for everybody to still in any way. Well, and team, are there any things that we need to share or any other types of technology that we're going to need to make sure that we're using on Zoom? I just have one thing at the beginning and that's it. Okay, great. Natalia. Oh, here they come. Yay. Hi, everybody. I'm writing in the chat. Tell us where you're from, school, and location. All right. Well, thank you. I see folks are coming on in. Welcome, welcome. The chat is really your chat, our chat just to have some fun. You can see I posted up there already, tell us where you're from, school, yay, Ohio, Waco. Oh, this is so fun. I love seeing where everybody's from. Thank you for joining us today. And for those of you who are watching this later, maybe you're in your jammies watching this recording, so welcome to you too. My name is Meg Natter. I'm the CASE Director of Community Colleges and Foundations. And I've been in this role just over a year and I'm very happy to be here. And thank you, thank you so much for signing up for this webinar and for telling us that strategic alumni fundraising is something you're focused on and you need help with because that's what CASE is for. We're here to help you. And I think I got a rockstar team together today, so let's get going. First, I'm just going to start off by making sure everyone knows that there are four modes of alumni engagement that CASE measures. Philanthropic, volunteerism, experiential, and communications. So that's the four modes of alumni engagement. And today we're focusing just on philanthropic. And that's, I know you're all like, yes, Meg, we are very worried about donations. I'm sure you are. And we are very different from the four-year schools. So we have a whole hour to figure this out. I want to share the good news is we are not doing any PowerPoints today. Can we have a yay for no PowerPoints? This is really going to be a discussion that I think will help you maybe just feel a little bit better about your world and what you're going through. I'm sharing one, just one slide with you that has become kind of controversial. It's from our voluntary supportive education survey that we did in 2023. And you'll, now don't pick on me too much. The numbers across don't add up to a hundred because I did take out one category, but you'll see, these are the types of institutions that community colleges and four-year schools receive money from. Didn't say that very well, but hopefully you can see on the chart, it makes sense to you. So if you look at the four-year schools, most of their money comes in from alumni, 48%, 41%. And look at the two-year, 5.3%, at least those who participated in this survey, 5.3% of your funding, of our funding is coming from alumni. Then we have non-alumni individuals and community colleges kick up a lot there. We're going to talk about how we define alumni and maybe some of those non-alumni individuals are actually alumni, but that's where we do quite well. In general, that means people in our communities who may not have graduated from our school, but just love, love our schools, love our community colleges. And then we really kick butt on corporations, right? Look at that. We do well over the four-year schools and then foundations were right in the pack and organizations too. So we have to look at that 5% that is very low, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Might not necessarily be a good thing either, but I just wanted to start off with this as we have our conversations and think about what strategies are important for you. I just wanted to share with you something to think about, and I'm happy to put this in the chat once I get off the stop share. All right. So just a few things for us to get started, but I'm going to introduce our panel now. We've got Allison Dolan-Wilson. Thanks, Allison. She's Vice President of Institutional Advancement at Northern Essex Community College in Massachusetts. Then Dr. Chris Downing, Associate Vice President of Development and Community Engagement at Heartland Community College in Illinois. Diana Pollard, Associate Vice President of Institutional Advancement and also the Executive Director at Dutchess Community College Foundation in New York. And did I get that right, Diana? It's the Dutchess... Dutchess Community College. Okay, good. Thank you. I always stumble over Dutchess a little bit, but I got it right. So good. Thank you for being here, Diana. And off we go. Our moderator, John Wolfkill. He's the Executive Director of the Community College of Aurora Foundation out in Colorado. Thank you so much for leading us off here today. And just so everyone knows, there should be a Q&A box at the bottom of your screen. So if you have questions today, we're going to kind of save them till the end, but you can put them in the Q&A box whenever you like. I'm going to be monitoring that. The chat's really just for fun and to say hi, but if you have questions for this panel as the hour goes on, please put them in the Q&A. I'll be moderating that so John can do his job moderating the panel. Okay, so John, over to you. Thank you. Great. And we're going to start off, right, because CASE defines alumni as really any students that take non-credit classes, complete classes, but not a degree. Those that complete certificate programs, right? It's kind of anyone that takes classes and completes something. However, all of our colleges define alumni a little bit differently. And so what I want to ask each of our panelists, if you'll do two things, tell us a little bit, tell us like the number of students at your institution, kind of the size of your advancement team that I hope folks kind of zero in on that because as you're sharing examples later, they'll be like, oh yes, they have four or five people or they have only one person and they're doing all that. Wow, right? So give them a little bit of number of students, size of advancement teams, and how does your institution define alumni? Let's go ahead and we'll start with Diana because she is dressed to impress today with her big board and major donor holiday party coming up today. Well, thanks, John. So our team is up to six full timers and two part timers. And that is up significantly just over the past year. And prior to that, we had three full timers and one part timer. So we've done a big expansion in our foundation office. And how we define alumni is anybody that has graduated from Dutchess Community College, has a certificate program, or has completed 45 credits or more successfully. The other area that we are looking at including, which is new to us, is micro-credentials. People that have completed micro-credentials because we have not had many of those in the past. And so that's a new area that we're expanding on, and we will probably be including those individuals in that. And I would say at this point, we have about 55,000 alumni and number of students that we currently have full time on campus is probably about 4,500. And then we have another 2,500 concurrent students in the high schools. All right, great. Let's go over to you, Alice, and then we'll go to Chris. Yeah. So we have about seven advancement staff, but that's inclusive of our folks that are focused on grants, including state and federal. Our student body is a little less than 5,000. We consider when we're looking at sort of as a denominator for percentage of alumni giving, alumni that have graduated with a certificate or degree. And when we're talking about non-degree alumni, just because there are so many people that take a class or two, we define that as those that have received 20 or more credits from us. And then for us at Heartland Community College, we have just over 