great for us to be able to add that additional expertise of the parents to our networking events and to the networking site. So get in front of parents. We are really fortunate that our parent association board has an alumni association board of directors liaison position. And one of our alumni board members gets to attend every single one of the monthly meetings. Even better is that that person gets to add to the agenda that goes out anything that we ask. And we've been fortunate enough that that person comes to us and says, what do you want me to talk about this month? We really try to include links with speaker bios, even if these are programs that parents aren't going to be attending, just knowing that they're happening and seeing what's going on in the alumni community means that it's a win for us. And we keep in mind that these are parents who are in all three divisions and are highly connected. So we know that they're in turn going out and talking to the people in their classes and in the other organizations in the school that they're participating in. We don't always have that direct communication and promotion of alumni programs. Um, where we get to talk to the parents. So having, having our alumni board person as a, as kind of a spokesperson, um, has been a big win for us. Our parents love to be helpful. Um, this year, um, we we've had a job posting portion of our networking site ever since we started it. We have no illusions that we're ever going to be a university level job placement service, not by any means, but from time to time, we would have positions. This spring, um, with the pandemic hitting and we were hearing from our college students in particular, that their internships were being eliminated. They weren't being able to find anything. Doors were closing, um, high school students who were looking for jobs, weren't able to find anything. So we worked with the head of school to send a communication out to all alumni and all parents and all faculty, where we talked about the importance of helping our young people find something meaningful to do over the course of the summer. And we had a really lovely response. It wasn't overwhelming. It wasn't more than we could manage, but we were able to get those positions out to upper schoolers and to college students and recent grads. Um, it was so successful. We decided to do it again at winter break at smaller program, but again, any positions that we can get out in front of people are wins for us. And so we're planning to keep doing that twice a year. And we just make sure that once those jobs are posted, we let the students and the college students with the relevant experience know. So they don't, they don't miss it. It's also helpful as parents give us this information because it helps us know better how to connect them to alumni and to students. And it makes our network bigger and who wouldn't want a bigger network for their students. I have one great example of a perfect pandemic partnership to share with you. Um, when COVID and everything hit in March, um, we were also in the process of, um, really evaluating our communications with our non-digital alumni, knowing that so much of our communication has gone to the digital side of things and, and knowing that our magazine was likely to be sunsetted as well. Um, we had alumni volunteers reach out to, uh, Golden Romans. Those are our alumni who have celebrated their 50th reunion and beyond just checking in wellness checks. How are you doing? Do you want to chat those kinds of things? And it worked really beautifully. Um, in a, uh, phone call, um, interview with the forum, actually the student writer who was writing about the, that project asked how current students could get involved. And on the spot, I had a brilliant idea, um, knowing that we had 500 branded postcards laying around that we weren't planning to use again. I said that we were going to be recruiting students to reach out before Thanksgiving to the same group of alumni and just send a little holiday cheer their way. Our parent association liaison announced it at the October parent association executive committee meeting and the community service liaison person jumped right on it and said, I guarantee you, I can have 50 to 60 families from the lower and the middle school signed up in a matter of days for this project. And that is exactly what happened. We were able to send out over 500, 535 postcards to alumni from the class of 37, all the way to the class of 62. Um, and it was easy because we either backpacked the postcards and the names of the alumni and the addresses home to the, to the families, or we mailed them for the students who were already working remotely. We did get caught a little bit in going remote. Um, so some of those postcards got stuck in being returned. We did want them returned to school because we did want to do a little bit of quality control. Um, anyone who was working remotely, we just gave them the postage and they mailed them directly, but I was happy to have a little bit of an insight so I could, um, judge the process a little bit, but you can see that we even got some really lovely, um, messages back to our students. So non-digital, which is rare this day, these days, 530 postcards out, um, and for only the cost of postage personalized in such an adorable way, something we could never do just among our staff. Um, they arrived a few days before Thanksgiving when people might've been feeling rather blue and there were Zoom sessions scheduled for the families so that they could work collaboratively or at least socially on this project, um, from home. And I was able to go in and talk about what it meant. Um, it's the great multi-channel positivity story. It's got it all cute kids, adorable elders, wonderful letters, great COVID response. It's feel good. Even families who are new to Latin this year remarked that it made them feel more connected to the school in a year that that's been kind of tough to do. And yes, it just so happened that they arrived not too long before our final solicitations for year end as well. So it's also important to make sure that your parents know what's happening all year round, the networking events and these partnerships with the PA are fantastic, but the parent's attention is going in so many different directions. You have to be constantly visible and it's pretty easy to do. Make sure that your alumni events are included. Alumni events are included in the parent calendar. We have a next week at Latin that goes out every Monday. We make sure all of our alumni events and programs are in there. Now, parents aren't invited to these events necessarily, but it's important for them to see what we'll be offering their students. Also make sure that you have alumni representation on all social media channels. We do have our own alumni Facebook page, but it's one Instagram account. So we really work in coordination with our communications team to make sure that we have alumni represented on social media so that parents can see what's happening. And also make sure to include alumni news in your school news. We recently launched a new news hub. And as you see here, we've made sure that alumni are featured here. What's great about this is this is also our main site. So prospective parents are seeing this as well as our news channels and agencies. Don't forget to get in front of those senior parents before their children graduate. We're really fortunate to be part of a January panel for senior parents. The kind of nice thing about this is it's a lot of rules and regulations. What kids have to do in their second semester, how they need to kind of toe the line and not let let things slack. But we get to come in at the end and talk about all of these great ways we're going to be supporting their children and what's going to happen for them after graduation. It showcases our dedication and the community ahead to their children. It allows us to build a relationship with those parents and let them know that we're not just cutting them off completely. They're going to get their own newsletters as they become parents of alumni. And then we ask for that partnership and keeping in touch with those very mobile young alumni. So we've run through a whole bunch of things for creating a school-wide culture of alumni engagement. And we hope you found some tips. The great news is as we hear those tour guides go past our office now, they'll often pause, say we do cool things, give a little bit of an overview, and we get to smile and wave and pat ourselves on the head for at least creating doing some good work in this arena. This is really a low-cost effort. It's time intensive mostly, but it has a huge payoff. It won't happen overnight, but with persistent and consistent programming and communication, it can happen fairly quickly. And yes, we are so happy to have our hearts warmed by the students who are embracing Mabel Slade Bickery, our founder, coming back to see the faculty members that they know and treasure and are really beaming in pride as they leave Latin. So engaging the constituents in your daily sphere is full of wins. It demonstrates value added for your key stakeholders. It enriches student activities and learning. It provides alumni with consistent and engagement opportunities beyond the cocktail parties. And we all know that involved alumni are more likely to donate. It helps us grow alumni who look forward to returning to school and to sharing their wisdom and plant seeds for the future expectations and benefits of being an alum. And it's extremely fun and rewarding, not just for the students, the faculty, and the alumni, but for us too. So thanks so much for tuning into our session. And please do feel free to reach out with any further questions and share your ideas. We love to brainstorm together. Thanks so much. Thanks so much.

alumni engagement

building relationships

student-friendly office space

connections between alumni and students

engaging faculty

engaging parents

alumni visibility

value added