Communications in Advancement is delivered by Mark Schroeder, Development Strategist at the University of Queensland. Mark's career journey can be described as eclectic. Stops have included heading media, marketing broadcasts, commercial departments at national sporting leagues, and managing teams of journalists and media operations staff at major global events such as Sydney 2000 and the Beijing 2008 Olympics, the New Delhi 2010 and the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games, and at the 2010 Singapore Youth Olympics. Prior to his current secondment, where he works with UQ's fundraiser to write proposals for and pitch to high-level donors, Mark managed the Advancement Marketing and Communications team at the University of Queensland that launched a $500 million philanthropic campaign for research and scholarships. He also runs his own social enterprise that developed a method for lifeguards to communicate with non-English speakers on beaches. I'm really delighted to be able to present Communications in Advancement today. I've been working within Advancement for about 7 years now and I feel truly privileged to be in this area. What we do positively impacts people's lives. What you do to earn a living comes with a genuine meaning and purpose. You're in a really good place in life. Now, I'm assuming most of you watching this already have some sort of background in communications, so I'm going to give you many of the lessons I've learned about how to apply communications specifically within Advancement itself. Lessons I feel will help you become more effective. We're going to touch on the why you're reaching out to your alumni. Also, knowing your audience, the reliability of your contact data, your content, the platform you should use to get messages out, frequency, analytics, privacy, and to finish, I want to give you seven fast tips I hope you'll find useful. So, let's dive in and get going. Alumni are not just older students and they require a very different strategy. When people are students, the onus is on them to stay up-to-date with what the university is sending them. They need to know when lectures and tutorials are on, attend those classes, submit assignments, and attend exams. The motivation to stay engaged is clear and it's very, very powerful. However, once they graduate and become alumni, the relationship dynamic changes instantly. It's now up to the university to show why the graduate should engage with them. Advancement must now provide genuine value to their alumni. The transactional part of the relationship is over. They got their qualification. You now need to prove to them why the relationship is worthwhile. So, why are you communicating with them? Read any book or listen to any podcast about how to be good at conversation and they will say the same thing. Only speak when you have something genuinely interesting to say and later on, we will talk about how to decide if what you are saying is genuinely of interest. Remember, the most interesting person at a party is usually not the person who spoke the most. Before you jump into producing content, you need to stop, take a breath, and think about the underlying reason you are reaching out to your alumni. You want to build a relationship. Well, what type of relationship do you want to build? For what benefit to the alumnus? To provide them with knowledge leadership? For their advocacy? What is the end goal that you are trying to achieve? If you want them to make a gift, then think about how you've positioned yourself previously as a giving destination. Is it clear why you need the funds? Is it clear what the money will go towards and is that important? And will it resonate with your audience? Put yourself in their shoes and be as honest as you can. Know your audience. I can tell you the first thing PR people learn is there is no such thing as general population. The same principle applies here. You do not have general alumni. If you want genuine engagement, then you must provide relevant content and that means you must segment your communications. So let's look at some simple ways to do that. Take into account the data you will have available with even the most basic CRM. And the first one is age. By splitting up your alumni into age segments, you can provide different types of content according to what stage they are in life. We'll get to that more in the next slide. Another one is gender. There is some differentiation in content that you can make. Thirdly, their degree. By that I mean what qualification did they finish with? The next one is location. This could be as simple as domestic alumni and international alumni. Be careful in getting any more granular than that as the accuracy of your location data gets less and less reliable over time as they will move their address. The next is donor. Are they a donor to your institution or not? How to speak to donor and non-donors needs to be different. The tip I'm going to give you is the essence of communications to donors is first and foremost gratitude for what they have already done. Now, if you've got a more sophisticated CRM, then it will allow you to track what your alumni are interested in. And that is a really powerful segmentation strategy. Just remember a person's interests and what they graduated from are often not the same thing. Now, finally, how engaged are they? If you've got the resources and capacity, I would recommend you understand how many of your alumni regularly engage with your