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Energizing Alumni Relations at Two-Year Institutio ...
Energizing Alumni Relations at Two-Year Institutions
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All right, hello, this is Scott Peska, and I am with Waubonsie Community College as Assistant Vice President of Student Services and Alumni Relations, and my colleague with me. I am Jen Davis, and I'm from Joliet Junior College. I am the Manager of Alumni Relations and Annual Giving. And we are thrilled to share with you today in this case webinar, just a little bit of information about energizing alumni at two-year institutions. We're going to share a lot of personal examples from both of our institutions and what we've worked with. Jen and I both have worked with alumni for quite a few years here, and so we're also part of a smaller group within the state of Illinois that's been able to get together periodically. I would say maybe once every other month or once every couple months just to kind of share ideas, and that's been really a fruitful exchange. Yes. All right, so let's start with just the institutions that we work at so you can get a little better understanding of students that attend those institutions and the alumni. Great. I'll start with Joliet Junior College. So one of our sort of claims to fame here is that we are the first community college, and we were established in 1901. That's just one of our favorite taglines, we'd love to say. And so in my department, Alumni Relations, we have over 60,000 alumni right now all over the world, and we try to contact them in various ways that we're going to go over in our presentation. And we have a couple of satellite campuses that are located in Romeoville and two in Joliet, so we're expanding and it's great. Thanks, Jen. And Waubonsie Community College is just down the road from Joliet. We're about 40 minutes apart, and we're situated in the northern part of the state, so we're both about, I would say, 50 minutes from Chicago or 60 minutes from Chicago in that area. Waubonsie Community College is also a comprehensive two-year institution. We got four campuses, and our main campus is in Sugar Grove, which is just outside of Aurora. We serve annually right around 12,000 students, and we're, like most institutions in Illinois, like 65, 70% part-time, 30, 35% full-time. And we have about 42,000 alumni. We have not been around quite as long as Joliet, so. And we're excited to share. So today, we're going to look at a couple different alumni practices, and we're going to start by talking about engaging communication practices. And so to begin with this, there is a little bit of research on it, and I did find some stuff from Salesforce. There was a blog that just talked about engaging ways to communicate with alums and what individuals' preferences are. And so as you can see on the graphic here, you know, some like email still, some are using social media. Video conferencing is gaining in popularity in a way to communicate with alums. And so we thought about the different strategies that we've employed that seem to be, you know, getting a good response from our alumni. And these are the ones that we've listed here as ways that we commonly are communicating with our alumni in ways to engage with them. So to start, we'll talk about newsletters. And many of you may already have a newsletter. It's not an uncommon concept at all as a way to share information. We both are sending ours electronically. Our newsletters for Waubonsie, we send them out once a month. And so we try to keep them very short, you know, really just inspiring, quick reads. Generally, they have, I would say, no more than five segments. Usually, we have a just for fun segment. We have a segment on who's, you know, where are some of our alumni now. We can kind of feature some of our stories if there's activities going on. So we have a lot of different things that we try to feature. There's things happening at the college. We're building a new building, for example. We try to give updates on where the college is in that just so that they can stay connected with their alma mater. So the alumni newsletter is a great way of just getting out information and also highlighting some of the stories about your alums. Yeah, we use our newsletter pretty much the same way here. We do it a little bit differently in the sense that we have a seasonal newsletter. So we were sending it out once a month, and we found that our clicks were getting higher. We had a little bit more information in one, and we sort of did it seasonally. So we do ours about four to five times a year. It is named the Wiley Wire. We have embraced our mascot fully here at Joliet Junior College. And so we wanted to kind of rebrand the way our newsletter looked. The way our newsletter looked, much like Scott's at Waubonsie, our newsletter focuses just small little clips like what's going on on campus. We have a section that's just about our foundation. So anything coming up with scholarships, any of the events that we do for both alumni engagement and foundation fundraising. We're kind of one in the same in our office here. So right away on the upcoming events, we usually list everything that we've got going on. We also have a special alumni events. We try to label those within there, but we have one we'll talk about later coming up that was very popular. And we only marketed that event on our Wiley Wire newsletter and social media, and we were able to sell out. So we know that our newsletter is getting looked at. People know what to expect. And it's just a helpful place for them to go back to if they see something and they forget. Where did I see that? They can go back to their newsletter and find it. Um, obviously, what gets a little bit difficult is just keeping up with our database. So we have 60,000 or so names in our database, and this goes out to alumni and friends. So that's something I'm not sure if Bonzi's doing that, Scott, but we call it like alumni and friends. So a lot of our donors are also getting this coming from the foundation. So it's not just specific specifically