5,000 students with us actively right now in our credit portion of things. We take the definition of alumni as anybody who's taken at least one class with us. We are the youngest community college in the state of Illinois, a little less than 30 years old. We also are right next to one of the largest major state universities. Illinois State University is a stone's throw from us. So we have a number of students who come to us to pick up one to two courses and then make their way there, but find a large affinity for us. So that's ours. All right. So now we've kind of level set kind of where we are, what we're starting with. So let's dig in and start talking about alumni and alumni giving. It's so easy, right, to get overwhelmed with the number who fit these different criteria. And if you're like our institution, which is anybody that's completed a class, right, that's a lot of folks. So why don't each of you take one to two minutes and just describe your overall approach to alumni engagement and advancement. Let's kind of go, I know there's no one size fits all, so just give us a broad landscape of one to two minutes of kind of what your institution is doing when it comes to alumni engagement. And Allison, let's go to you. So we are really just starting out in terms of more event-based networking and just getting people connected. We decided to start talking to our non-degreed alumni as well and said let's communicate with them for a while before we start asking them for money. So our non-degreed alumni or alumni get our magazine, digital newsletters, and again we're just sort of skimming the surface in terms of having events, more covalent events. So if we have games going on, a solid lecture, arts, inviting folks beforehand to things, starting to have a little bit more networking. We have software that we use that we're trying to engage alumni to answer questions for our students. So that's most of the engagement and again a lot of communication with them. Excellent and hold it, we're going to definitely come back later in our conversation about technology and so I definitely want to hear more about that software. Chris, how about you take one or two minutes and describe sort of your approach. Sure, we have a, I have a fantastic team member who's actually in this call as well too and I want to give a shout out to her, Gina Glover, who's our associate director of alumni and community relations for us. So she handles a number of things underneath her area. Our strategy has been threefold. First is just getting people to raise their hand and identify as an alum. We have done a number of programs where we ask through our social media for people to say, hey I am an alum and if you do and I realize I have left it in my bag but I carry them with me everywhere we go. As soon as a person says, hey I am an alum, they receive and I'll hold this up to the camera. It's a proud alumni pin so hopefully you can see that. So we distribute those and push that out. We do that about once a quarter if not every other month on our social media and ask people to do so. We also, for any time someone's making a donation, purchasing a ticket to our event, things like that, we ask them are you a Heartland alum and then give them a definition of that. And then the third part for us, which is really kind of simple, anytime I'm in front of any group to speak about anything on behalf of the college or any of my team members are, we ask them, we ask people within the crowd to raise their hand if they are an alum or if someone close to them as an alum have the pins on hand and hand them out the card itself. Also if they don't register, we ask them to go back to the website and just simply flag and then wear the pin. So a big part of our campaign is getting people to literally fly the flag for us and show that they're a Proud Hawk in our community. I love that, a Proud Hawk, that's amazing. Diana, how about you? Yeah, so for us, we have, we're working on engaging our alumni there and so I would say we haven't worked on that enough, right, and that's an area that we have to work on. We have only one person that's part-time working on alumni other than myself who goes out and meets with alumni and we've started doing different events and that sort of thing to bring them in and make it, you know, an important, make them an important part of the college. Great, well thinking about how we're doing that engagement, let's go into a little bit of what do you think are some of the best strategies for those on this call that might be just starting out? Kind of Diana, just maybe just one step behind you or about that first step, what are some of those best strategies as folks start? Anyone kind of jump in on that conversation? I would say doing it. They say you miss 100% of the shots you don't take and I think asking, starting with the strategy, starting from somewhere, you know, it was just Black Friday and Cyber Monday. I'm sure that the company didn't stop with just sending you that one email like, hey, and we're just going to leave you alone for the rest of time. Now you got seven, so by the time that you're like, you know what, I really was meaning to buy that weird thing I didn't need, but asking and saying where is that low-hanging fruit, where can I start? You know, like I said, I think communicating first so that, you know, the first thing that you're talking to your alumni is not with your handout, making sure that we know who you are, we want to tell your story, we want to tell you about what's happening here and then following up with that ask and we've seen that do very well for us and not only again with our alumni that have graduated, but also some of our non-degreed alumni and, you know, this is my first foray into community colleges. I've been in higher ed for over 25 years. I've been in four years before this and when we actually asked non-degreed alumni, we actually got notes back of saying, oh, you know, I didn't graduate, but I remember Professor so-and-so and I was like, this is the first time I've ever gotten a thank you note for asking someone for money, so I would say that the first strategy is just doing it. Yeah, and I would agree with that. We've kind of changed our model a little bit and I've started visiting alumni where they are, so I've been to visit alumni in Chicago and California and Texas. Like one of our alumni had self-identified through a survey we did that he was a former CEO of Foot Locker and so I went down to meet him in 2017 and we had a great meeting. He came back up to the college. He played basketball at the college, so he wanted to meet the basketball team and from there he is and then COVID happened, of course, and travel stopped, but since then he has now come. He's joined our board. He flies from Texas to come to our board meetings and visits our basketball team every single time he's here, but it was that. It's kind of meeting them where they are, too, I think is a good strategy and I know that's difficult for some of the smaller shops, but if you can get your institution to invest in that, I think it's a great strategy. I think it's celebrating as well, too, kind of tagging into both what Allison and Diana talked about there. Celebrating your alumni outside of your Asking Your Development office. So again, coming back to my teammate Gina, two things that we do. One is we have an alumni speaker at our commencement ceremony, so since that's such a huge public thing, it's a chance for us to lift an alum up and have them celebrated. We also then work to specifically reach back to alums to come back to speak at our fall kickoff at a number of events, and then we have our alumni awards are part of