Create an Use Policy

Transcription

1 Create an Use Policy your alumni but not everybody at once! Are your valued alumni being bombarded with campus ? Learn how to set an effective and sensible communication policy. In this report you ll learn how to: 1) 2) 3) 4) Create an alumni -use policy for your campus Learn the advantages of involving other departments Determine how to use your addresses to solicit contributions Understand the economic impact of collecting and fixing bad and undeliverable addresses & much more! By Don Philabaum President & CEO IAC 1

2 How things have changed! It s been 10 years since the Internet began to revolutionize how people including your alumni live and communicate. Back in 1995 you were probably focused on buying better computers and trying to improve the way you managed the millions of records you keep. But today, if you re like most alumni and development executives, you re beginning to see how , if its use isn t managed properly, can change from that wonderful communication tool to a source of potential damage to your valuable relationship with your alumni. In this report we show you how to create an -use policy that will prevent that disaster by setting communications standards that every department will follow. You ll learn what to include in your policy and get a blueprint to help you write it. You ll learn how much you have to gain by putting this policy in writing and putting it in force. Be sure to share this critical information with your staff, and start getting those benefits today! 2

3 10 steps..to create a campus wide alumni -use policy After nearly a decade of collecting addresses, most alumni associations feel they re ready to use to effectively communicate with and market to their alumni. But the numbers show an incomplete picture. Our research shows that most associations have acquired, on average, only 17% of their alumni s addresses. While a few have captured as many as 50%, some have as few as 7%! What are your numbers? Let s look at an example. Let s say of your 30,000 alumni, you ve acquired 20% of their addresses (6,000). Let s also assume you increase the number of addresses by 20% each year over the next 5 years you end up with 14,929 addresses. That s still only 49.77% of your alumni. You still have a way to go. Good News/Bad News The good news is that as you continue to collect more alumni addresses, you ll eventually be able to reach most of your alumni more frequently and at less cost. The bad news, though, is that a lot of other departments are going to want to do the same thing and the consequences could be serious. As the effectiveness of communication becomes clearer, other departments will insist they want to reach their constituents, too. The law school, engineering school, health, communication, sports and other departments will want to use your database, or they ll attempt to mimic your success by building their own address database of the same alumni addresses. Without a policy in place, your campus could be sending countless communications from many different departments, all demanding attention and gradually annoying the heck out of your valued alumni. Don t wait for that to happen. Now is the time to create a campus wide -use policy. Follow these important steps: I. Identify your goals. II. Determine how often you will alumni each month. III. Decide if and how you will use to solicit contributions. IV. Consider the needs and participation of other departments and colleges on campus, and control the content, frequency and timing of communications. 3

4 V. Determine the type of e-marketing tools available to other departments on campus. VI. Target each of your communications and analyze the results so that you make your campaigns more effective. VII. Decide whether you will charge a fee to other departments for sending their communications. VIII. Build a strategy to fix bad/undeliverable addresses. IX. Develop guidelines on how to write , including length and content. X. Determine what type of marketing your affinity partners are allowed to do and how often they can use your list. Now, let s examine your options for each step. 4

5 I. Identify your goals The first step is to decide what you want your -use policy to accomplish. In our talks with hundreds of alumni professionals around the world, we hear many of the same wishes. In nearly every conversation, professionals say they want to do the following: 1. Prevent alumni from being flooded with s from all departments on campus 2. Serve as the central database for all addresses, so that everyone can work together to collect and correct them 3. Send targeted communications more often to alumni 4. Collect more data from alumni There are many other concerns, but first let s look at these top four: 1. Prevent alumni from being flooded with s from all departments on campus. This seems to be the biggest reason for creating an -use policy. It only takes a moment for any department on campus to send an to alumni inviting them to an event or asking for contributions. In the past, people didn t do much of this because of the high cost of paper, postage and printing. These days it s a simple matter to send a low cost and everyone knows it. If you don t have a campus-wide policy in place, your alumni could receive s from the development office, annual giving campaign, office of their major, and a club or organization they belonged to all on the same day. 2. Serve as the central database for all addresses, so that everyone can work together to collect and correct them. Another goal of most administrators is to become the central database for all addresses. Because addresses are continually changing, it makes sense to forge alliances with other departments and have everyone work together to correct bad/undeliverable addresses. Don t wait until alumni databases start to multiply across your campus! 3. Send targeted communications more often to alumni All your departments are interested in increasing communication with alumni, and everyone realizes how important it is not to wear out the welcome mat. But they may not know how to prevent that. The whole point of a good -use policy is to give everyone the chance to communicate regularly with alumni but not overwhelm them. 4. Collect more data from alumni The Internet can be a goldmine for data. One of our clients received 34,000 fields of 5