alumni, but alumni have definitely come to look for this in their inbox. Do you have your donors in your list, too? We do not. So we keep our strictly to alums. We keep it very specific. We do different types of information for those that are giving to our foundation. So we have a different newsletter for that. So they kind of get a combination. I absolutely love how yours is called the Wiley Wire, and it's tied in with your mascot. That's kind of a fun name. We haven't figured out a fun name for ours, but that's something that's on our agenda, trying to figure out another way to personalize it right to make them. Yeah, but you also mentioned just about the database, and I think one of the benefits to an alumni newsletter, especially if you're sending it out through your databases, you get a lot of great analytics that you can get back as far as open rates, as far as the number of alums and if they're reading them, if they're not reading them. Sometimes just even different subject headings for your newsletters I found has had a really impact on which ones get open, which ones don't. Yes, the analytics are huge. If you use a database that allows you to do that. We are in Blackbaud, Razor's Edge, and being able to see that's how we knew that the change in our title, like it was just a basic like bridging the gap newsletter and had our logo and it was fine. And then we switched to Wiley Wire. We could see like our click rate went up. I don't know if it was something in the colors or the way that we changed it, but it's really nice if you have that data. It just lets you see and even timing. So at Waubonsie, a newsletter every month is working out great for them. We ended up watching analytics and seasonally seems to be working better for us, but that can be very personalized. And that's the benefit of having that those analytics to look back at. Absolutely. Well, another communication that we use and we both utilize that is that of a birthday card. So Jen, why don't you talk a little bit about how you send out your birthday cards? Yeah. So we just have our alumni in our system and it's pretty simple. My administrative assistant is so great at this. She's got it all set up, but basically just everything single month. She runs those alumni that have birthdays coming up that month and they get a digital birthday card from us. What's fun about this particular card that's shown on here is we had a student, an alumni who actually designed the card. So, and whenever we try to reach, you know, want to switch it out and get something new, we also solicit alumni if they'd like to submit an image for a birthday card. So it's just like another way to connect with them and make them a part of that experience. I love that idea. We, we, we change our image once a year, just to always try to make sure that every, every alum is going to get a new birthday card every year, different kind. But we don't, we haven't done that as far as a competition. That's kind of fun to encourage people to. And if you see on the bottom, we actually named the alum that did this particular one. So then they get their name and it's going out to all of, you know, some recognition. So it's fun. So we send very similar. We send a birthday card out to all of the alums during a period of a week. So we don't actually send it on the actual day of their birthday. We kind of look at each week. We send out anyone who has a birthday that week, we'll send out a personalized message to them. So we do personalize it. And then we also just remind them of the benefits that they have being an alum of Wabansi. And so we give them the birthday note, but then we also had to put in there a little bit of information with them that they can access just to remember, like they're part of this bigger network with us and we have certain benefits to be an alum of Wabansi. So, so yeah, we always are trying to figure out how to make that just a very purposeful way of engagement and a chance to just remind them we care about them. And that that we're here with them. I actually like that you list your benefits there under the birthday card. We do have a stay connected button where they can do that, but I like just having that and they see it right away. That's a, that's a good idea. So we, so, you know, that's, these are the individual type of communications, but we also do things on social media. And I think that this has been a growing trend, obviously the last 10 years or so, increasing our presence on different social media sites. And so one of the things that we'll talk about is just how each of our colleges are doing it. We both have a very different approach to engaging our alum online, but I think the key thing is that you're finding some strategies that work best for your institution and ways that you can do that. So Jen, you want to start by talking about what you all do for your alumni social media? Yeah, absolutely. So what I seem to find the differences at different schools is if they have one social media account for their college, which I believe Wabansi does, right? You guys just have one. So I'll let you expand on that. But here at JJC, we have a main Joliet Junior College social media channels. They have the most followers, most engagement, and we can have important events and highlight different posts within them. But obviously, since they're working for the whole college, it's hard to get some of our pieces in. So they do allow us in different departments to apply to have your own social media page. So we have a foundation and alumni social media page. And the benefit of it is if you look on the right hand side, you can see sort of what our titles look like on Instagram. And it's a variety of us promoting our different events, our different fundraisers. What did not make it into this caption is, you know, we highlight different alumni for different reasons. And it gives us a place to put those highlights. We are taking an alumni trip to Paris and London next year. It's going to be our first abroad trip for our alumni. So you'll see Wiley, our mascot in front of the Eiffel Tower and in London there. So