our large foundation dinner for our scholarship donors and recipients, so it's a nice chance for us to say to those folks who are scholarship donors, hey look, here's kind of the outcome, here's what your student that you're investing in today that's sitting at the table, here's what they'll eventually become. We also do that with donor spotlights and just so many times where we can sing their praises without ever asking for money and then kind of come on the back side. One other part I would add in, when we get a chance to figure out who someone is, we try to meet with them, ask them about their story, do the what you would kind of see is maybe that first donor engagement that you'd have of getting to know someone, even though they already maybe know your college a little bit, figure out where the gaps are and what it's been, and then the first question that we ask of them is will you help us find other alums like you and bring them into the fold in some way, so never asking them to give money necessarily first, but saying hey, will you, as I keep going back to fly the flag for us, talk about it, be that proud alum, and then the ask comes so much easier after that, that they're able to have that sense of pride. Yeah, I really love that. Go ahead, Diana. No, I was just going to say we do an Alumni Hall of Fame at our gala every year, right, and we recognize two Alumni Hall of Fame and we bring them in and then we have them come back and sometimes our alumni are commencement speakers, you know, there's different ways to engage them. We try to bring them when we're doing career fairs, if we know they're in a particular business, say they're in banking, and they need a bank for the career fair, then, you know, and that's kind of how we do that, and we always, you know, maybe have them wear a pin or recognize their table in some way that this is an alum working at this table. That's great. I love that hearing about celebrating our alumni, right, all of us can do that, and using your marketing communication teams, I know that's really important at the Community College of Aurora. They're doing twice monthly posts specifically about sort of alumni, where are they, what they did, what they're doing in business or in the community, and I also love this idea that you're, it sounds like all three of you are doing a lot of questions. You're asking a lot, that you're getting basically yeses or yeah, let me help you, let me connect another alumni. You're doing a lot of asking before you're actually making an ask, and so I love hearing that. That's just some great advice for us that are starting out. Now let's kind of move in. Go ahead. John, could I just, could I just jump in? There's a question just for Chris about his donor spotlights before we move ahead. Chris, could you just expand on what those donor spotlights are? Sure, happy to do so. Donor spotlights are really kind of taking that, I didn't mean donor spotlight, alumni spotlight is really what I should have said within there, not the donor part of it. The alumni spotlight is, as you've had those conversations with those individuals, you're kind of capturing some of that information, and then you're dropping that alumni spotlight back into maybe donor newsletters and other spots so that the alumni, you get a chance to celebrate them. So my apologies there, I should never conflate the two, they are two very separate concepts, but the, you can be part of our alumni spotlight and never have given us a dime yet, we just want to celebrate the success that you've had and that we're proud of you in that way. Yeah, and we do that as well, we do a monthly donor highlight that goes out to everybody we have an email address for. Back to you, John, thank you. Yes, well, I also see, we're going to take that second question that's in there about how have you found that transfer students identify as alum from their four-year or from the community college? So let's kind of dig into this, this is really kind of a data research question, so I know what Meg was talking about is how community colleges tend to be very focused on the corporations, foundations, non-alumni individuals, but we need to begin to think more about that, like a four-year that had a much higher rate, I think 48, almost 49 percent versus our 5.3 percent overall, like percentage of our overall fundraising. So let's dig into research, what are some of the research, and I know Allison, I think you did like a dissertation maybe on this, if I remember, okay, so yeah, I know you've done some research in writing, so I'll start with you and then others, Chris and Diana, jump in, but what are some of the research findings that are most important when determining what strategies and which alumni to prioritize? So how can we use data to prioritize our efforts? Yeah, that and then including your question that was in the chat. So, you know, even, even in our, even in the answers that we gave already we're almost kind of talking about two different strategies right so so there's some strategy of fundraising that's a marathon and some that's a sprint. We know that we have to build the pipeline for our kind of annual gifts, and then from there, that's when we start to cultivate our major gift donors which is more of the, you know, the one to one and the individual. And, you know, if you have a small shop or if you're just starting out and you don't have the infrastructure or you don't have the data or you don't have, you know, maybe you're just starting in terms of being able to do that research. It takes a while so how do you say to your president or whomever you're reporting to. No, no, trust me on this one I'm just kind of building it up, we'll start, you know, breaking it in in five years that obviously can't be the answer. So you have to continue with your, you know, corporate and foundation relations and you know your local banks and everything that continue to give money, but also start with that basic in terms of the annual giving to at least start creating a pipeline to get to the point where you can then cross some of your alumni over to that and I will say, in terms of, you know, the question that was asked. The conversation that we're having right now is a conversation that I love four years are having with their graduate students, because they need to keep expanding their pie. And so they're saying how are we getting graduate students to give when they might be loyal to their undergraduate degree, similar to how we have to say okay but now they're going right off to right off to another college and are they going to be loyal there. And the research shows and conversations anecdotally have also shown that people are very much happy and thrilled with the place that got them their start, where we have a disadvantage and have to really think about the strategy there is a lot of schools that have been doing this for a long time have class giving, because if you're starting giving up here you're going to continue to go up, which is why you hear things like gold and all that stuff because it's okay we want them to give all their here, they've got to keep that up when in their first 10 years out, and then the giving comes up from there, we're already at a deficit for meeting to knock that off for at least two years, if our students are going to another thing. So, you know, I think it's taking some pages out of the playbook of how four years do it but recognizing that we have to go about it in a much different way because of those time constraints and the other schools so I think it's, it's a slow methodical process, it's building the pipeline, one foot in terms of major gifts, and maybe starting with some