Fundraising is an appealing job to many. It is rewarding, fulfilling, collaborative, competitive and fun. Of course, it is also challenging in a variety of ways and requires someone who can remain confident even when things get tough. There are also many individuals who would love to work in higher education. Working for an educational institution gives one a sense of contribution to the greater good and to the advancement of society.

If you're reading this post, you've had the thought of transitioning into higher education and working in fundraising. It can often seem tough to get into this type of a role if you do not have prior experience. So, what do you focus on? Read for five tips to help you land that higher ed fundraising job of your dreams!

1. Highlight relevant professional experience - While you may not have raised dollars and donors for an institution in the past, that doesn't mean that your experience doesn't provide you with some transferable skills. Talk about your experience working with senior level executives. Speak to any times when you have had to convince someone to make an investment they would not otherwise have made.
2. Don't forget about relevant volunteer experience - Volunteerism shows how much a cause means to you and that service is important in your life. If you have worked with your alma mater on any reunion campaigns or mentorship opportunities, this demonstrates a passion for higher education. If you don't have higher ed volunteer experience, that's ok! Other experience can still help, especially any work with fundraising drives or boards.
3. Think beyond just front-line fundraising - Large scale fundraising departments in an institution have a variety of needs. There are research, communications, marketing and operations functions. Some schools will have donor relations departments and others have extensive digital fundraising operations. This could be a better fit for you depending on what you've done in the past.
4. Look through your network - You likely are connected to a few folks through LinkedIn who are working in fundraising. If not, take a look, likely you have classmates from undergrad who are working in this area. Set up a networking call to ask questions about what their job is like, and how your background could fit in.
5. Study up - In order to ace a fundraising interview, you'll want to be able to walk and talk the part. Know the terms that fundraisers use. Do you know what a LYBUNT is? Read up on current trends in fundraising as well. 

Many people have successfully made the transition to a fundraising career. You can too!

 Most alumni and annual giving offices utilize volunteers in some way. There are some programs out there that are best in class, but most schools have their fair share of successes and challenges with alumni volunteering. Perhaps one of the biggest challenges is how can we find those uber alums, the individuals who not only love our school, but are willing and have the time available to help us with attracting more alumni to reunion, or serving as an admissions volunteer or calling up classmates and asking for a gift.

No school will get all rock stars but here are a few tips for increasing your chances of finding awesome volunteers:
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1. Speak with class presidents and vice presidents - When it comes to Reunion, the default choice for a Reunion volunteer is to call on the class president. Sometimes the president would be a great volunteer, but there are also many times when this person is too involved in other activities to give enough time and effort. Sometimes the president isn't actually the networker that one might expect either. However, the class president will know who from their class would be best served in a reunion volunteer role. Schedule a call with him or her as a way to get to know the class better and to do a little recon on who from the class could fit that uber reunion volunteer role best.

2. Search social media - Review your top hashtags on social media or use data from social media vendors you currently work with to determine which alumni are out there who are regularly sharing your information. Pair this with any user open rate data you have from your email system. This alone will not be able to tell you if someone can be a good volunteer but it will give you an idea of how well-connected someone has stayed to your school.

3. Check for involvement at the club level - Which alumni are club leaders? Would they be interested in serving directly with your school in some volunteer capacity? You don't want to cannabalize someone's volunteer time with a club, but many alums are willing to take on multiple volunteer roles.

4. Have a position description available. Being able to provide a short, one page description of what an alum will be expected to do as part of a volunteer role can help set expectations and can help to avoid confusion regarding responsibilities. Position descriptions can ensure that you don't have an alum agreeing to the position but then realizing after the fact that he or she isn't truly up for this type of work.

5. Ask the right questions - When speaking with an alum about volunteering, have a set of questions drawn up that you want to go through. Often times this can help determine if the person you are speaking with will be able to fulfill the responsibilities of the role. Depending on the volunteer position, you may want to ask things like "What other types of volunteer work do you do?", "Have you been involved in fundraising initiatives in the past?", "What do you think about the latest news from the college/university?", "This volunteer role requires 10 hours of work a month, do you think you can fit that into your schedule?"

​Finding great alumni volunteers can be challenging. Planning and persistence can help ensure that your success rate is high!

Much has been made over the past 5 - 10 years about the power of crowdfunding in higher education. Crowdfunding provides the urgency necessary for higher ed fundraising, it cedes the responsibility of fundraising to concerned constituents - making the ask more personal and heartfelt, and it can provide a unique, short-term platform for restricted gift fundraising at a lower dollar threshhold. All of these things have allowed days of giving and student run crowdfunding campaigns to become immensely popular.