we can just have a little bit more fun on that page because we have the ability to do so. We have our own. Unlike when we promote through the college, it's hard. We have to be very specific and they have a very strict schedule. So there's benefits and detriments to both. But as you can see, this is just a great place to reach, you know, alums in different ways. Yeah. And I love how all the different examples that you provide over there as far as the types of posts that you can put out there. You know, we have, we are centralized. We go through our marketing communications department and our college has the mindset and really saying we should have one account that's out there. So we have everybody joining students, current and former employees. I mean, everybody jumps onto the same page, but it does make it a little more challenging as far as the strategy behind when things get posted, who has the opportunities to post. Now, we have had good rhythm as far as a number of different posts that we put out there for our social media. And a lot of alums do connect with it like images or will share stories. And we find it important after our newsletter goes out, oftentimes we'll highlight different segments in that newsletter on social media. And so it's also reusing some of the content. So people see it more than just once. We know sometimes they don't actually read the newsletters and, you know, get a lot of emails in your inbox. You have to delete some stuff. We understand that might be one that goes. So we try to look at reusing some of the same information that we put there. And our social media, you know, it is great to get analytics. We can try to, since it's centralized, we do try to like isolate which posts we put out, which posts we've encouraged. And then we try to look at that information as far as where it's hitting. We also are only on LinkedIn. So we have conversations about, or we also run, I think, well, Bonzi is on a couple Instagram. So we put a few posts in some of those different places. But for as alumni, most of our posts that we get on is on LinkedIn. That's where we put most of ours. Great. We have a LinkedIn account as well. And that seems to be picking up a little bit more traction, which I didn't realize. I wasn't a big LinkedIn pro at first, but I'm definitely learning where the engagement there, we have a specific group for alumni on LinkedIn. Do you have the same, Scott? We do. Yes. And we, you know, we've been talking about some of the other platforms like TikTok. I don't, we haven't moved to that yet, but there's been this push, especially for younger alums saying that's where they like to connect with. So like, do we start making some TikTok videos? I'm not sure. We haven't gone quite yet to that. But it's definitely part of the day that you need to make sure that as you're looking at your communication practices, we want to reach our alums where they're at. And so trying to make sure that we're maximizing that is important. And we know that Facebook might be attractive to some of our older alums. They might be on that where some of our younger alums are not. So just being mindful of where we post things at the institution and making sure that we're hitting in all those different places is important. Yes. So the last thing that we'll share as far as a communication strategy is obviously our websites are important vehicles and tools for us to communicate out to our alums. And both of us have some pages. I think both of us realize these are, there's a lot of opportunities for improvement on our pages. But we do like to, you know, we want to have a place where our alumni can revisit. They can get all the information they need. This is right now, the very heading of when you log onto a Bonzi's page, alumni page, you'll see some of this information. And you can see that, you know, a lot of it, we use strong imagery. We want to build our students with, we want to make sure that they've got all the links that they need to, to upgrade things. You know, being mobile friendly is really important, whether they're on a tablet or on a phone. So making sure they're looking at it from those aspects are important. And just, we want to make it useful for our alums. So, you know, this is one of the second parts of that page, but we try to make sure that as we are telling our story and telling our alum story, that there's ways about them being connected. You can see here that we have highlights to our LinkedIn page. We have our alumni information form right away. So they can see that. If they want to read past newsletters, we're in the process of now putting all of our old newsletters on the webpage. So they could kind of connect with those and see those as well. And so trying to make sure that it's also not stagnant, because that's a real challenge that I know we've experienced is that if our page has the same image on it for six months or a year, it does kind of quickly feel outdated and that it's not being viewed as often. And so it's, there's one thing that our web, our marketing communications department can do is let us know the analytics on each page. And if we need to update certain things, because it has outdated information. Sometimes it's just rewording things and trying to put it in a neat or newer format. So that's part of what we do for our pages. Yeah, ours is very similar to that. We have an alumni page within our main JJC webpage and like Scott said in the beginning, there's definitely room for improvement, but as anybody who's worked with the web and the size of these webpages is that it's just difficult. There's a lot of limitations on how you can set up your page and how you get it. So I would love, I can envision all kinds of different things I wanna do, but most importantly is we want a landing page that's specific to alumni. So it's available in our dropdown menu. And basically it just talks about the basics of this. And you can see here, this already has to be updated because it says 48,000 alumni. So when has that been done? So it definitely needs updating, but the most important page is if you don't mind going to