communications. It's worth targeting them as a group on their own. I would particularly think of them as a group your fundraisers will be very interested in developing towards a gift. Let's go back to point one of the last slide where I spoke about segmentation by age. On the screen are three basic age segments representing three different stages in someone's life, although you can decide where the cutoffs should be on your own experience. At the top of those under 35, which we call young alumni. In the middle of those age 35 to 54, which we call career alumni. And then at the bottom of the slide is the segment for those age 55 and above, which we call senior alumni. When we send in newsletters to our alumni, we differentiate some of the content according to what these segments have responded well to in the past. This is where analytics comes into play and you should aim for evidence-based decisions. So if we go to the top, young alumni, we found that they respond to content about networking, social opportunities, early career advice, and an introduction to what we call life finances, such as tax, savings, and how to save to buy their first property. They're also possibly thinking about further study. Now, career alumni in the middle, the assumption is that many of them will have families. So they tend to respond well to parenting advice, how to give their children an educational edge, investing for the future, and interesting, how to change careers. And then we've got the senior alumni. We found content about medical research, health advice, planning for retirement, volunteering, and events work best. And they are also the segment that tends to be more open to the prospect of making a gift. Again, this is generally what we have found has worked best for us at our location and our culture. You will no doubt have similarities and differences. How reliable is your contact data? As a Skillcom professional, I'm sure you're keen to jump into developing your plan. Part of that will be what resources you have and how you can deploy them efficiently. My tip to you is you will only understand efficiency, whether that be time or money, once you understand how reliable your contact data is. The first point on the screen, postal addresses are notoriously inaccurate. When UQ used to send printed alumni magazines out, you could walk around the surrounding suburb that was filled with student rental accommodation and see stacks of magazines at every house. Why was that? That's because that's the last address we had for that person. When people move, they tend to update their driver's license, bank details, utilities, but telling the university is very low on their list. This contact data is a problem for about 99% of institutions. Think about how much money and time you're putting into print and whether an opt-in model is needed. With that in mind, before you decide to go to the expense of holding an event in a particular city because your data says a lot of your alumni are living there, you may want to double check that via other means, such as LinkedIn. And finally, lifelong student addresses. They sound fantastic, don't they? Lifelong engagement. Wrong. We found they are only opened at about one third the rate of a private email address. While addresses such as Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail may have achieved an open rate of 35% on our e-newsletters, the lifelong UQ addresses were opened at only 8 to 9%. If those lifelong addresses are a significant proportion of your overall alumni contact details, then you need to think about putting resources behind changing them because they alone are deflating your engagement numbers. If you only remember one slide from this presentation, I would like you to remember this one. Do you remember what I said at the start? You must prove to your alumni that you're worth engaging with, not the other way around. You must prove that there is value in the relationship because they already got what they wanted from you, which is their qualification. They have moved on to the next stage of their life. So, what do you now bring to the table that they need? Too many institutions focus on themselves with little thought to the recipient, which is represented by the left-hand side of this diagram. We spend too much time talking about ourselves as the point of the articles we send to our alumni. On the right-hand side is everything they want to know about in their lives. The trick is to operate in the overlap. Work out how your institution's expertise gets immersed within topics they want to read about. How are you part of impacting their daily lives? Remember that the next time the lead article you have in a newsletter is, for instance, about an academic who has won an award that likely isn't well known outside of the faculty. The point of an award is not the award itself. It's that the impact of the work being done by that recipient is really special. So, work out how the researcher's work affects people's lives and then the relevance of the award becomes much clearer to the reader. The good news is that in a world of fake news, your institution comes with credibility. So, leverage that. Just look at the news coming out about COVID-19. People listen when it comes from a university. Now, communicating about philanthropy, the essence of philanthropic messaging is about impact, not the institution. You are not asking people to give to you. You are asking them to partner with you so that you can help them