segments, maybe by age where instead of starting young we're maybe looking at 25 to 45, but looking at some of your majors or student groups that were and getting an alumnus or two that might have been in that major to do some, you know, a peer solicitation on a more mass scale. And that's where we've seen some early successes on our end, sorry that was a really long answer. No, I think it was a great answer though Allison and, and, and I almost went to and no offense john of the research that you're doing right now Allison when when we were talking about this entire presentation, do you want to tease out some of the things that people have been writing about now for decades within their research and what you've seen other people who are literally studying this from an academic standpoint, what they're seeing and what they're finding. Yeah, and again I'll start by saying, obviously this is not everyone some people are doing this well and wonderful so you know not painting everyone with a broad brush and holistically just that idea of choosing to spend the money to invest in asking for alumni choosing to spend the money in the infrastructure, choosing to say we're going to take the time to focus on on our alumni because you know, I mean think about. So obviously there are many industries that have fundraising. And one of the reasons why I love fundraising for colleges because we have this built in constituency, our alumni, so it almost seems insane to not be able to focus on that. But again, it takes time resource dedicated personnel dedicated resource software which I know we're going to talk about later, and the understanding to say, I'm going to give you that leeway to be able to put in the time for that now, and hopefully I'm never sitting in all of our chairs and 1520 years from now we're going to say, I'm really glad you did the interesting part and just to tag in as Allison I talked about this my research was on why volunteers choose to be community college foundation board members, and the fascinating thing that was within, as I looked through it was that while at four year institutions, most of their foundation board members are immediately come for their alumni pool and and are specifically put in with that aspect of it. My research found that most of the foundation board members are coming from the local community, and in many cases had either no affiliation with the community college they were sent there as a responsibility as a corporate responsibility aspect of it, or what I ended up doing kind of the doubting Thomas aspect of it, where they had a negative perception of their community college, and then it pivoted because of some life event, usually it was either their child or someone close to them had a great experience at a community college and it changed their mind, and they went from having, like I said a somewhat negative view to this overly positive and wanting to kind of convert others over and say hey I used to look at it this way, but now I see this part of it. The third category of that I kind of found the research where super fans of people who already huge donors or supporters of the community college, but even in that group, they weren't necessarily alums, they were just people who gave because they either believed in the concept or had some personal connection, first generation college student things to that degree and so those changes, but the research which, as you had to do the background and that part of it. A lot of scholars just have written off that community colleges will never be able to do that, and and it was, it's been given as fact versus, we haven't really tried so we can't really call it never like, you know, if we were to simply say humans can't swim because Well, let's maybe put someone in the water and see if they can swim and and that part of it so I think we're pushing back against a number of things there. And sometimes we let the data falsely speak to that I remember, you know, when Megan I first met but there was a, you know, at a case conference and there was this number that said, here's how much alumni give what do we get from that don't ask alumni because they're not going to give my question to that was, well, how are we asking them how are we engaging. If we kind of said let's just check the box and say we asked them once, how can we expect them to give in a meaningful way. And again, when we've been focusing our strategy on on asking alumni more and often and engaging with them more, not only have we seen A huge increase of our new donors and our new alumni donors. They're also making more gifts per year and their average gift per year is is enhancing. Am I talking budget gazillions of dollars. I'm not, but I'm talking about more. And again, doing what we can to get that pipeline and I think turn that that idea on its head that our alumni don't want to give Well, let's make sure if we can. I saw a question pop up on the chat. I think about resources. So we've got a couple of those really good articles or research that you both used or referenced. If we could do that, Meg. Is that something that we can get sent out to the folks on the call. Sure. Yeah, I'm looking for that. Okay. Yeah. And I couldn't tell if it was a chat or a question that popped up. It just went off. Diana. I know you mentioned that you're actually I mean you're flying out of town from from New York to other states to go to visit some of your alumni. Tell me a little bit about like What are you looking for in order to make that kind of return on investment of time and dollars to go see them. Like, how are you identifying what are you looking for. This is, hey, this is worth me flying out of state to visit this alumni. I'm a little interested in sort of Your thinking around your strategy of how you're selecting those alumni to visit Sure. So, so we were doing well screening. Number one, and we have a prospect researcher apart. He doesn't work for us. We contract with him. So when I have somebody I sent him You know the person and say, okay, can you do some research on this person. It gets back to me that sort of thing. And it's relatively, in my opinion, inexpensive. It's like $250 and we get an amazing Research paper back and so how we initially start to decide who we're going to be putting in through our wealth screening because again we have 55,000 right and it's expensive, you know, to do well screening on all of them. So we look at who has already been giving consistent donors right People that have given and even if it's not consistency. So maybe they're not giving every single year, but they're giving every other year, but they're giving also the amount they're giving right so we start looking at people that are giving $100 on a regular basis or anybody's made a gift of $500 for us a single gift is a good amount for a start, you know, based on an appeal letter. Right, people that have contacted us and said, hey, can you make sure I'm on your newsletter list, you know, there's people that have connected with us, those that have come to us and said, hey, can I get an alumni alumni ID card, you know, so there's there's key indicators. Right, eventually we will wealth screen, our entire database and kind of take a better look at that. So, for some of the individuals like I said, Keith Daly's his name and he's a former CEO Foot Locker, and he lives in Texas and we did an alumni survey, and he wanted to get involved right and he noted that in the survey. So, that was like, yeah, absolutely. We'd love to get in touch with you. And he's been so committed we you know another alum that we have in Chicago, started out with the first gift to us a $500. Right. And so I was already going