Amongst all the advances made due to new technologies available, not much has been said about how some of these same technologies could impact the world of alumni relations. If Uber can revolutionize the cab industry and Air BNB can transform the hotel industry, what can change the world of alumni relations? What product or platform can provide a new way for alumni to interact, to contribute and to share through their relationship with their alma mater?

In 2016, we began looking for new ways to reach our alumni. We provided a good range of opportunities already: regional alumni receptions, on campus tailgates, social media feeds, e-communications, and local service opportunities in select cities. However, we wanted to do something more. 

With the onslaught of new tech out there, there are a number of different ways individuals can share their expertise in ways never before possible. This provided a unique opportunity for us. We knew one of the strengths of our alumni base was our base's willingness to help others. The College's mission is "Ask More of Business, Ask More of Yourself" and we have some great programs for students to participate in while in school. We had also launched a local service opportunity for alumni in DC, Chicago and South Bend that allowed teams of alumni to serve as pro bono consultants to local nonprofits. This program was running well, but we didn't have a way to scale it nationally. We knew our alumni enjoyed using their business skills to benefit others through a connection set up by Mendoza, but was there a technology available that would allow us to take this type of program online? Enter crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing has been around for a little while now. There are crowdsourcing sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo that help individuals crowdsource funds. This type of crowdsourcing migrated into higher ed with companies like Scalefunder and the proliferation of days of giving. But there are other types of crowdsourcing tactics as well. 

IDEO, a famous design consulting firm, has been running idea sharing challenges on its social impact site, OpenIdeo, for a few years now. The idea is that to solve some of the world's biggest challenges, the best way to do this is to utilize the wisdom of crowds. While you could get 5-10 experts into one room to discuss how to get more clean water to India, the best way to find the most effective solutions is actually to get as many opinions as possible, from people with expertise in a variety of different areas, and then to refine those ideas with the power of that same group of people.

OpenIdeo, along with other campaigns, provided us with the inspiration necessary for our new alumni relations campaign. We wanted to provide an online platform to allow our alumni to share their ideas for solving a specific societal challenge. We wanted to pose a question to our alumni that they would be uniquely qualified to answer, and we wanted to allow our alumni to vote and comment on ideas suggested by their counterparts.

While we had what we thought was going to be a great way to engage our alumni. We wanted to be sure of it. We surveyed our alumni and asked them what they thought of a number of different service opportunities and types of service organizations to help. The idea sharing suggestion received high marks, so we were more reasonably assured that this could work.

We then set about determining a topic. We wanted something that was targeted toward experienced business people, but also something that would be a broad enough topic that an alum could contribute regardless of whether their background was in marketing, operations, accounting, finance or anything else.

Ultimately, we suggested a topic centered around the environment and how businesspeople can help to reduce the carbon footprint of their workplaces. We set the challenge to be one month long, from May 15 to June 15, and called it the Mendoza Ask More Ideas Challenge. 

To do this right, we couldn't just create the site, we had to get people to visit. To build a more robust, integrated campaign, we did a couple of things:

• Internal partnerships: We worked with many different offices on campus to help spread our word: The Alumni Association, Development, the Office of Sustainability and our MBA student New Impact chapter. All of these groups helped spread the word about our challenge to their constituents as well.
• Outside partnership: In order for the suggestions made as part of the campaign to truly have a significant impact, we wanted the suggestions to benefit a group beyond our alumni base. We partnered with a nonprofit, the Catholic Climate Covenant, who also promoted the campaign to their constituents and helped us review ideas.
• Social media: We created a gif, a unique graphic overlay for social media and a video to create a more robust site and to encourage our followers to post about the Challenge
• Local touch: While we wanted this challenge to be conducted online, we also saw the value of doing in-person events as well, as this would provide a new form of engagement event, something very different than a typical networking reception. We hosted a dinner for our alumni at a local farm-to-table restaurant with table hosts at each table to facilitate conversations around the carbon footprint topic.

The Challenge was quite the task. Some aspects of our plan exceeded expectations, while others fell flat. In the end, we finished with 64 ideas submitted. Our goal had been 100, but ultimately we were satisfied with our final tally. So what worked?

Positives:

• Local dinner: The dinner we hosted sold out and we received very high marks from our attendees. Many alums commented that it was nice to interact with fellow alumni in a way in which they feel like they are contributing, not just networking.
• Internal partnership: It was great to have other departments on campus willing to share our message and help us reach a different constituency base.

What could have worked better:

• Social media: We didn't get quite as much activity as we had hoped to see.
• The question itself: This is perhaps the most difficult part of running an idea challenge. The question has to be perfect in that it draws people in, but will also elicit a wide variety of answers. In retrospect, our question may have not been audacious or out-of-the-box enough to really inspire 100 ideas.

