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This is part 2 of 3 of What We've Learned So Far Creating Alumni Event Videos.

Ignite Boulder is an engaging evening of insightful and fun presentations on a variety of topics. Leeds hosted the pre-parties for Ignite 8 & 9 at the Boulder Drafthouse. We used Twitter and Facebook to bring people out for casual networking, for an opportunity to learn more about Leeds, and share in some awesome beers.

The Ignite 8 pre-party was my first live event use of the Flip cam and I focused on trying to get quick, interesting quotes. Since Ignite is about presenting your ideas, I asked people what they would present on if they made it on, and some interesting stuff came up! I also met actual presenters and they shared on their presentations and some Ignite history. We ended up getting some good quotes because I brainstormed questions beforehand with my teammates. The final video was very DIY and fun! Viewers told us they really liked it:  the quotes, and especially seeing themselves and their friends on camera. 



For Ignite 9, I followed a similar video strategy, but this Ignite was tied to Boulder Startup Week, so I interviewed people on their involvement with the week: what was informative, engaging, etc. At the Ignite event, I also shot b-roll (background footage) of the band, as well as the incredible throngs of people filling the Boulder Theater. This allowed us to give our viewers a deeper context and flavor; it put the event into a physical space, and give a visceral feel to the venue and the incredible crowds of people.



What I learned:
Ignite 8: While it is great to get quotes from a variety of people at an event, make sure find out who the important people are (like organizers, speakers) and get some quotes from them! For these people are very invested and will have interesting things to share! And the more people you interview and the more quotes you get, that will help round out your video and make it compelling.

Ignite 9: Make sure you actually hit the record button! I was looking to get a quote from Andrew Hyde, the main organizer of the event. But Ignite was packed, people everywhere, and then suddenly he was standing a few feet away from me. So I ran up and grabbed him for a quick word. It was great! Good quotes, he's a very nice person and very excited about how much the event had grown. I walked back to my seat euphoric! I got Andrew Hyde! We had rounded out our story with his great quotes. Well, on my way out I checked the camera, and what I got was me walking up the stairs toward Andrew, and he getting ready for me to turn the camera on. Then it cuts to the camera coming away from Andrew, sliding down the wall and me thanking him for his time. What? Where was the interview? Turns out I hit record accidentally on the way up, turned it off when I interviewed him, and turned it back on after we were done. Ouch!

Lesson? Ignite is pretty rowdy and action-packed event. People are everywhere, it is dimly lit and loud. This can be true for many events. So if you see something you want to record, you really need to slow down and double, double check that your little red record light is going! Cause the brutal truth about video is always the same (just like the old saw supposedly asked at weddings): Get it now, or forever hold your peace.

I've done a lot of events in the course of my career, all types and size of events from small and simple gatherings to very large and complex events involving high-profile individuals and lots of moving parts. Experience has taught me there are elements you can control and there are those you cannot. Pick the one thing that, if it fails, the event fails and manage around that one thing. Knowing and planning around these elements are key to event planning sanity and, for the most part, success.

Take our two most alumni gatherings in Los Angeles and Chicago as example. We had a great turn out in L.A., granted we have a very large concentration of alumni there, and we have an absolutely fabulous venue provided to us by one of our loyal and successful alumni Evan Greene. In addition, we provided the food and beverages which even sweetened the event draw for attendees. In the "elements you cannot control" category, we were also very fortunate to have our event fall on an evening in between the playoff nights as the L.A. Lakers were battling the Boston Celtics in the NBA finals. Several members of our alumni community did mention to me that there would be no way they would have attended should the event have fallen on a playoff night. If it had fallen on game night, I would have moved the informal welcome and presentation to earlier in the event and made sure all of the televisions in the venue were tuned to the game.

Chicago presented a different challenge in that the weather became a player in the evening event. And, I have also learned, weather trumps all in event planning. For our October building dedication, the wind blew incessantly up until just before the event. Then, it stopped.This was good because culmination of the dedication involved the unveiling of two 50 foot banners off of the side of the building. Wind would definitely have put the cabash on that. As it turned out, the 700 attendees never knew that the unfurling was ever in question.

Homecoming, generally held under a giant tent outside for 300 plus alumni in was driven inside by a series of snow storms last year. We were fortunate to, 1. be forewarned, 2. have adequate space inside and a flexible caterer and, 3. have an active Social Media program that let us notify folks that the show was still on.