to Chicago for a conference. Right. So, and I don't see him every year, I probably see him every three years. So, for me to invest $2,000 let's say that's a plane tickets expensive right to go to Chicago and spend time with him. And he's given me 15 $16,000 over three years, the return on investment is there, right, the time the energy the money, you know, it's definitely worthwhile but really doing your research knowing, knowing what is a big gift to your institution, which is always different across the board right what's important to your institution. What are you asking for right that's part of it. So when you're asking your donors are when you're asking, you know, you're doing donor acquisition and getting alumni engaged at that low level are you asking them for $25 are they giving it to you, are they giving you less are they giving you more, those that are giving you more, obviously, are more interested and again that's another indicator that that's somebody you should probably be reaching out to. Diana, there's a question about where do you find a prospect researcher on indeed LinkedIn where'd you find your person. So we have hired a consultant that we've worked with over the years on different times because we're looking at going into a campaign, and he actually knew of one that he has worked with for many years so that's how we found the one that we're currently using. But yeah, I would think any consulting firm would be able to find it but yeah you should be able to find them on LinkedIn. I'm happy to share the person that I work with he actually lives in Florida now he used to live in New Jersey and now he lives down in Florida. So anybody wants to email me separately I'd be happy to share his information. But, yeah, there's probably a number of places that you can. Thanks. I also just wanted to add you know because there's so many ideas of varying degrees of resources and and so you know just one fun trick that I challenge all of you to go in and do is just an interesting place to start is, you know, oftentimes we work with a lot of people that have been in in at this particular institution for a good amount of time. So they might have like oh I know so and so and I know so and so and that's how you know those are the people that get highlighted or maybe win the awards or you know you connect with on a regular basis. Go into your system and run the people that have given for 10 plus years and pick your number say $100 who has given us $100 every year for the past 10 years. And do you know them and I was surprised with, you know, work with a lot of people amazing been there for a long time, and when we ran that simple list that those people weren't on the radar. And, you know, we came up with, let's just create these giving societies and one of them, you know, being a, being a loyalty society, and just, you know, didn't ask just sent these, hey, you've been giving us 100 bucks for you know. And thanks so much welcome to the, to the, you know, loyalty donor society. And, you know, someone wrote back $1,000 check again that's not big money but that's an indication of maybe these are people that we need to be looking at more and start cultivating more on a major gift side so you know there's there's there's software and there's people and there's money that we all spend, and then you know for those that just want to kind of say what are some no cost things that can help me to at least take the next step, you know those exist to. And I'm wondering if there are others because you've talked about sort of how you're looking in your database or are there other ways I know there's a question in here about how are you keeping up with all of this. And so let's kind of switch a little bit we can kind of merge the technology and still a little bit of the how are we prioritizing who are we reaching out to who are we connecting with. Tell us a little bit about where does your donor and alumni data live, is that in the same system are they separate systems give us a little bit of the understanding of why you put them together why you keep them separate, but tell us a little bit on the tech side, just broadly, how are you storing and tracking all of this, and you know does that piece of technology offer some of the, some of the early well screening at least the initial things that can help you query and run those lists that you just talked about and kind of even some of the ways that Diana is identifying folks that she might go visit so kind of bring that all into about the technology that you're using to help structure and track all this work. Yeah, so we use razor's edge, and it is separate from where a banner school. And so, each year, we work with that side of the house to bring over our alumni, and then not every year but probably every few years to bring over some of our non degreed alumni and side note on that we're soon going to have to come up with an algorithm or something to help us decide, you know, at some point you got to pay for how many records you have so you have to say who's going to be worth it for us to keep in from a non degreed alumnus standpoint. And you know that's some, some of those things that you know some packages depending on what kind of software you have that can be included in terms of a certain number of data pens where they go through it. You can pay services for that. And then there's the good old fashioned send out a couple mailings and pay to have the return address sent so so in terms of addresses. And that's one thing you know emails free and that's great and we've seen this go go back and forth, but obviously with with so many digital things which are still wonderful and good and great. We still see a good amount of success with with mailers, which again also helps us to to get up to date addresses. Yeah. We are also a razor's edge shop and then that aspect of it and as Allison just kind of pointed out there, getting to that tipping point of, hey, do we have too many internet we really work on people who have engaged with us so again, going back to our alumni that we're using as bait for lack of a better term if they're choosing to engage with us, give us an email or reach back to us with social media and had a second action that gets them into our razor's edge system. We try to at graduation, or as our students are coming to pick up their cap and gown we asked them for, hey, what's your next next email system that you have or at least something that you'll check, or some other way that we're able to communicate, and then We then do a calling, just as Allison kind of talked about there. After a while we're able to now keep track of when someone's going in. And then if we're really not seeing any type of activity of not opening any emails of not engaging in any way, then we start to kind of look to pull them through. We're also using a service called live alumni, which is really based out of the LinkedIn platform and takes a look at individuals where they're working at and what fields they're in. We then get reports back from them that are within Excel files that we're able to sort through seeing what industries that they're in and seeing where we're trying to fundraise for so Coming up for us soon here will be something really in the healthcare related field. So we'll be trying to reach to most of our alums who show that they're working in the healthcare field. Not that they necessarily got their degree from us within that. So yeah, you have your obvious nursing ones, but it might be someone that's gone on that came to us for just Not just but came for us as part of their beginning aspect of it and then got into a nursing program later on, but had a great start with