SupportingAdvancement.com announced today their 5th annual survey on matching gifts. Their intent is to provide ideas for how to improve and enhance matching give revenue and compare results with prior surveys to find with tactics have been most fruitful.

Learn more about Alumni Channel by attending one of our 30-minute web seminars, or ‘webinars’.  All you need is a telephone and Internet connection!  All webinars are just 30 minutes.  Limit 14 participants per webinar, but you may have any number of your colleagues join on your call. Continue reading →

Andy Shaindlin of alumni futures, a blog on ideas, trends and new directions in alumni relations, shares a few of the occasional alumni-related postings seen on Twitter.  Andy writes, “this isn’t about ‘how to use Twitter for fundraising and alumni relations.’  It’s just a couple of simple observations.”

The theme connecting the tweets Andy has collected is:

Students and alumni have a preconceived idea about what alumni associations do, and our actions often don’t match those preconceptions.

Read the rest of Andy’s article at alumnifutures.com >>>

How can online friend-to-friend fundraising help you to raise money and engage your staff and volunteers?  This detailed case study on idealware, a provider of candid Consumer-Reports-style reviews and articles about software of interest to nonprofits, looks at how one small school raised $3000 from mostly new donors with a minimal investment.

Read more at idealware.com >>>

Do you sell old yearbooks to alumni?

From Tracy Crowe Jones ‘94, Director of Alumni Relations for Central Methodist University, Fayette, MO:

All of our old yearbooks are housed in my department.  We sell them for $15.  There isn’t much of a profit, but it does cover shipping and bring in a little extra money to the alumni association.  We sell them more as a service to our alumni than as a profit-making endeavor.  On our alumni website we have a list of the years for which we have leftover yearbooks so people know ahead of time if what they are looking for is available.  If a yearbook is not available I often point the alum to eBay.  You can save a search on eBay and get notification when something with your search parameters is listed.  Almost weekly I see at least one of our older yearbooks on eBay.

We are happy to announce that Alumni Channel now works with Twitter!

Try these new features on for size:

• Members can now make their Twitter account visible on their profile (just edit profile)
• You can make your organization’s Twitter account visible on your home page

We actually now support all the most popular social networking applications in the same way (Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn too).  To see how your organization’s account would be showcased, see http://demo.schoolalumnisites.com for an example of these icons (see the area just to the right of the message board heading).

If you ever type a web address in Facebook, always include the http:// so Facebook knows it’s a link and makes it clickable.

Convention Center, Minneapolis, MN
April 6 to 8, 2010
Booth: 523
NCEA Convention Central – National Catholic Educational Association

Alumni Channel will be exhibiting at the following events over the next few months:

Catholic School Administrators Association of New York State (CSAANYS) Conference
The Marriott, Wolf Road, Albany, NY
November 15, 2009

NYS Coalition for Independent and Religious Schools Conference
The Marriott, Wolf Road, Albany, NY
November 16 – 17, 2009

Archdiocese of Chicago Office of Catholic Schools Professional Development Convention (OCSPDC)
Loyola Academy and Marian Catholic High School
February 22, 2010

National Catholic Education Association Exposition
Convention Center, Minneapolis, MN
April 6 – 8, 2010

Past Events:

Archdiocese of Chicago Office of Catholic Schools:  2009 Technology Conference
Midwest Conference Center, Northlake, IL
November 11, 2009

NJSBA Annual Workshop
Convention Center, Atlantic City, NJ
October 28 – 29, 2009

Catholic Diocese of Arlington, Diocesan Education Institute
Bishop O’Connell High School, Arlington, VA
Friday, October 23, 2009