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Strategies for Engaging International Alumni
Strategies for Engaging International Alumni Recor ...
Strategies for Engaging International Alumni Recording
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It's really good to see so many people from all these different places. This topic is really interesting and I just, everyone's knowledge, I saw this presentation at the case conference myself, so I know it's very, very good. So you're in for a treat here. Now you're just setting expectations too high, you need to set them lower and everybody will be pleasantly surprised. I think that I am ready. Fiona, are you ready? Yeah. Jacob, thumbs up for you. Good, over in Case HQ. All right, awesome. Let's go ahead and get started then. I am Claudia Taylor. Thank you for being here. I am the Director of Events and Stewardship at the University of North Texas Ryan College of Business and I'm also on the Case District 4 cabinet. So it's my pleasure to be hosting this webinar. I'm thrilled to have you here. It is our, I think it's our third together so far. This is an opportunity to take the highest rated sessions from the conference that we had in San Antonio in April of last year and present them for free to our members in an online format. So it's very exciting. Today we are digging into strategies for engaging international alumni, a topic that I know a lot of institutions are really hoping to get, you know, some more knowledge on since we have so many international students coming to our institutions who will hopefully one day become international alumni. Before we get started, a few housekeeping items. First, we hope you'll ask a lot of questions. Please drop them in the comment section and I will filter them up to our presenter at the end of the session. We'll try to get to all of them. Keep an eye on the comment section. I'll be dropping links and additional information in there throughout the presentation. And if you experience any technical difficulty, just send me a private message and I will try to troubleshoot for you. Now, I am thrilled to introduce our presenter today, Fiona Masarenko. Fiona is the Director of Global Initiatives and Alumni Relations at the University of Texas at Austin. She brings a unique perspective to her position, having lived abroad in Indonesia, Ukraine, and France, and traveling to 30 countries. In her position, she collaborates across campus to help develop meaningful engagement between faculty, students, and alumni from around the world, fostering scholarships, partnerships, building a culture of philanthropy, and of course, sharing UT Austin's mission and vision on a global scale. Fiona is a UT Austin alumna herself, having earned a master's degree from the LBJ School of Public Affairs, in addition to her bachelor's degree in International Relations and French from the University of Richmond. Fiona, thank you for being here today, and take it away. Thanks Claudia, and I want to thank CASE and District 4 for inviting me today and to everybody who's on the Zoom today for your time. It's always a little bit awkward to hear your bio read like that. And this is a new field, I think, in international advancement, or if not new, then gaining much more attention and traction. And so I am sure that you guys have some ideas and things that I can learn from, and I certainly hope that I'm able to share some nuggets that you can walk away with. You heard a little bit about my international background, awkward listening to my bio, and I added an awkward photo here just to provide some context of why I think I'm in this field, why it's so important to me. This is a picture of me as a first grader living in Jakarta, Indonesia. I am first generation American, my mom was South African, my dad was English, so I really consider myself a global citizen and always driven, I think, by connecting with people and using storytelling as a motive to engage and dig deeper and find connection. And so that's what I think keeps me really motivated in this space. So what we're going to talk about today is international alumni engagement. What is alumni engagement? How is it different for international alumni? We'll look at how international and alumni engagement has evolved at UT, and how we're leveraging our goals, our future-backed goals, to drive our strategy in our activities, and then we'll look at those strategies and dig into some of the things that we found successful So, what is alumni engagement? Obviously, you guys have heard the statistics before, alumni who engage with the university and volunteer experiences are more likely to give, who participate in events are more likely to offer financial support as well. And when we think about alumni relations, we think about it in terms of how we connect with each other, what infrastructure is in place, what is the relationship, and an engagement that goes a little bit deeper than that to build intentional vehicles through which the university and alumni are connected in ways that are meaningful. And that's where the magic happens. We're all people with individual lives, busy schedules, disparate interests, limited time, so there has to be meaningful and deeper connection. And that's really much easier to do with alumni who are closer proximity to the university, whether it's in the same town, the same state, same country. It's a lot more challenging and complicated to engage with