Chicago, however, was a different story in that the inclement weather (wind, rain and tornado warnings) came on suddenly and coincided with the beginning of our alumni reception at the Union League Club of Chicago. To their credit, many of our alumni still braved the elements to show up, but we also did have a good deal of attrition. And who can blame them? In this instance, there was absolutely nothing that we could do to adjust to the weather other than again, use Social Media to notify folks it was still a go. All in all, we still had a very nice event with good conversation and interaction with our loyal grads.

We've gotten a lot of mileage with our Flip cams. No surprise there. They are small, super-easy to use (one red button) and HD quality. What's not to love? I've taken a Flip and shot video at:

 • A Taste of Leeds, an event here at the school featuring alumni in the food business.
• Two Boulder Ignite events and pre-parties.
• Alumni events in Los Angeles and Chicago.

For each event I planned to hit that red button, get some quotes, some atmosphere, and move on. We would then string it together into a slice-of-life video. That worked to a certain degree but each event turned out demanding different strategies to capturing video, and then in the editing as well. Below is what we did, followed with what we learned and might do different next time. This would be a LONG single blog post, so we are breaking it up into three, starting with...

A Taste of Leeds
For A Taste of Leeds, I wanted to capture the event set up, our team carting materials around, students mapping table set up, etc. I got that and then I grabbed some on-the-fly impression interviews during the event: How people liked it, their favorite food, and general feelings and reactions. At the same time our communications director, Sarah Behunek, with a TV production background, systematically shot a variety of B-roll (context footage), and then interviewed each participating business person on the key areas of their business. She got great quotes, and tons of useful product footage; which when matched with my footage, allowed us to knit together a compelling slice-of-life video.



What I Learned
Sarah and my shooting styles complemented each other, but only "organically", i.e. didn't come out of a master plan. It worked out fine, but why chance it next time and miss some potentially important footage? Moving forward we are going to have a basic storyboard for larger events. At the very least, a shot list: What are the key shots/interviews, who will grab what, and what's our overall concept for the final piece? And, always keep in mind that the Flip is way portable, so grab stuff on the fly as well. You have to have at least a sketch of a plan but stay flexible and creative as you go. 

Next: Boulder Ignite 8 & 9: Recording a fun party full of smart people!

I am collaborating with two Alumni Relations colleagues, Jennifer Eury of the Smeal School of Business at Penn State and Joseph Russell at The Goizueta School of Business at Emory University. We are presenting a panel on metrics around alumni relations (and in my case, communications) at an upcoming Association of Business School Alumni Professionals (ABSAP) conference. I have never met these folks, but we did conference call recently around our preso and our common theme about metrics: it's a moving target.

As we've explained in previous posts, in our office, we measure everything. Well, almost everything. At this point, we have very few ways to measure alumni engagement. There are the usual: alumni giving, event attendance, providing mentorships or internships, speaking in class. These, it can be argued, are indications of a level of engagement. We recently added an alumni blog that I would also argue demonstrates a level of engagement and building relationships, conversations and community.

In any event, whether measuring alumni giving or alumni engagement, why is it important? Well, to be honest, my boss and our advisory board think it is important. But even beyond this consideration, there are a number of reasons metrics are meaningful in my world:

• They help me determine where to invest time, effort and resources;
• They reveal what efforts and initiatives are and are not working;
• They expose obsolete practices and pave the way for new and innovative ideas;
• They educate internal stakeholders about the relevance, impact and success of creating alumni relationships;
• And, they can be inspirational to me and my colleagues for work well done.

My ABSAP colleagues are doing some innovative work themselves in the area of metrics. Smeal is launching a 1-5 scale to measure engagement and how it might relate to philanthropy. Emory is now including alumni participation in Social Media in how it analyzes alumni engagement and possible philanthropic tendencies.

In the end, no matter which strategies and tactics our programs employ, we will continue to seek the best information possible to inform us about what is relevant and important to our alumni want and how we can deliver.

Leeds Social Media Panel July, 2009

I came across an online discussion about the threats and challenges to Alumni Relations in the new media world sparked by a post by social media pioneer Jeremiah Owyang and with corresponding excellent points by Alumni Relations professional and social media pioneer in higher education, Andy Shandlin.  The upshot: absent some strategic response by Alumni Relations programs, social media platforms could soon render these institutions obsolete. The concern is that alumni are being lured away by Social Media platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn where they can connect without having to rely on us.  When I launched the Leeds alumni relations effort seven years ago, necessity was the mother of invention. I had no money, no staff, and limited time; these factors amongst others led me to rely on email as a main form communication. Then as now, I also supplemented my communications with limited print pieces promoting large events such as Homecoming. However, recently I have come to the conclusion that:

• Print communications in alumni relations communications are circling the drain;
• Social media and strategic online communications platforms will rule the day.