us. So we're going to talk about those. So we try to look at what industries, our students are going into our alumni are going into not necessarily what they studied with us. And that's a great service for us there. Well, let's let's go. I brought up like surveys, the ways that we're sort of trying to gather information. I know there's a little bit of questions here. We'll come right back to tech. So we're not leaving the tech conversation just yet, but go a little deeper for each of you are those that this makes sense. Tell us, like, what are some of the strategies in terms of how you're collecting and getting that initial information. Is that as they're graduating. Is that sending out something. Is that through email through these Through a quick survey. What has been really those strategies that have helped you seem to engage so you can give that little piece of swag to them right away. But what's really helping you engage them and get that correct information. So that when you do put them in your database, the actual information is good to go. So we actually get the information from our banner system. So our registrar's office when everybody graduates, we get it once a year. So anybody that's graduated and, you know, January in May or in August, and they will give us their information. They do now collect personal email addresses where they used to force the students to only use Dutch's email. The problem with that was they didn't let them keep their email once they graduated. So then we lost contact with these individuals. So now they have changed that mindset. They also collect cell phone numbers now, right, which they didn't previously. So we're getting a lot of information right off the bat. And because we email to people on a regular basis, you know, we are able to keep up with some of that. We at least those that, you know, don't tell us, oh, stop emailing me or what, you know, that's never fun. You don't want to hear that. But it happens. So that's kind of how we do it. And Razor's Edge also has an email append, right, so we can get information from there as well. But right off the bat, we get everything that the college already has. And when you're first sending something out, besides a congratulations for graduation, let's say that we all do that. But if you're trying to engage them, is there a one or two question survey? What are you using to sort of engage them right away to get them to interact with you now as an alumni? What's that kind of that first step for each of your colleges? I have a really weird and unique portfolio and I'm lucky in that I oversee both. In addition to the advancement functions I oversee institutional research and effectiveness as well as career services. So we were able to institute an exit survey, which hadn't been done previously, which enables us to kind of ask about their time but also talk to them about, you know, being an alumnus this is this, you know, yes, their time with us is done but it's just the beginning of their relationship with us. So we're able to plant some seeds in terms of where they're where they're going what they thought about here what they thought about, you know, career services and at least plant that somewhat so are we getting a ton of specific information that's going to help us with segmentation, no, but at least planting that seed of that relationship, which I'm fine with now because again we're still at the very base strategy in terms of pipeline building and not getting super into that one to one yet so the segmentation is primarily based on how they engaged with the college while they were here. Well with technology kind of wrap up this conversation then we'll move a little bit to kind of contacting graduation like frequency and some questions I see here in the chat so we're in the q amp a. Are there other you mentioned live alumni, are there other technologies that you feel like have really strengthened your alumni giving sort of alumni communication if you're using thank you are you using any other technology you feel like that's been a really big return in terms of engaging those alumni, and they're giving one and a fail we have. Thank you, which has been great. We use it primarily around our giving day. We've tried to use a little bit more with our athletics fundraising and have them use it with the team so so that's been fun, and yet I think we can still use that a little bit more. We recently worked with a great company called pro topia. It was about alumni engagement, and they were interested in getting into the community college space so so you know gave us a little bit of a deal. And it was a way to do a sort of mentoring program without having to do the lift of a mentoring program, which, again, at a place where you might not have huge alumni engagement to be able to have the numbers that you need for your students. It allowed students to ask questions and then match with alumni and really super interesting we're like this is gonna be great. This is gonna be a great first step in terms of engaging alumni and getting them connected with students, and it did not work out for us so you know still very interested in dabbling in in technology that can help us in that way. But again, we don't all have the resources to fail and fail fast like some of our four year brethren do. And so you need to be really smart when you do that and I like I said I wanted it to work. But we just weren't there yet in terms of how our alumni engage with us. We've kind of gone the other direction of, we've tried to get some big wins with some of our larger alumni which we have, and then let others kind of come quietly in behind and so I know that there is that idea as Allison talked about of building the pipeline and then hoping that it pops up. We've been lucky enough to identify early on some of our alums who have chosen to be and a bit of the discussion that we've had with them, and something that I would really say and I'm sure, Diana she talked about the, the CEO of Footlocker and that part of it is coming back to them and saying hey, this is an opportunity for you to be a leader that, as many of us here know that there was a time where community colleges were seen as lesser than and we've, we've come out of that and now have gone and kind of record time gone from being this afterthought less than look down upon to a bit of the celebrated hey this is what higher education can be the American story and and really that part. And the same things happened for alumni that when I first started within my position, 15 years ago, I would have people come up and who are donors and like quietly whisper to me like they committed a crime like hey I attended a community college, and I said to them, do me a favor say that with your chest not quietly here in the shadows, like if you really want to help me if you if you believe in what we're doing, be proud of it, and it took a little bit to get people to that part. And so what we ended up talking to some of our donors about our alumni donors was, we need you to show that you wanted to give back and we need you to, as you make this gift for the gift to be symbolic in nature of a certain size, and to almost say hey it's all right to give, and then I'm proud that I'm an alum of Heartland, and here this is my gift standing behind it so we almost took the lack of alumni giving and made it new frontier. So instead of something that people were ashamed of simply saying hey, get in on the ground floor this, you get to be and for certain members of our alumni group that we've had to give it you could see it light in their eyes that they went from being, and this is something to go back to that other point of our