international alumni. So I would welcome you to pop in some thoughts in here in the chat of what you perceive as what makes engaging with international alumni different from domestic alumni. For me, and Jacob and I were talking about this a little bit earlier, philanthropy and volunteerism are very American concepts, very Western concepts. They're not shared among all cultures. And our alumni do get that experience. They're exposed to it on campus, but it is a steep, I think, learning curve and takes a lot of relationship building and intercultural competence and sensitivity to that. In addition, there's all kinds of geopolitical things to consider. Now is not the right time necessarily to be fundraising in the Middle East, for example, or hosting events or broaching certain topics. Same with Eastern Europe. So the geopolitical context is really important. Ecuador and Argentina right now, same kind of thing. Sensitivity towards what's going on in their countries, in their homes or where their families are. And then we also consider the experience of alumni. So UT is obviously a graduate institution. The bulk of our international students are graduate students. They have a different experience on campus than undergraduate students. So they're not going to necessarily have the same affinity for football or want to go and have a happy hour. Many of them end up being PhDs and faculty at other institutions. And so that also drives how we want to engage with them and what strategies that we look to. So I think it's important to kind of understand where we have come from and where we are. You probably know our tagline, what starts here changes the world, which we love. And we have the world changers and change makers and change starts here. And interestingly enough, the world was really not an audience of UT Austin or engaged intentionally only until the last sort of 10 years. So I'd like to kind of just dig in and tell you the story of where we started and where we're going. So we have more than 500,000 living alumni across 176 countries. Our concentrations of alumni track with our largest international student population. So of course, we've got many, our highest concentrations of students are from China, India, Korea. We see that across US institutions. We found that our largest population of PhD alumni are in Korea. So that's something that's driving our engagement in Korea. And we find that our ambassadors are our greatest, our alumni are our greatest ambassadors at elevating our visibility around the world, strengthening institutional partnerships and collaborations, creating opportunities. And UT doesn't do a lot of marketing. And we always hear from our alumni, Michigan is here and Arizona is here and they're all at these fairs, where is UT? And so we've created some vehicles to equip our alumni to represent UT there. And as such a large institution, a public university with close ties to the state of Texas, alumni relations at UT has really been primarily focused on alumni in Texas and driven by Texas exes, as well as our individual colleges and schools. So it's, nobody likes to use the word decentralized, but that's true. And it can be difficult to always be on the same side, out from the outside, they just see us as UT and we want to make sure that we're presenting and keeping in touch. But Texas Development, Texas Exes and Texas Global, which is where I sit, came together and identified this sort of missing piece. There was growing international outreach among gift officers, but gift officers were having conversations and people were saying, well, I haven't heard from UT, nobody from UT has been here in 30 years. And now I know you're coming to ask me for money. Texas Exes is an amazing alumni association, but there's a stark difference between the 54 chapters they have in Texas alone versus the 18 chapters that they have internationally. And so that's how my position came about. And I think it's important to provide context that I'm not in the development office, I'm actually in the provost portfolio. And we've created this kind of trifecta of the alumni association, the development office, and international advancement, and then my team and where we sit and creating opportunities really around the academic mission of the university, creating engagement opportunities and relationships that are helping to support the relationships and conversations that the international advancement team are having. And it's been a learning curve and we're still working on it, but it has been a strategy that is working for us. So that's kind of what my team is bringing to this, is this cross-institutional collaboration, bringing in the alumni relations people and gift officers embedded in different colleges and schools so that we're sharing information and identifying opportunities for collaboration and to complement what we're doing to strategically engage Longhorns for Life, which is one of the pillars of the strategic plan that our president unveiled a couple of years ago. And I'm sure that you all can relate to some of the challenges that we've had and continue to navigate, which is bad data, outdated contact information, data protection laws, GDPR, other privacy laws, firewalls in certain countries, tools, our database and systems weren't optimized for international outreach, our homegrown CRM couldn't actually take international addresses until about five or six years ago. We've had countries