achieve a selfless goal, such as curing a disease. The equation you need to remember is their gift plus your expertise equals the desired outcome. More and more, people see universities as a business. So, if you lead your messaging with you, then they are less likely to give. Here's some figures that back that statement up. On the screen is a graph and this comes straight from research UKI did before we went into a major philanthropic campaign. The green areas represent alumni who rank themselves as an 8, 9, or 10 out of 10 in terms of their intention to give. The brown sections represent an attention of 0 to 2 out of 10. So, the green, very likely to give. The brown, extremely unlikely to give. You can see on the left-hand bar, which is where the university itself is the focus of communications, the strong intention to donate is just 6%, while the strong intention not to give is 52%. Now, on the right-hand side, where a specific cause and impact is the hero of the communications and the universities only included as credibility, the strong intention to give quadruples to 25% and those totally opposed to giving drops by 30% to just 22%. That's a massive difference and it doesn't cost a single cent to action. Here's another tip. Entrepreneurs and philanthropists often have the same mindset. They want to solve problems and achieve an outcome. My advice is to arrange your philanthropic communications such as an ask or a proposal the following way. Firstly, start with the problem. If you don't have a problem that needs fixing, then why are you asking for money? Get to the point straight away. If possible, explain the problem through a human and emotional story. Next, what is the consequence of the problem if it's not solved? Make that consequence relevant to your target audience. Then, what is the solution you're proposing? Specific research, a scholarship program? This is where you insert that in. Then comes, how do you want the reader to be part of the solution? This is the time for the philanthropic ask. This is the call to action. Then at the end and only at the end, you demonstrate why your institution is the one that can deliver this solution. This is where you show your credibility. You follow that sequence and you're going to have clear, concise philanthropic communications. Your platforms. So how do you get your message to your audience? I would recommend you experiment but I will run through what has worked for us and why. So let's focus firstly on social media. We've got Facebook, an important one and a good place to judge feedback. LinkedIn. LinkedIn provides a page for every educational institution and those people that list you in their profile are automatically opted in. You'll notice on screen there, it says there's almost 160,000 on our alumni page. That's how many people have listed our institution in the education section of their profile. The works are already done for you to get that audience. Thirdly, Instagram. It's great for visuals and remember, photos and video of your campus are very, very powerful for alumni engagement. It's what all of your alumni have in common, your campus. There are other platforms, social platforms you can use but those three are what I'd say are the base ones you need to have in place. Next come your EDMs, the email newsletters. I've been hearing for years now that email is dead as a way of doing newsletters and I'm just going to say that's absolutely rubbish. It's still very, very powerful and very, very worthwhile. We have two main EDMs. One for events that's just distributed to those living within a certain distance of our campus and one that is specifically for news. Some institutions join this together but we find there's more engagement when they're separate. We also have a printed magazine but as I mentioned earlier, this is now an opt-in model to save cash. Other platforms. Let's talk about your websites. The first is your alumni website which you will control which should be a one-stop shop of information. Now we have a couple of others. We're currently in a major philanthropic campaign right now so we have a separate campaign website but of course you'll also likely need to manage the actual giving portal where people select the fund they want to give to and make payment. So how often should you communicate with your alumni? Now there's heaps of articles and blogs about how frequently you should use each of your platforms but there's a question you must be able to answer before you put frequency into your communications plan especially in regard to EDMs such as e-newsletters and especially if you work in a decentralized mark-on structure and that question you need to answer is who else at your institution is communicating with your alumni? Who else has the alumni contact details? If you're working centrally, are they also available by the faculty, the particular school? If multiple areas of your institution are sending your alumni different emails then the volume can add up really really quickly so you need to get on top of that first before you decide your frequency outside of that. Analytics. Look, universities are evidence-based institutions so as a communications professional working at one, you should also have facts and figures to back up your strategies. You need to track your results. Most of the platforms have an analytics section. For your website, it'll likely be Google Analytics but Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, they all have their own