students who have the challenge of, hey, my allegiance is with my four year institution because I transferred there. We've started to get some wins back the other direction by saying look, you can make a $50,000 gift to the University of Illinois, that's going to be a nice brick on five campuses over, and maybe you get a parking meter in the parking lot. So $50,000 here, it's going to make an impact, you're going to have an endowed scholarship with us, you're going to be here, you're going to be one of the people that we have at the table for things, and you get to leverage your size and you get to leverage kind of that aspect of it and that you don't have to be, you know, as they're maybe looking at their other places and they've been successful, but the other alums are, you know, Steve Jobs and or actually he never graduated, never mind, pick somebody else who actually graduated from a place and they're like, yeah, I can't give $2 million a year and so I'm almost ignored but at a community college, I'm celebrated and to take that advantage. Yeah, so I think we're talking about that sort of ROI for the donor, and we have found that true we have our board president and then one of his good friends that is now very engaged board member, both from a four year college here in Colorado, but they got involved with us because they felt like that was really important. And therefore, I mean, in their words their four year. My gift wasn't going to make as much of an impact in the lives of students but understanding what your community college is doing here in our community. I knew that it would be a much bigger impact right so donors think of that our alumni again back to that question of how do we talk to folks that are going off to four year schools, again, their opportunity to engage their opportunity to engage with that first gen student at your college is very different than their opportunity to mentor somebody at that that four year so there are I think our eyes and opportunities for meaning for the donor, but let's talk specifically there about three or four questions and we are about 12 minutes here from the We do or we're going to get into kind of alumni councils here just a moment Chris, but let's go back to ROI for your alumni. Tell us a little bit if you've got any data on that there are about four or five questions about ROI on your mailings ROI on think for you ROI on live alumni, or even like email and kind of concerns about the return for how much emails and how frequent and worries about the can spam act. So kind of answer those questions about just ROI as you're using these different strategies and communication, what's really working, how do you know it's working. We set some goals specifically from kind of an annual giving standpoint and we just said we had to put some goals out there to give us something to get to, you know, it wasn't going to be like and then tomorrow we'll start our billion dollar campaign. And so we looked at the data and said where are a few areas that we want to make a change. One was new alumni donors to the average age of our donor was 65 plus so we wanted to increase donors 25 to 44, and we wanted to increase the average gift. And one of our bigger goals was, and even though I don't know that a lot of community colleges, do this and maybe we shouldn't, I don't know but I was just interested to see what was our percentage of alumni giving. And, you know, for those of you keeping track at home you have your kind of, you know, Princeton's and MIT is that are maybe around like 25%. Maybe your larger state schools, if they're really good maybe like a 14% some small privates maybe at a 7%. And we were at maybe point 2%, and I'm proud to say our goal was to get to a whole number. And we are there. And again that's subjective right because we were talking all about the different but but I think it's starting with some small goals to achieve to at least help you to start to narrow down what are some of the strategies, I want to work on to at least help move the needle in some of the areas where I probably have a lot of room to grow, you know, how do I shoot fish in a barrel, not that I support fish violence. So we so we're so we use the VSC right so I'm the voluntary support of education and we have, you know, I think we're at around 2% or something and we put it in our strategic plan we just finished developing a brand new strategic plan initiative, strictly around alumni and it's one of the, one of them is to create events to events around the country, each year, right so we know we have a tremendous amount we've looked at where our alumni live. They live in Florida, they live in North Carolina. You know they live on the west coast, different places right so we're going to start doing some events there, but the data. We're trying to do so we actually put that we want to increase our alumni giving by 4.6%, right, which is significant when you're only around 2% right I think we're just under 2% even. But these are the strategies that we're looking to do it, we're looking to actively personally engage them, you know, and again, we increased our newsletter, we were doing it quarterly, we're doing it monthly, we increased, we're doing an alumni spotlight monthly opposite we're sending out a communication whether it's an alumni spotlight or the newsletter. So we're trying to do all this engagement. Before we go and meet with them and get them right because we want them to come to us we don't want to do these trips we don't want to do. Make this investment, if they're not going to be successful. I know we're running we're gonna we've got about eight minutes left so let's move to alumni councils. Chris I remember at our last case conference, I know you had a session there talking about your employer focused alumni councils. Obviously we don't have time for the whole session but give us some of the highlights about sort of the vision like what was your thinking behind these employer based alumni councils versus other people that might have that traditional kind of alumni advisory council that's opposite not connected to your board but separate right. Why did you go with the employer focused and then sort of what's been what's been the results of having those employer focused alumni councils. Yeah, and so we really as, as we were dreaming this part of it I was trying to figure out a way, what is something that I can get somebody around but show the value to them. And what we heard from our local employers as we're doing a number of other things was they're trying to create culture and a sense of belonging at their pace of employment, and they have to find ways that their employees can interact outside of oh hey I work at State Farm that's one of our major employers here that it's not enough to simply say oh, I'm a State Farm employee so are you well that's 15,000 people that that does nothing. So they have what they call these affinity groups with inside State Farm, and I saw that they had things for veterans they had things for a number of other parts and it's almost like a college in and of itself that you can start up any student group, and so it Why don't we just simply see if they'll have one for Heartland Community College graduates and alumni councils as it is standard up inside, allow people from across departments to come together so, and then it gives leadership opportunities inside of State Farm Yeah, I might be a new employee here but I am the chair of the Heartland Community College alumni council at State Farm, I got to work on my communication skills reaching across departments. So it got the employer excited and I had to find something that the employer would want. And