listed like Taiwan, a province of China, was on our website. That turned off a lot of people who were coming to the giving website to give and saw that and decided not to. Those are just a couple of examples. And, of course, the pandemic, when travel wasn't possible, we were separated by years of disengagement and untraversable distances that made what we're trying to do difficult, but in some ways, too, led us into this virtual space where we're able to have conversations and events in ways that we really couldn't before. So, you know, every institution is unique and our approaches to alumni engagement are unique. We all face similar challenges. And the truth is that there's no one size fits all. But we're driven by a vision that's centered on relationships, and that's really important for us. That's our driving force. And it's not recruitment, it's not money, it's relationships, and we're trying to be authentic and transparent. And so out of our vision, we've created sort of these four goals of what we want to achieve in our partnership across the university and what Texas Global in this space is trying to achieve. So, you know, we want a connected community. We want to have those relationships. We want to be able to provide a number, a variety of ways for alumni to engage so it's not just one thing, and it can sustain global health crises, evolutions in technology, political upheavals, et cetera. And in order to support that, we need to have a strong cross-institutional commitment to international alumni engagement, as well as starting the relationship with our students who are going to be our alumni and making sure that we already have those relationships so when they leave campus, they're not going to lose touch with us for the next 20 years when they're successful and we're having conversations. So out of these goals, we have come up with some strategies that we're focusing on, and I'm going to walk through those right now. I mentioned data. Data, data, data, it's really important. I don't need to tell you that. But when I came into this role, I really wanted to be intentional about not just having this top-down, sometimes perceived as colonial approach of here's what we're going to offer. Rather, we wanted to say, hey, international alums, this is what we're doing. We're intentionally reaching out to you. We want to know where you are and how you're interested in engaging with the university. So it goes beyond having good contact information, but data to drive your strategy. Where are they? What is it that they want? How do they want to be involved? And then to use that data to inform your activities. If they don't want virtual events, don't do virtual events. If they don't want lectures, don't do that. If they're looking for networking, think about how you can facilitate that. And we did a survey and discovered that, for example, there's more of an appetite for in-person events than there is for online. And something that we've also been committed to is keeping our data as much as possible, strategies for getting updated contact information. Things that we have found helpful are things like RocketReach. I don't know if you guys have heard about that, but you can find email addresses for people. If you've got some information about them, but you have a bad email address, RocketReach can help you find that. There's a certain number of free searches, and then there's different levels of signing up. And LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Of course, LinkedIn is where a lot of us spend a lot of time, I'm sure, looking for people. And LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a way to slide into their DMs if they're not a connection. We've had a lot of gift officers who make a cold call on LinkedIn through Sales Navigator, and they've gotten meetings out of that. So those are two tips I wanted to extend there. The other thing that we've done is social media campaigns, and where in the world are you to get alumni to update their information and give them a reason for why it's important and what information they'll be getting from us and how their data is protected. So these are some of the results of that survey that I mentioned that we did a couple of years ago. This tracked with our data. It was good to see that our responses match sort of where we knew people were. This gave us a breakdown of who they were. Most of them that responded were international graduate students. Some were undergraduate students, and we had some that also studied abroad. Let's see. And then we got some data on how they wanted to engage. So virtual events, almost 20% said they're still interested in them. I would like to redo the survey and see what the appetite is for there. But this is where we did our building blocks and starting to build our framework. Communications and storytelling, we're all inundated with marketing communications. I was out of the office for three days, had 200 emails when I came back, and probably 20 of those really require some urgent attention. So what we have done is tried to make our emails really engaging, not too long. We've improved our website content with calls to action, highlighting events, stories, connections that inspire loyalty and peak interest. So what's happening in Korea? What does UT have to do with that? What is the story behind that? How can we share that message? And student stories, alumni, where are they now? And how can we drive