6 updated data from its alumni within three months of launching an online directory. With the right policies and strategies in place, you ll be able to capture a treasure trove of information from your alumni. To encourage every department on campus to follow your -use policy, why not offer to send them data updates? Better yet, become the central communication headquarters for everyone to reach alumni. No matter what goals and strategies you decide on, it s important to write them down and share them with other departments on campus. II. Determine how often you will alumni each month At IAC we ve been surveying alumni for 10 years to see how often they want to receive s. Most agree they re willing to get up to two s per month from their alumni association. That s 24 contacts per year. If you re not communicating with your alumni times each year, you re missing out on important opportunities to build nostalgia and loyalty, increase participation in events, and encourage giving. If you want to foster strong two-way communication with alumni, we recommend a mixture of communication methods. Here s a sample plan that uses a variety of tools to touch alumni 19 times in a year: Broadcast 6 times per year e-newsletter 6 times per year Multi-media ecards 3 times per year Electronic birthday card Animated epostcard 2 times per year Survey 2 times per year III. Decide if and how you will use to solicit contributions If one of your goals is to solicit online contributions from alumni, your plan should include strategies for: Annual Giving Capital Campaigns Planned Giving Though today the volume of online giving is low, our clients are seeing consistent year-toyear growth. 6

7 Robert Weiner Consulting performed a study about online contributing for CASE. Their results, called the Solicitation Survey, are available at the CASE website Of the 463 organizations that were surveyed, 49% of respondents indicated they were using to solicit donations. Of those who were not, 42% said they would start in With those kinds of numbers, it s very likely your organization is planning to solicit donations via soon. So you ought to be starting to establish an -use policy TODAY! Keep the following in mind as you build your ephilanthropy strategy: Make sure your message is clear. Select the appropriate delivery vehicle. Make it easy to contribute. Request donations around reunions and homecomings. Make sure your message is clear. The research findings confirm that it s vitally important to make your message clear. Alumni don t have time to wade through pages of information. Select the appropriate delivery vehicle. Don t use broadcast s for your appeals alumni receive too many of these. Consider asking for contributions with multi-media ecards or animated ecards; they re specifically designed to develop a sense of nostalgia and commitment. One IAC client, a small private college, sent out a multi-media ecard to approximately 8,000 alumni and within a matter of days received more than $12,000 in contributions. Make it easy to contribute. Your alumni are as time-starved as you are. If you want their money, create an online donation tool that will recognize them when they reach the page. They ll save time because your site pre-fills in all known contact information. Design your page so that all they need to do is enter their credit card information. Request donations around reunions and homecomings While we anticipated that most alumni would give in November and December to take advantage of tax breaks, what we found was that nearly 40% of the contributions made each year occurred around reunions and homecoming. 7

8 IV. Consider the needs and participation of other departments and colleges on campus, and control the content, frequency and timing of communications As the secret gets out that you have amassed a significant database of updated alumni addresses, don t be surprised when other departments on campus and the individual colleges ask to use those addresses, too. Now, before confusion or disappointment result, is the time to create your policy and set standards. Then, get campus-wide commitment to using the policy. You ll need campus administrators to endorse it, and you may need your president to sign off on it. This white paper offers strategy and specific steps for establishing a policy that will prevent misuse of your valuable alumni addresses. We suggest you recruit other campus departments as partners to help you develop your online community. Reach out to every department on campus. Hold a series of meetings and invite administrators to view your online directory and see the registration data being collected. Show them how data can be mined from the information in order to target marketing messages to alumni. The sample marketing strategy shown earlier in this report identified a total of 19 contacts from the alumni/development offices. Assuming your alumni are willing to receive up to 24 s per year from your campus, that leaves six additional contacts that can be made from others: The admissions office asking for help in recruiting students Individual colleges keeping their alumni informed The career center asking for mentors Your athletic office encouraging them to attend games Your theatre department encouraging alumni to attend a play The president asking support for a capital campaign Software is available today that can let you dynamically deliver content to people based on their interests and hobbies. Keep in mind that your six e-newsletters could be customized to include news specifically from a graduate s individual college. Invite your career center staff to write a column for your e-newsletter that talks about the benefits of mentoring and gives examples of successful networking stories. Ask your sports department staff to write a column with links to their web page. I think you can see now that a comprehensive/coordinated campus -use policy gives everyone regular access but doesn t overburden your valued alumni with a torrent of s. To help everyone else see this value, encourage other departments to consider the following: 8