the next slide, Scott, I can show once you're actually on the alumni relations page, just gives you different information about what our office does and then how you can stay connected with us is right at the top, stay connected. That purple button will take you to a form where you can update your name, give us your non-JJC email address, let us know what your major was and just collect that important data. You can make a gift to the alumni fund. And then what's not on here is, well, actually I guess it is on the right hand side is just our alumni events is that we try to promote those in different places, but we wanted a landing page where we could take them to places where they can come back to campus. And alumni events probably pretty similar across the board. We have fun events and things we do just for engagement and networking. And then we also have diverse alumni panels where we have alumni come back and actually speak on various topics. We partner with their career services for that. So we really just wanna utilize the webpage as a landing spot where they can link to different information. Towards the bottom of this page is where we link to all of our social media and all that different kind of stuff. So just it's nice to have a space where they can go and see it all in one place. Yeah, and I think that as we kind of finalize the topic of communication, one of the things that's important, right, is obviously variety is important. We have a lot of different venues that we can share and mediums that we put information out. But part of it's also even informing our students that they are alumni. So a lot of times when they, you know, community college, we have a lot of first-generation students that come through and when they're not finished with their educational pathway, they're gonna maybe go on to a four-year institution or so they don't necessarily connect that they are an alum yet. They feel like, oh, I'm still actually moving through. And so sometimes it's even trying to help them understand that it's the way for you to stay connected with us as a college and the communication. And we kind of have to almost inform them of what it means to be an alum or what it means to be an alumni because it's not assumed at that point in their education. So. That's a great point. So the other thing that we're gonna spend a little time talking about is just some of the practices that we put in place. And in addition to communication, we have a lot of different things that both of us found out that we were doing. And sometimes we've mimicked each other. If we find one's doing something that's working, so it's not stealing when you're borrowing from a friend. So by all means, feel free that anything in this session and presentation that you're seeing, you can reach out to either one of us. We're happy to share. That's part of the way that we have what we have. So we'll start with some of these different things that we've done, but alumni cards was something that we came up with and we started, I wanna say it was about three and a half, four years ago. And at Waubonsie, we've been giving them out to our graduates when they leave. We sent out some information immediately to all of our past alums that they can contact us. We have it in the newsletter and the birthday card that they can get this alumni card. It's something they can carry around in their wallet or their purse. It's something that identifies them as a past Waubonsie graduate. And we have some benefits that we've tied to the club. So the card, so athletic access to any of our athletic events, spirit, you know, percentage off of some spirit wear from our bookstore. And so we try to make sure that they're aware of some of these benefits that belongs to it. Our card is just a card stock card. It's a little heavier duty, but it's a nice size. And we've gotten real positive responses. We've been giving these out. This has actually been something very attractive. So when we send out the birthday cards, we almost every week we'll get two or three responses asking for a card to be mailed to them or how they can come pick one up. And it usually gives us an opportunity to engage with alums, to talk about these benefits and to get them into our office if I need to or just to have a conversation. So I really enjoyed working with the alumni business card or alumni card to be able to give that out. So Jen, you're a little different. You have a little more benefits with yours. Why don't you share? Yeah, we do. I need to acknowledge it though. This was definitely an idea I borrowed from Scott. So I saw his card. He gave it to an example of us in our affinity group when we were talking and I thought, oh my gosh what an awesome way to just give something to alumni that makes them wanna come back to campus. So very similarly, the back of our card also has we have a discount in our bookstore for spirit wear. We have free entry to our athletic events. Our automotive department does work without labor. I mean, they have an automotive discount. So we've been trying to work with campus and getting some of those. But in addition to that, we've also been trying to work with local businesses in the area to see if they're willing to offer any discounts to our alums by showing their cards. So we've got some pretty good lineups on TCBY gives our alums 20% off. This photo right here is for a wood fire pizza. This is a place across the street from JJC. It's really fun. They're offering 15% for alumni. And we actually just spoke to the owner recently and he said that they're using them. They're showing them and getting their discount. So that's exciting to hear. We're really trying to build up those other local businesses the benefit, and this is where social media comes back into play is one of the things we can say to these businesses to encourage them is that we are promoting them on our social media pages. So having the page off to ourself, I can post a new business partner once a week and just highlight their business, link to their page and let them know that they are supporting our alumni and students. And some of those