traffic to our website to take an action, to share information with them on the opportunities they have to engage through the stories that we have on our website and are putting up on LinkedIn or other social media so that we've got that inbound marketing working for us? And then again, your data or the survey or whatever you know about your international population can inform what stories you should be telling. One thing that we have done is targeted communication around holidays of cultural significance. Most of our alumni are in Asia, and we can do this by address. So we're not getting tricky about cultures that you can't really identify well in a CRM. So we're lucky to have really wonderful graphic designers and students who can help us create these graphics. We send them via email from our senior vice provost for global engagement. We have them professionally translated, and it's a really nice touch point. And we sent out the happy Thanksgiving to Canadian alumni, and we got a response like, wow, I've never ever had anything from UT about Canadian Thanksgiving. And we had one of our mid-autumn festival greetings go to alumni in Japan, and it was translated into Japanese. And somebody wrote back and said, this is really amazing to see UT recognizing this holiday that's so significant for me, but also in my language. So small touches like these can have a big impact. And these don't have to be laborious. You don't have to have a graphic designer to do this. Look at who your students on campus are that you can talk to about, hey, what do you think about this holiday or this graphic that I've created in Canva? What messaging do you think would be impactful? And you can look at your faculty and language or your Centers for Middle Eastern Studies or whatever it is. And then you can also use that as an engagement opportunity for your alumni leaders, like, hey, I'd love to get your take on this. And people love to give advice. So that's a low-hanging fruit, I think that that's an easy way to start engaging. And then also thinking about social media. And we email these readings. We put them on social media. We also have to think about the younger alumni. They're not on Facebook. They're on Instagram. But our older alumni are on Facebook. We have all these WhatsApp groups that we're learning about that exist among our international alums. And we've now, through all this outreach, learned our Taiwanese are online. And Koreans are on KakaoTalk. So I have way more social media than I wanted on my phone. But it's a really great listening tool and a way to just put messages out there, like, hey, we're thinking about you. Same with events that you're having or significant university dates that you can cross-promote as an outreach opportunity. I touched on this about our intra-institutional partnerships. This is hard. And it's smaller institutions. It's different. And of course, we're really large. But alumni see us as a united and single entity. And so we have really used our data, actually, to show our colleagues across campus what opportunities there are and identify how that aligns with what they're doing and where we can collaborate. We work closely with our career services to talk about alumni who are interested in creating internship opportunities. We have created a Teams channel where maybe we don't have room for other meetings, but we've got this Teams channel. And people can post, like, hey, I'm going to India, who's got people there that I can meet with? I've got a couple hours extra in my schedule. Or has anybody been there before? What are people doing in Costa Rica? I have somebody coming to campus from Costa Rica, and I'd love to be able to talk to them. And the same way, we've created a listserv, too, so that people can email and ask questions or we can easily share with the people that are working in the same space so that we're sharing information. Jacob asked me, as we were getting started, are we doing in-person events or virtual events? We do both. And in-person events are really difficult. And I know that not everybody has a budget to travel. So I would suggest, if you are not connected to your international office, get connected to them. Find out through them what faculty you're traveling. And if you've got faculty leading a study abroad program to Singapore, is there an alum there who could maybe have the class come to their office or set up a networking event with the Alumni Association there or something? Because of my position, I travel with the senior vice provost for global engagement, where we're talking to academic institutions. And so while we're in-country, we host events and we bring leadership. And we're starting to get more deans that are interested in traveling with us. Some universities, the president and provost are traveling all the time. At ours, it's the senior vice provost who's the face of the university globally. But you can see there's just a variety of opportunities that sometimes we don't think about. Some associations have, like we have the flying longhorns of travel that's organized that you've got opportunity there to build relationships to. And then we do events on campus as well to build relationships with our international students. So we do an alumni orientation, which is something that I picked up from another case colleague in training our international alums. What does it mean to be an alum? Being an alum and identifying as a graduate of your