9 A centralized collection of addresses in your database While many departments on campus may want to build their own databases, if you explain that 39% of addresses go bad every year, they might realize their resources would get pretty stretched trying to correct them. Remind them that you have a wider reach and many more opportunities to engage and involve alumni in activities and events. That means you ll automatically be gathering addresses that they d never get on their own. Encouraging them to help increase registrations You don t have to do it alone! The average alumni association has less than 20 percent of its alumni registered in its online directory. So many organizations allocate limited budgets and do virtually no marketing that their directories risk becoming dinosaurs something alumni might randomly check every couple of years. But it doesn t have to be that way! Your alumni directory can help build a vibrant community where people help each other get jobs, do business, share stories and connect in other ways. When you and other campus departments promote your directory in newsletters and at events, you deliver the message from multiple trusted sources that this online community is an exciting place to visit often. It says, Stuff happens here, and your alumni can be a part of it! Make it easy for the departments to send s and e-newsletters Whatever system you put in place, make sure the process you develop doesn t force campus departments to go through your staff to communicate with their own constituents. It s important for them to know they will have access (within the guidelines of your written strategy) to send broadcast s and e- newsletters. You gain even more cooperation when the e-newsletter program you offer them is easy to use. 9

10 V. Determine what type of e-marketing tools are available to other departments on campus We suggest that you give your colleges and other departments the flexibility of using various e-marketing tools: e-newsletters ecards Animated Cards Broadcast s Surveys Your deans will find your organization to be a tremendous resource for them in making contact with their graduates when they hold events. As you begin to educate the departments and colleges on campus that you are able to isolate data, they will begin to find new ways to connect with their graduates. For example, the athletic director will find value in your ability to data mine records to find all alumni who played under a retiring coach and invite them to the coach s retirement party. Your law school dean will see value when you can send a broadcast to all alumni who live in Chicago and have contributed before, inviting them to a dinner to support a law school building addition. Find a way to include as many departments as possible in the broadcast s and e- newsletters you send out. VI. Target each communication and analyze the results We recommend that you require all departments to analyze their use of addresses. More than any other medium, including print, radio and TV, the Internet allows you to find out who is paying attention reading your s, e-newsletters, multi-media ecards and other e-marketing communications. The benefits are significant: You will be able to continually tweak and improve your message Your alumni will receive targeted communication that interests them All your communications will present a consistent brand and theme More and more alumni will contribute, attend events and network with each other You will be able to continually tweak and improve your message Because of the many demands on everyone s time these days, you can t rely on a single marketing piece to get your alumni to do something. With traditional mail you could only afford to send one marketing piece to engage and involve alumni. 10

11 Today with , you can send a broadcast , and then a multi-media ecard, followed by an animated ecard, and then followed by a traditional direct mail post card to drive alumni back to the website for more information. In each of these applications you can evaluate who responded and who didn t and use that data to make your next message even stronger. Your alumni will receive targeted communication that interests them. As you continue to build your database and information about your alumni, you will be able to deliver news and information based on their interests, hobbies and issues they support. All your communications will present a consistent brand and theme Later in this report we discuss the need to train campus departments in how to communicate effectively with alumni via . It is important that they understand your institution is represented by an overall brand and that their communications should support that brand. Participation in contributions, events and networking will skyrocket. Imagine how much more participation you would see in contributions, events, mentoring and other activities if you used traditional marketing techniques plus included three to five messages to call the reader to action. That sort of campaign can result in a 10, 20 or 30% increase in any of these activities! Try it and see. VII. Decide whether you will charge a fee to other departments to facilitate their communications Each campus will look at this differently. We suggest you develop a cost to provide this service to your departments and colleges. It won t be as much as they would have had to spend to print and mail communication pieces, but it should be enough to offset the staff time required to provide the service. In a time where budget cuts affect every department on campus, your president will appreciate your entrepreneurial thinking and the fact that you re reducing the three P s paper, printing and postage costs. Keep in mind that you re providing extra support to campus departments as you correct the addresses and provide results. Is this worth money? Absolutely. Consider charging them up to $.10 per sent. Naturally, you don t want to charge too much, as you want them to use the service. And remember, the more you communicate with alumni, the more addresses and address changes you ll receive. 11

12 VIII. Build into your plan a strategy to fix bad/undeliverable addresses Research we ve done reveals that addresses are as perishable as fruit. Nearly 39 percent of addresses are returned as bad/undeliverable due to: Change of jobs Changing ISP s to escape spam Switching to broadband Moving In a Webinar we gave recently that attracted more than 100 alumni and development professionals, nearly 80%, when asked what they are currently doing to correct bad/undeliverable addresses, responded Nothing. Most were just re-sending to the same bad addresses or deleting them without attempting to fix them. One of our clients really gets the value of addresses. They ve calculated the online contribution value of an address at $20 ($200,000 in online contributions each year divided by the 10,000 alumni registered in their database). They send out 12 e-newsletters to alumni, plus an equal number of other e-marketing tools throughout the year. If paper, printing, and postage cost about $1 per mailing, then the value of each address would be an additional $24 dollars (one dollar cost for each of the 24 mailings in one calendar year). That s substantial value for an address. But think about this. Within three years nearly all of the address in the database will go bad unless measures are taken to keep them current. It s clear that you must build into your -use policy a plan on how to correct bad/undeliverable addresses. Here are some options: For all notices of undeliverable messages, look up the addresses of those individuals and send them a postcard, or call them to request that they update their profile with a correct . Begin immediately collecting two or three addresses from your alumni. Research indicates that 45% percent of Internet users have three to six addresses. Consider outsourcing the problem to organizations like IAC who have dedicated staff to handle the mundane and time-consuming job of updating these records. Provide a list of bad/undeliverable addresses along with phone numbers and ask alumni volunteers to call and request updated addresses. Work with your annual giving office and hire some of their part-time staff to make contact with the alumni whose addresses are undeliverable. 12