if it's a chance for them to build again community inside. If it was a chance for them. I then also talked about how they build uses a recruiting tool back here on our campus to be able to show our students, oh look, fellow Heartland graduates go to work at this place so they get a chance to capture local talent. So it's selling back to the employer of this is why you should stand this up now once they do so, the great thing that happens is we now get people that we weren't aware of going oh yeah I'm an alum and I want to join that group because it looks good at the place where I'm currently employed and I can be involved. They then add each one of their businesses, create their own culture create their own structure, but they're capturing data for us. They're now engaging with us in that way. And they're the ones doing the work for us. It's not on us to pull these together. They do it. It's not on us to push out the communication, they do it. Our name outside of Heartland Community College isn't anywhere. It's now sits next to the State Farm logo it sits next to the country financial logo. It sits next to the Rivian logo so it's no longer us we're now getting this kind of co opting in a positive way, and people choosing to believe in more on our brand as an employer. All of the employers who are starting to do this are starting to go, holy cow, we didn't realize we had X number of alums from Heartland working here for us. We probably should give you a little bit more because, you know, 20% of our workforce, our co our test pilot one is a local imaging. They do healthcare imaging and radio and radiography, and that part of it, they found, not just their radiographers but the other people working there. I think it was over 60% of their employees were Heartland alums. And so they're like, yeah, you guys are awesome. We owe you so much more and have been that part, and you then get to see this this kind of natural thing that's occurring. But it's not your work, they take it on they take ownership, and you just simply kind of lay out for them. Here are a couple of goals and objectives and the simple part is, hey stand up your council and decide when you're going to meet how often you're going to meet and consider joining us for our service day. Never make an ask. We wait almost until year two or three, and we talk within as we want you to join our community campaign. I think it's year three, and be part of our overall goal of getting to 500 identified alums as part of our giving across our community. And so it's bit by bit. So again, we then have the pins that the council can give out they come together, but they get to decide it's not us, and that allows them to absorb it more so I want to leave us. Yeah, that's outstanding. Yeah, thank you so much for kind of sharing a little bit about that I know there was a question around where folks are living their data I know what we're working with is with our workforce side of the college. As they oversee also all of our advisory councils for different programs, they use Salesforce and so we're working on maintaining all of our alumni in that database because it's employer related. And then as they make gifts, where they move into our, our donor CRM which is our NXT, and then they have a constituent code right as alumni and other codes that are are appropriate to them. So that's one of the questions I know where it's on there, but as we're wrapping up time I want to make sure we've got just about three minutes left. So if each of you can literally take 45 to 60 seconds. Give us your greatest piece of advice or a good strategy. If I'm starting out where I want to take the next step and what we're doing with alumni giving, give us one or two pieces of advice in 30 seconds to 60 seconds. Let's go with you, Alice and then we'll go Diana and then back to Chris. Find out where you are. Make a plan. And then try things more than once. People, if people aren't used to being asked if they're not used to being asked to go to event if they're not used to coming to a stewardship event. They're not used to giving on a, on a brand new giving day. Repeat, repeat, repeat, and you'll see it pay off. Yeah, and I would say, do your research, right? Research, research, research, you know, look at your alumni again who they are, where they are, how you can connect with them. I always think it's good to connect with them at their level. Like, what's important to them. Make sure if you see they played athletics when they were at the college, make sure that they're getting all the information about your athletics. If your teams and division, you know, three in their regional champion, you know, make sure they're getting the information so that you're connecting with them about what's important to them. Talk to who's talking to you pay attention to who's commenting on your posts on social media, who's replied back going back to Allison's point of who's giving you consistently, even if it is five or $10. Go talk to them, and then ask them to be advocates for you, ask them to be the ones that are carrying the torch for you. And then I the other part to get yourself a Gina, and not not that position, but the literal person and I'm sure within this chat she was ready to take any offers from all of you but she she's been an amazing part of what we're doing, and having somebody who's passionate and dedicated to that aspect of it. Holy moly. Oh, john you're still muted but you're doing great. I was just going to go ahead. We covered so much I was messaging john I think we need another webinar just about data management donor alumni there were so many questions that took up a lot of our time but they were important questions, and obviously what everyone in this audience needed to hear and learn about. So thank you thank you watching the chat still after this is done we will send the recording out we tighten it up a little bit for time, but it's just lots of taking out Meg saying, um, so don't worry you won't miss anything substantial, but we'll send it out after and if it's all right with the group will share everyone's emails all of our panelists emails with our audience so in case you didn't have a chance to follow up or Chris there's a question about your presentation. If you could share that so we'll make sure everyone has the emails and john you want to wrap it up for us just thank you everyone Natalia has been in the background I should have mentioned her in the beginning but thank you Natalia for keeping us organized john back to you. There was on the call take 30 seconds and put in what was your biggest takeaway I can tell you one thing is, I'm going to start filling my backpack with our alumni challenge points it has our logo on the front of the college and it sort of CCA alumni on the back and I'm going to start making sure I'm asking every crowd every presentation, who is an alumni, because we all do that a lot that's such a simple easy thing, like why am I not doing it so that is one big takeaway for me, but I heard so much about engaging and celebrating informing and asking before you ask and then actually making the ask and so so many good takeaways today thank you everyone our panelists you were amazing. Everyone have a great, great holiday season as we're through Thanksgiving and heading into the other parts of the holidays so thank you so much for joining us. We look forward to seeing as the next webinar, or one of the case conferences coming up. Thanks everybody. Bye. Bye. Great job.

alumni engagement

community colleges

fundraising strategies

networking events

Razor's Edge

employer-based councils

data management

LiveAlumni

alumni relationships

alumni involvement