college is also a very American Western thing. So we tell them, here are all of the resources available to you. And here's why it's important to stay in touch. And here's what it means to be a part of the Longhorn global community and how it can support you in your career and growth. We're introducing a student and alum mentorship program centered around global careers. So this brings in study abroad people and alumni that are living around the world. And then we do special welcomes for international students and an international student graduating reception that recognizes them. And then we work with the Texas X's chapters and friends that we've made around the world to do send offs and welcomes for students leaving to come to UT and new graduates that are moving back or moving to a country and looking to make connections there. So we're still in the throes of measuring success. But of course, this goes back to the data as how many addresses are you able to update? What is your open rate and your click through rate? And you can add tracking to your email so that you know, to your link so that you know, is it email that's driving engagement? What emails are driving engagement? Who are they coming from that drives, that gets more people to respond? Is it social media? We have looked at like how we're increasing our mailing list. Our social engagement is our following in certain places that we're trying to hit increasing or not. We've done some net promoter score surveys after virtual events. Our response rate is not great, but those that do respond really like our events. So we take that with a grain of salt. But there's lots of variety of ways, a variety of ways you can measure your success. And of course, that just goes into informing what to continue or what to do differently. And I will stop there only with two recommendations of books, if you haven't heard of them, that I have found really helpful in this space, which is new. And Gretchen Dobson and Sandra Varela are sort of the leaders in international alumni engagement. And then the alumni way, I follow Maria Gallo on LinkedIn and subscribe to her newsletter and find her insight really helpful too. So I will stop sharing there. Thanks for listening to me ramble on. That's my contact information. That's my contact information. I'm always happy to talk to you if you want to check out our social media to see what we're putting up there. And then I'll just mention that this photo was taken at my first international event that we organized in Seoul in 2022. Our VP of research happened to be there at the same time. We had some alumni help us find this venue because all the venues were sold out after the pandemic. I hadn't seen it until we got there, but it ended up being really beautiful. And we had this mix of older alumni, less recent alumni, and more recent alumni, and a lot of people who had never met before and didn't even realize that there was a community. So here we go. And I would love to know. I haven't been monitoring the chat. No, I've got some questions for you. OK, so I guess one of the first questions that I have is, how do you start the conversation with international alumni? Are they coming to you and saying, I want to start a chapter? Or is it you're reaching out to them and just putting feelers out there? It's kind of a both and. So on our website, which is for Global Alumni, we have Texas Exes chapters as an engagement opportunity. Like, here are the chapters that exist. Here's how to find them. If you want to establish one, I can help connect into the Texas Exes and have that conversation with them. I'm really involved in the international chapters. But it is also something that, if it comes up in conversation, that we help to steward. So for example, we have a chapter in France. It's not really a chapter. It's one person. It's not really active. She's using it maybe in ways that aren't aligned with what we're hoping to do. But we know we have a concentration of alumni there. And so we have worked with her to try to get some other alumni involved. We've reached out to some who have said, yeah, I'd like to do something. We've got people who have said, I want to be engaged, but I can't be a leader right now. But I have these other people that you might want to talk to. And so we're working with them to build up that chapter. And then in conversations when we're traveling or having outreach and people are like, I don't even know what to do, then we just present it as an opportunity. So it's about the end, I guess. Yeah, yeah. We had another question come in. Does UT have multiple donor management CRMs? And if so, is there one that is primary? We have one main one that's homegrown. And that's going to be sunset in a couple of years and move over to Salesforce. What I have found is that it's, I'll say, I'm committed to democracy of data. And we put all of our stuff in there. We mark who we've talked to. We want that track record to be in their profile so that when the lottery and we're not here anymore, the next group has all of that data to continue that conversation for the benefit of the university. However, we know that a lot of colleges and schools are using different email platforms and that a lot of our data is living on Excel spreadsheets, on somebody's desktop or inbox and not always getting into the central database. And so that is one of my goals. And that's kind of one of the things, one of the reasons I'm kind