Tag Archives: alumni

IN CASE you missed it…

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CASE IndianaI have some exciting news! I recently joined the board of CASE Indiana! CASE Indiana is an affiliate of District V of the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. CASE and all of its affiliates are aimed at providing professional development and resources to professionals working in communications, advancement and alumni relations in higher ed and independent schools. (Whew, that’s a mouthful for an elevator speech!)

I am excited to join the board as it is mostly comprised of colleagues at higher ed institutions, and I have the opportunity to bring the voice of independent schools into the conversation. Plus, I really look to the world of higher ed for peer role models.

Last Friday, CASE Indiana hosted its annual spring conference (there’s also one in the fall). Some of the key themes from the sessions I attended were: personalizing your messages based on people’s interests, connecting your online content to your goals, and simplifying your brand.

Evolve or Die: The Future of Integrated and Digital Communication by Allen Rosso, MindFrame

  • Understand your data, personalize your message, and develop strategies instead of implementing tactics.
  • Traditional channels still matter.
  • Think WHO instead of how many, WHY instead of when
  • For alumni communication, start the conversation while they are current students, and continue into the alumni-alma mater relationship. Remember that alumni live all over the world – share online events and engaging videos so that anyone can participate.
  • For donor communication, send personalized messages based on their gifts (i.e., send a video of the basketball state championship if they support athletics).

Content Strategy for the (Higher Ed) Web by Patrick DiMichele, mStoner

  • Move past “who, what, how” and on to “why, who cares, what’s next.”
  • All of your online content should directly correlate to your organizational and departmental goals.
  • Audit your existing content to determine if it’s clear, web-ready, usable, on message and actionable.
  • Even if your marketing points are the same as other schools, they’re still important to you. Differentiate yourself by showing tangible stories of why they matter to your school.

We Are Boilermakers and Much More by Rwitti Roy, Purdue University

  • The power of a strong brand lies in loyalty, retention, special focus and competition.
  • You need to both simplify and amplify your branding message at the same time.
  • Sometimes standing out from the crowd is as simple as owning what’s yours.

I’m looking forward to the fall conference!

Make online flipbooks with Flipdocs

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The Park Tudor Story FlipbookHave you been wondering how to make your print publications available online? Flipbooks are a great alternative to posting PDFs of your magazines, brochures or catalogs.

Our communications office realized a couple years ago that we needed to find a solution for making our alumni magazine available online, so that alumni anywhere in the world could access it at any time. After much searching, I came across Flipdocs, a service that turns your PDFs into interactive flipbooks, and I haven’t looked back since.

Top features of Flipdocs:

Customization – You can give your flipbook a title, add a table of contents, and customize the background. If needed, you can add password protection. They also give you a variety of options for linking to your flipbook, including embedding it seamlessly into your site.

Easy to use – Flipdocs is not only easy for me to use, but also for our site visitors. When viewing a flipbook, you can turn through the pages, navigate through the table of contents, or view thumbnails of each page. Viewers can also print pages, download the PDF and e-mail to a friend.

Video – One of the top reasons we chose Flipdocs as opposed to other flipbook services was the ability to easily add video into the interactive flipbook. Using the link editor, you just add the URL of your YouTube video. You can also add Flash.

Analytics – Beyond just giving me the total number of views for each flipbook, Flipdocs also provides analytics for total views per day and total clicks per link.

SEO – The content of your flipbook is SEO juice. Search engines can read the text of your publication, which can boost your visibility in search engine results pages.

Pricing:

Pro plan – $350/year. You can pay a flat fee and convert as many PDFs as you want. This is a great cost-effective plan if you plan to upload many publications. Our top reason for choosing the Pro plan was the ability to replace flipbooks at no additional cost when corrections are needed. This is really beneficial for our summer school catalog, so that we can add classes or note which classes are full.

Pay as you go – $30 for 20 pages + $1 per additional page. This is a great plan if you plan to use it only for a few publications, such as your alumni magazine that only comes out 3 or 4 times a year.