13 Your organization makes a commitment to staff and manage a process to correct physical address changes. So it must also develop a strategy to correct those addresses or risk losing out on communicating with your valued alumni. IX. Prepare guidelines on how to write , including length and content Don t assume anything. You want to make sure your alumni recognize your institution s brand and see consistency in your communications. You must carefully define how campus departments present information, how much information is presented, and what type of information they present. Select someone in your office to become an expert in this area. This person should develop a policy that will give other departments guidelines to follow. Consider including the following areas: Subject Line Body Keep in mind alumni are pressed for time. Write a headline or subject line that grabs attention otherwise you risk being deleted like so many others that appear in the barrage of daily . Make your headline short and focused on alumni interests. Response rates increase dramatically when you keep the body of your short and to the point. Remember the 3 S s (short, sweet and simple). Our research has proven that recipients of broadcast s respond significantly more often when the contains three or fewer short paragraphs. HTML or text? It s up to you. We ve had tremendous results by sending simple text messages that follow the above guidelines. But close relationships make a difference. Because you already have a good relationship with your alumni, response rates may increase when you use HTML and include photographs from events, activities and places on campus. 13

14 X. Determine how often and what type of marketing your affinity partners are allowed to do Many alumni associations have relationships with third-party organizations that provide valuable services to alumni. Among these providers are: Credit card companies Insurance companies Mortgage firms Student loan firms Merchandise companies Traditionally, the only way these firms have been able to reach alumni is by sending letters, postcards and flyers. As you know, marketing costs are not insignificant. As you continue to acquire more addresses, your affinity partners will want to have periodic access to your alumni. They, too, have had to accept lower response rates due to the cost of mailing offers to alumni. However, if you take the cost constraints away from them, they will be able to achieve significantly higher revenue. Sharing alumni addresses provides your affinity partners with three benefits: First, if you lower their 3 P s by 50%, you increase their profits enormously. They will more than likely share this cost savings with you, which may result in better returns than you might be receiving from them right now. Second, you will provide them with the opportunity to market multiple times, which will increase their response rate and increase the number of orders. This translates to a higher contribution to your organization. Third, they will be able to use media-rich e-marketing tools that can include photos, sound, and custom content, and they ll be able to create a greater sense of need beyond what traditional brochures and flyers can generate. While you re getting your feet wet in this area, we suggest that you work with one of your affinity partners to test response rates. Encourage them to use any and all of the following: multi-media ecards animated cards broadcast s Have them measure the response rates when they send one, two, three, four and even five unique e-marketing messages. This will help you set standards in the future. 14

15 We suggest including a statement at the bottom of each that informs alumni that your valued partner has helped provide this message. Their participation is just another way they help support the alumni association. Below is a sample statement: The (your organization s name) is sending you this on the behalf of (the affinity partners name). We value their participation, but we never grant access to your or personal information. This organization is endorsed by the alumni association as a trusted partner that contributes to our needs. If at any time you decide you prefer not to be contacted by this provider, please reply to this with the statement Not interested in this product, and we ll take you off the mailing list. Summary Thanks for taking the time to review our report. Now it s time to put your vision of a best campus -use policy into practice. We firmly believe that marketing guided by your written -use policy will usher in a new era of success in relationship-building between your university and your valued alumni. If you have questions or would like to discuss any aspect of building an -use policy, please contact me: Don Philabaum don@iaccorp.com IAC (Internet Association Corporation) 15

16 Create your own -use policy Use this form to create your own -use policy. 1. Identify your goals. 2. Determine the number of times your alumni/development office should alumni each month. 3. Identify whether or not your -use strategy will include soliciting alumni for contributions. 4. Build your policy around the needs and participation of other departments and colleges on campus, while controlling their use. 5. Determine the type of e-marketing tools available to other departments on campus. 6. Develop reports that will keep all departments informed. 7. Consider whether or not you will charge a fee to other departments to facilitate sending their communications. 8. Build into your plan a strategy to fix bad/undeliverable addresses. 9. Prepare guidelines on how to write , including length and content. 16