of creating this little cross-institutional community of people who understand or are interested in international so that in the Teams channel or on our listserv, we can remind people like, hey, if you're getting data, please make sure that you're updating it in VIP. That's what it's called. So that we can present that sort of unified history and have that data and not lose it when those people win the lottery. Right. I used to say, yeah, get hit by a bus, but I think winning- I like the lottery. Yeah, that's much more positive. You mentioned that you had done a survey. What system or what program did you use to do that survey? Yeah, we used Qualtrics. Okay. And just sent it to everybody that we knew. We modeled it, I think, after some surveys that we had seen our peers doing. And I think there was some case examples too. And we were thinking about what is it, what was important to us. I think even in that book by Gretchen Dobson, there are some questions in there too. So it's not scientific, it's not vetted by people who are really good at doing surveys, because I know there's an art and science behind it. We didn't have that and we were trying to get some data fast. So we just were grassroots and put together a Qualtrics survey and sent it out to the addresses that we had. And you talked a little bit about this, but if an institution wanted to sort of create a position like this, where would they start? And who was kind of the driving force behind instituting your position at your institution? If you know the answer to that. Yeah, no, I do. I do because when I joined UT in 2014, it was just around the time that the development office had started looking for new opportunities and they wanted to do international outreach, but they didn't know where to start. So they contacted the international office, which is where I was, which is what Texas Global used to be called to talk about what is going on? Where is there activities? What should we be doing? Who should we be talking to? Who's a cultural expert that can provide us with some information before we travel? And there were a couple instances of like somebody who's very dear colleague, I love the story, outreach to an alum and said, I'm gonna be in Jakarta. I'd love to have lunch with you. He flew to Jakarta and he'd never been there before. He was almost late because he didn't factor in the like two to three hours of traffic. The guy said, this is great. I'm so happy to meet with you in Jakarta, but I live in Singapore. So what are you doing in Jakarta? And by the way, I've been giving to my other alma mater for the last 30 years and they've been in really great touch with me. I haven't heard from UT. I know you want my money. You know, it was not a great conversation. Now, I think that sort of highlighted for them that there needed to be more relationship building and that they didn't have the alumni relations staff on or capacity because they were on the principal gifts team. So they were really looking at high prospect donors and that alumni relations piece was missing. And so they came to the international office, the president and provost in 2019 introduced a new position at UT, which was senior vice provost for global engagement to lead the internationalization strategy of the university. And when she came on board, one of her questions was, what are we doing internationally with our alumni? And everybody was kind of like, you know, we're doing this and Texas X's is doing this. And so I think she really spearheaded that conversation and spoke to the leaders of Texas X's and Texas development and they agreed that there needed to be extra support for international alumni relations. And so that's how my position was created. I do a lot more than alumni relations. And if I had less in my portfolio, we may have been a little bit further along than we are, but yeah, that was the genesis of that. So, you know, whether it's going to your VP of development or talking to your provost or the VP for international or whoever it is, even talking about the need for something, whether it's a position like that, I think is a good way to get started. And that we kind of just mentioned that what I'm going to ask about next, but when you are sort of marketing to an international audience in terms of, I get from your presentation that you're trying to build relationships and not necessarily making direct asks or asking for campaign contributions. But if you are, what are the most effective ways, are email campaigns the most effective way to do that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I did mention relationships a lot and say that we're not doing fundraising. I- You're always doing fundraising. Development-lite because we do participate in our crowdfunding, university-wide days and campaigns. We do an email campaign around international education week where we get letters from students and from the senior vice provost. And I do work really closely with the frontline gift officers on their proposals. We provide all kinds of information about how many international students do we have from Mexico? What faculty-led study abroad programs do we have in Mexico? Who are institutional partners in Mexico? I'm just using Mexico as an example because that informs their conversation. And then when they learn what the alum is interested in, then they know, and it's global, they know they can rely on us for arranging a conversation with graduate