connections have also translated into other giveaways and other different things. So it's just a nice segue into meeting some of the local businesses. I'd love to offer our alumni discounts nationwide, but I'm getting a little ahead of myself, but that's definitely been really nice is having these partnerships and being able to promote them. That's exciting. And we're looking forward to doing some of those connections with some local businesses and some alumni-owned businesses. That's our next step with that as well. Very exciting though. These have been both positive on both of our campuses. So if you don't have an alumni card, I know a number of four-year institutions have it. Two-year institutions can, I mean, it's certainly being successful at both of our institutions. I would encourage you to try it. Absolutely. So the other thing that we do is we give away gifts. I mean, that's a benefit of being in alumni relations is that you can sometimes promote your college in different ways. And so we have, a lot of times, things that have logos on it. We can give away a variety of different things. Obviously, T-shirts is one that many places have given away, but we've tried to also look at different things that we can do. So we give socks and hats and key chains. We give a key chain to every graduate that leaves Waubonsie. They get an alumni key chain. That's to start with. And then this last, we just did a baseball game, and I'll share more about that coming up, but we gave away alumni hats for the game. It was kind of a fun thing to do. So you, and one of the ideas that we're gonna steal from Joliet very soon is a sock campaign. So why don't you share a little about socks? Yeah, our sock campaign's been going about six years now. So every year, our design of our socks changes. This past year, JJC got a new president, Dr. Klein Namu'o, who is from Hawaii originally. And so we, that's the Hawaiian sock theme. We wanted to kind of welcome him with this year's design. But basically, the sock campaign is one of our most successful fundraisers within our campus and with alumni. We sell our socks for $20, and the profits, they benefit our alumni fund that goes to an alumni scholarship. But it's an awesome way to promote school spirit. It's an awesome thing to promote to our alumni. We have a lot of them, when they come back to campus, who've bought socks in the past, and we'll be wearing them when they come to campus to do some kind of event. And it's just been a really nice way to connect them. It's also a very easy fundraiser. So within your groups or departments, I mean, we do photo shoots on campus. Sometimes we highlight students wearing them or professors or alumni. We just try to make a variety of promoting the socks, but it's really just showing them and people buy them. We sold 250 pairs last year, and that already jumped to, we sold 400 pairs this year. And it's just marketing on campus, in our newsletter, and on social media. So it's a really easy fundraiser that, like we said, promotes school spirit, and people love, they just love that kind of stuff. So I encourage you to steal away on that one, too. That is a fun one. And I know one thing that we both have just started this past year was some stickers, like some sticker sheets that you can give away, because it seems like children and kids, but I think even adults are loving these little sticker sheets that have stuff about the institution or your mascot, kind of fun stuff with that, right? Yeah, sticker sheets have been really popular and fairly inexpensive. So we also both have some different award recognitions that we provide to alumni. And there's some common ones that I think many institutions do, like Hall of Fame with their athletics. That's pretty common. A distinguished alum is fairly common that we do something like that. I know at Waubonsie, we also do a featured alum, where we'll do three to four times a year, we'll feature a story to our board of trustees and also put it out to the community just about some successes that our alums have. And so trying to find ways to encourage your alum to share their successes with you and bring that back, it gets great to be able to put that out into about either specific programs. We've tried a couple, the last couple of years of really targeting programs. So like two years ago, we focused on our nursing program, which was turning 50. And so we tried to highlight some of our featured alums around those. Last year, we had our automotive program that we were highlighting. And so alumni from our auto tech programs were the ones that we were featuring. And so it's always nice if you can have some sort of alumni recognitions. Yeah, that's great. And alumni of the month is something that I think would be great for anyone on their social media channels. Like if you are looking for something, even if you only get a couple spots a month, if you highlight an alum per month, and I think that's a great tool that I might have to start utilizing. But we also, we have the same awards. We have a Distinguished Alumni Award and a Hall of Fame Award. We give them out at our yearly awards event. This year, our foundation is turning 50. So we have a very big fancier event and we're giving those out and just featuring some alumni awards from the past and it should be a really nice time. So the other thing that we do is gatherings, get togethers. And these are periodic times when we try to look at getting together. For us at Waubonsie, we don't have a consistent like every annual event that we do. We're in the process of thinking of some of those things. But like, for example, we just had a night at the local ballpark with the King County Cougars, which is in our district. And so we decided, well, why don't we support that? We actually did a college-wide night for Waubonsie, but then I also did some special things just for alumni. So special seating or tickets or like the hats to give out to alumni that made them feel a little bit connected. I know we had about 30, 35 alumni that came out to just that. We had some of our employees who are alums that were there as well. And so