analytics sections and whatever you use for EDMs will also have statistics. Now personally, I put more weight on the stats that show me that the reader has made some extra effort to engage with what I have sent them. I like to see interaction so instead of just the open rate for any newsletter, I want to see click-through to stories. For social media, I like to see that someone has taken the effort to like a post or make a comment. For websites, I want to see that the bounce rate off the home page is consistently decreasing which means alumni are finding things that interest them. Experiment with content. Once you can see if something has worked or not, try experimenting with your content. You'll be surprised with what your audience may respond to. We once asked a professor to provide us with the 10 lines from classic literature that he would put into a Valentine's Day card. Now we put that as the lead story in an e-newsletter and there was some real nervousness about that but we wanted to experiment. We found that the click-through rate for that story was absolutely through the roof. It was one of the most popular stories we had ever done. If you can articulate the analytics to decision makers, it means the more you can experiment and broaden your horizons and find what your alumni really want to read about. Finally, I think that smaller and vibrant and engaged social media communities are more valuable to you than large and barren ones. I remember seeing a university's alumni Facebook page and that had a whopping 18,000 followers but when you looked at their posts, they only had like four or five likes and no comments. To me, what's the point? I would rather have three or four thousand followers on a page with people interacting with each other on the comments. To me, that's much, much more valuable. Privacy and communications preferences. You know what? By virtue of being university graduates, your alumni are very valuable. Having their contact details is a privilege and that trust can be lost very, very quickly. You must have the highest level of security around the access to the details. Don't use Excel spreadsheets to store their data. If you use an external platform to send e-newsletters, be careful about the amount of time that elapses between data is uploaded and when it is deleted after a send. Never use these platforms to store data long term. They can be hacked. It must be clear how the recipient can unsubscribe and what they are unsubscribing from. On the screen is a message we include in some of our e-newsletters. Ensure you have a process with advancement services about how those communication preferences are updated in your database so that they have been taken care of before you next send something. And finally, I'm going to give you seven fast tips. The first one. If the first time your alumni hear from you is to be asked for money, you're going to lose them very, very quickly. You must build a relationship first. You should give first in order to eventually get. Make sure you also profile everyday alumni. Not all of your alumni profiles have to be about a superstar. Alumni also like to hear about everyday graduates who they can relate to. Teachers, dentists, small business owners. Don't forget about them. Specificity is your credibility. Companies from banks to insurance companies are using social impact as a marketing strategy. However, they have to generalize how they help. However, your institution genuinely makes an impact. So you need to be specific about what that is and how you do it. That's how you stand out and that's how you cut through. Whoever you interview should see a draft and have the opportunity to make amendments. You're all on the same side with your alumni and it's going to save you a lot of problems if they've had the chance to have a look at what you want to publish before it gets published. The next one. Ban all photos of people standing in a row with awards. Visuals are incredibly important. When it comes to photos, get rid of that line of people in suits holding awards. Instead, try to get photos of them doing whatever won them the award. Then becomes an image that represents impact. Move upstream in the decision-making process. Just because you're in comms doesn't mean you should be the last person to know about something. You have important skills that are needed at the start of every process, not just at the end. Remember, you're one of the only people in advancement who has line of sight over what is going on across the entire institution. Nearly everyone else is focused within a silo. That is important information that the decision-makers need right at the start. And finally, academics value process. You value impact. What do I mean by that? You're going to interview and showcase the work of researchers many, many times. Now, academics love process, but as a communicator, you should be focused on impact. Understand that that disconnect is going to exist from the very start and it's not going to change. You need to work out how to demonstrate to the academics why you focus on impact, and then you'll have a far better relationship with the researchers you interview. Get your pitch, your analytics, and your results ready. I hope you're able to take away some tips. My details are on screen. Please feel free to contact me. I look forward to talking with you soon. Thank you.

effective communication

audience segmentation

contact data

philanthropic messaging

communication platforms

privacy