students in engineering from Mexico with this alum who might inspire them to give. I'm kind of going around in circles of your questions. We've done, nobody gets anything from social media and really our international folks are not on all of the platforms anyway. Email campaigns have been more effective. In fact, in our first crowdfunding university giving days, we sent out emails to our international population and that was how other colleges and schools got some of their larger online gifts. It was through our emails that they were giving to their degree granting college or school, which obviously we're not. We tested direct mail and text and phone during International Education Week with our annual giving team. The stats from that are not looking great and I think they only mailed to UF addresses so that doesn't help there. I think that the strategy for international is really not gonna be the annual giving approach. It is more of the long-term relationship building and larger gifts that are really gonna pay off. But I don't have evidence of that yet. I have anecdotal. Anecdotal, right. Yeah. And do you see a more or a higher level of engagement when you translate when there is a language barrier? Do you have a higher level of engagement when you translate? Do you mean like in the email greetings? Yes. Yeah, we haven't tested that to be honest. Although one year we didn't get our translations in time and so it did only go out in English. I do get a higher reply rate when it does go out in other languages. And sometimes people will get it and send it to somebody else like the VP of research being like, oh, who did this come from? This is really cool, I've never seen this before. So I don't know that it necessarily increases engagement but it demonstrates an understanding of another culture and what the language around that holiday is in that culture. So I guess recognizing that unique part of whatever it is that you're sending out, the home you're sending it. Going that extra mile and meeting them. Right, right. But you have to be very careful with translations and so get your message translated by a professional and vet it with a language, native speakers on campus, faculty and students to make sure that the context is there and that there's nothing weird. Don't just enter it into Google Translate and hope for the best. Exactly, right. I can see that. Well, I don't have any more questions and I wanted to say thank you so much. I appreciate you so much for being here and being part of our Together series. And I hope that you'll come to our conference in April of this year. I hope we'll see you again. Yeah, actually I have to check the dates cause I might be in Korea then. We're headed to Korea. I mean, you must travel all the time, so. I know, but I hope that my colleagues on the call at least took away a few nuggets and I'm always happy to connect. So please feel free to reach out with additional questions. And if you have ideas or successes that you've had, I would love to learn about them too because we're also kind of building this plane as we're flying it. And I always have such great input from colleagues around Texas and around the country, so. Yes, I love that. Thank you again so much for being here and thank all of you for joining us. I would like to invite everybody to register for the conference that's happening in April 14th through 16th. And you'll see a lot more presentations that are great just like this one. You can register right now. The early bird registration price is good through March 3rd. I also hope you'll mark your calendar and join us for our next Together. It is happening February 15th at 2 p.m. Central. We'll be joined by Carrie Phillips of the University of Arkansas Little Rock and Rachel Putman of the University of Arkansas Fort Smith who will present Keeping It Real, Authentic Ways to Share Your Voice, Vision, and Values Online. So this is aimed at marketing and communications professionals, but it's really important information that all frontline fundraisers can use in telling their institution's story. You can register right now. There's a link in the chat and other links there for the conference specifically. Thank you again for joining us and I hope we'll see you on February 15th. Thanks everybody. Thanks Fiona. Bye everyone. Okay.
Video Summary
In this webinar, Fiona Masarenko, the Director of Global Initiatives and Alumni Relations at the University of Texas at Austin, discusses strategies for engaging international alumni. She emphasizes the importance of building relationships with international alumni and understanding the unique challenges and cultural differences they face. Masarenko highlights several key strategies used by the University of Texas at Austin, including data-driven outreach, targeted communication, and cross-institutional partnerships. She also discusses the use of social media and email campaigns, as well as in-person events, to engage international alumni. Masarenko emphasizes the need for personalized and meaningful engagement with international alumni in order to foster loyalty and support for the institution. She concludes by sharing resources and recommendations for further reading on international alumni engagement.
Keywords
webinar
Fiona Masarenko
engaging international alumni
data-driven outreach
cross-institutional partnerships
personalized engagement
loyalty
resources
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