What will we do differently next time:

• Work with a small committee of alumni as an advisory board as we are building the site
• Run the campaign from the first of the month til the last day
• Host in-person events in South Bend and also in Chicago, our largest alumni market

Our goal is to have a different challenge question posed each year, leveraging the talents of our alumni to help a different group of individuals or part of society in need.

What do you think of the idea? Could your school launch something similar?

This post was first published on Evertrue's blog.
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BuzzFeed has flipped the journalism world on its head. From humorous top-10 lists to high-level news reporting, the tech company excels on both ends of the spectrum—and has done a great job of drawing in a younger audience because of it. Visitors might come for the quizzes, but they stay for the breaking news and investigative reporting.

There’s a good lesson here for higher-ed alumni relations and communications teams. By attracting alumni to your site with fun content, they may be more likely to see important information like fundraising appeals, reunion details, or volunteer opportunities.

Here are just a few examples of institutions that have begun to experiment with the BuzzFeed model to reach young alumni and students.

Saint Louis University’s Admissions Quizzes
​While this example is admissions-focused, alumni relations and fundraising professionals should take note: Saint Louis University (SLU) attracts potential applicants to their site by offering quizzes that are highly relevant to incoming college students (e.g., “What degree is right for you?” and “What student organization is right for you?”). The “would you rather” scenarios presented in the quizzes—similar to what you’d see in a DISC assessment—make the University feel personable and approachable.

Because the information provided in the quizzes could apply to any college experience, SLU’s admissions site has the potential to bring in traffic from Google searches like “roommate advice” or “what should I major in?” They’ve already cleared the first hurdle when it comes to reaching prospective students.
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This video tells the story of a Muslim student at UM who leads a team of student volunteers on a service trip in Guatemala. This video has a couple of key elements in it from Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey.

The Ordinary World/Limited Awareness of the Problem (0:05 into the video) – The beginning of the video features a voiceover from an alum stating his thoughts on the students who would be helping him as volunteers on a water sanitization project. He states his initial assumptions about the students perhaps not treating this project too seriously.

The Call to Adventure/Increased Awareness (0:18 into the video)– The alum then also expresses why he thinks this project may be challenging for this particular student leader.

Refusal of the Call/Reluctance to Change (0:48) – The student leader discusses her apprehension with certain parts of the project.

Crossing the Threshhold/Committing to Change (2:16) – The student team leader discusses the acceptance she feels from the local children, when she expected them to be reticent towards her.

Tests, Allies and Enemies/Experimenting With First Change (3:03) – The alum discusses how big of a role daily prayer plays in their community, and is hopeful the student leader will be ok with that.

Approach the inmost cave/Preparing for a Big Change (3:20) – The student leader discusses how you must learn to work with people who may be very different than you in order to achieve anything.

Reward (seizing the sword)/Consequences of the Attempt (3:44) – The village fell in love with the students who were working on the project.

Road back/Rededication to Change (4:25) – The student expresses her understanding of the value of what alums are doing.
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Return with the elixir/Final Mastery of the Problem (4:50) – The student leader explains how she now understands how great it is to work with alumni and later explains why she loves working with people who are different than her.

This video is unique it that it is telling one story from two different points of view, but the viewer can still feel drawn in by the use of storytelling techniques and great editing.

This post originally published on the Evertrue blog.

So, your advancement office has a great social media plan. You’re pushing out quality content, and your alumni are sharing and re-tweeting your posts using hashtags.


But how can you amplify that social chatter and get even more alumni engaging with you online? How can you increase the reach of your content—especially when a portion of your alumni base isn’t even using social media? (Don’t count out alumni who aren’t on social media; you just have to get a little more creative about how and where you surface the content to them.)


If these are the types of questions you grapple with every day, you may want to look into using social media walls. There are plenty of content curation tools available that can aggregate your best social media posts and display them in one place—whether on your website or on the big screen at an event.


Below are some of the ways that a social media wall can add value to your alumni engagement efforts, plus a few questions to ask yourself before you launch one for your institution.

Live Social Media Walls at Events

​If you’ve ever been to a sports game, you’ve seen it before: it’s halftime, and a brightly lit Jumbotron is cycling through dozens of tweets from fans.social media jumbotron

Content curation has been a tried-and-true tactic in the athletics world for a while now, and for good reason—the ability to display social media content on a Jumbotron makes TV timeouts and halftime shows that much more fun and engaging. Plus, because fans want to get featured on the big screen, they’re much more likely to use the hashtag and post about the event from their social media accounts in the first place.