it was really neat to kind of see the connection for that. Like I said, we try to look at a couple of things a year. We did a trivia night once and it's fun to try new things, but if it's an association with the college, that seems to also be a draw in as well. So it also helps to build those. So fun, trying to make them family-friendly, something that people can come out to, always trying to figure out opportunities for, you know, individuals that can connect with each other. Those are really good to do. And I know you have some fun events that you do as well over at Juliette, Jen. We do. And I don't know if you've ever done this yet or not, Scott, but we, a couple of years ago, actually it's already been almost two years, we put out an alumni survey that we just solicited in our newsletter. I think we maybe sent a separate email about it as well. And on social media, gave away a $50 Amazon card to one winner out of the pool of people who would answer. When you have a giveaway like that, lots of people clicked through. But in that survey, what they wanted was exactly what Scott has listed here. They said that they want more family-friendly events. They want more networking opportunities and different things like that. So we've been trying to make good on a lot of those different things. And one of them is, again, we work with one of our local business partners. So Bishop's Hill Wineries here in Joliette, they help us with all sorts of things and give alumni discount. In fact, one of the owners is an alum, so that helps out the matter. But we are hosting this week an alumni, it's like a wine tasting night. They get a charcuterie board and it's actually called Wine 101. So they get to learn about food pairings and such. We just put it out there as an opportunity. There were 24 spaces available and we just sold out today. And people are bringing friends, they're bringing their husbands or wives. We've got a whole mix of different alumni coming. And so it's just little things like that. This was also very, I guess, little work on our end. It was just about putting it in the newsletter, putting it on social media. And the winery is actually doing a lot of the work to set it up for us. But they were so excited for the partnership. And clearly our alums were looking for something fun to do on a Thursday night, so. That's great. So fun events. So it's always good to try something new. Yeah. All right, so we are running out of time. So we're gonna go pretty quickly over the next slide here. So really the other thing that you can do with alumni is finding ways to connect them with current students, right? So we have service events at the college where we try to invite them to come back and serve with them. If we can have them speak at events, whether it's delivering our Veterans Day address, if it's guest lecturing in a class. Alumni wanna give back. And just like Jen said, I think doing surveys is a great way. I did a listening tour my first year with Alumni Relations. And one of the things that I did is just had a few, I wanna say maybe six to eight different focus type groups where I opened it up for alums and tried to target certain alums to come back and just tell me what they wanted, right? Four or five focus group type questions and it really led to the same type things. But this is one of the things that they all talked about. They liked to give back and sometimes it's not about giving back financially, but it's also about giving back their time, their expertise, their knowledge, and their love and passion for being from the alma mater. So definitely look at those things that work with your student life departments or work with some of your academic units to say is there opportunities that we can connect this alum. I have this alum who is in this particular field and would love to speak or wants to get some experience teaching and try to find doors that they can open. Anything to add on that, Jen? We have the same. We've had just some discussion panels that alumni have come back for just to talk about the careers. Sometimes they're career focused and they come back. Sometimes they're centered, our DEI department is great about having diverse alumni panels that talk about their different experiences at JJC and they're always willing. I mean, we never have trouble getting alums who wanna come back and do those types of things. So it's definitely a great way to keep them connected. So that is, we're actually a little over on time, which is great, but this concludes our session. We just wanted to say thank you so much and hopefully you got some information and saw some things that you might be able to replicate or utilize. If you wanna reach out to either Jen or myself, we're happy to talk to you about our programs or the initiatives that we have. And we just appreciate being able to share this information with you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Have a good rest of your day.
Video Summary
Scott Peska, Assistant Vice President of Student Services and Alumni Relations at Waubonsie Community College, and Jen Davis, Manager of Alumni Relations and Annual Giving at Joliet Junior College, discuss energizing alumni at two-year institutions in a webinar. They share personal examples from their institutions and highlight effective communication strategies, such as newsletters, birthday cards, and social media engagement. Both institutions utilize alumni cards to connect with graduates, offering various benefits like access to athletic events and discounts at local businesses. They also emphasize the importance of alumni recognition, holding events and creating opportunities for alums to give back through service and guest speaking engagements. The presenters emphasize the value of staying connected with alumni and maintaining a strong relationship even after graduation. Overall, the webinar provides insights and ideas for engaging alumni at two-year colleges.
Keywords
Alumni Relations
Communication Strategies
Alumni Cards
Alumni Recognition
Engaging Alumni
Two-Year Colleges
Staying Connected
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