Several years ago (in part because of Andy Shandlin), I recognized the landscape was changing for communicating with and engaging alumni, especially since the launch of Facebook. More recently, when we combined our alumni relations and communications offices, once again, limited time and financial resources convinced me to eliminate high-maintenance, low-impact print projects for the school as a whole. Concurrently, I was able to create a position dedicated to creating a robust online presence. Since that time, we have established a social media presence in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and blogs (side note: get your institution's SM real estate before someone else does. We were fortunate that an alumnus had already established LinkedIn for Leeds, but was more than happy to hand over management to us when we reached out to them). Subsequently, we are seeing our numbers grow in each of these platforms and more importantly, in increase in the quality of engagement in these platforms.

Media Channel 
Since we combined our programs, we are now operating more like a media channel in that we create all of our content and distribute it across our various platforms. For example, we put a lot of time and effort into our alumni magazine (yes, I said print was dying, but we are currently transitioning our magazine from its historic online PDF to include more dynamic content). Our YouTube postings are a staple now as we have posted over 100 videos of faculty research, faculty and student awards, and students and alumni since we established the account several years ago. Our videos also aid our public relations efforts as we embed the them into the press releases we send to our media contacts. We are also pleased that our faculty now request videos related to their research and ask that they be posted prominently on our website homepage.  

Social Media Engagement
Rather than threatening our existence, we see SM as collapsing geography.True, we don't have to rely on annual membership dues for our funding, though a significant part of our mission is alumni engagement and cultivation with the hope that they will see fit to support the school financially. It's notable that recently the University of Colorado Alumni Association eliminated its dues-based membership and launched its Forever Buffs program. They charge incoming freshman a one time fee and offer an online community to engage students and alumni. For us, we use our social media platforms to extend our brand and reach to our current students and alumni. As I say to my colleagues, we have to meet them where they are and then create interesting, educational and relevant content to enforce our value proposition. How do we measure our reach in these areas? We do an annual brand and alumni communications survey and we also track our metrics in all SM platforms, website analytics and press release data as well. See my colleague's Metric Messiah post for more detail. Across the board, all of our metrics are increasing dramatically. But are we engaging? Recently, an alumna asked to blog for us; which we consider a new wave of engagement. Subsequently, we've had many more alumni asking to participate as well. I consider these developments as signs of much more online alumni engagement to come.

During a moment of elation came a brief moment of disappointment. And then ... opportunity.

A few months ago, we had submitted our nomination of Nick Sowden ('07 management, entrepreneurship) for the Kalpana Chawla Outstanding Recent Alumni Award given by the Alumni Association of the University of Colorado at Boulder. You can read our Portfolio alumni magazine feature about Nick and his work with the social enterprise ToughStuff by clicking here. 

ToughStuff provides affordable solar energy products to people in developing countries. Doing good while doing business. We're all for that, and so too was the Alumni Association, which ultimately selected Nick as the winner. Which was awesome (there may have been some jumping up and down and #squeeeeing! by yours truly when we heard the news) ... until we realized Nick, who is out saving the world one solar panel at a time, probably wouldn't be able to fly from East Africa to Colorado for the awards ceremony on May 5.

Dang.

That is .... until I sat down at my desk and started thinking about award ceremonies in general. Heck, if actors and musicians can accept awards on location via live stream or pre-recorded video clips, why couldn't a deserving alumnus? After a flurry of quick emails, we got the OK that Nick could videotape his thank you speech in East Africa, and the video clip would play at the awards ceremony here in Boulder (Patty Graff of the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship accepted the award on Nick's behalf).

 

Our fearless leader Sarah B, who attended the event last Wednesday, said the video clip of a young promising alumnus (proudly sporting his CU Buffs t-shirt) was well-received by the audience. Also, now we have content of an award-winning alumnus who's one to watch which we can share via social media. This experience, one in which we celebrated a young alumnus and made an impression on other alumni and supporters of the Leeds School, just further demonstrates the ever collapsing barriers of time and distance thanks to the digital world. 

By Sarah G. Martens

I recently received an email from a successful young alumna who is now an MBA student (at the Thunderbird School of Management) and an entrepreneur who developed her eco-friendly business concept while working in the Peace Corps in Peru. She wrote to me:

"Would it be possible to write some sort of blog on the [Leeds School] website about my experience as an entrepreneur and how Leeds helped me to get where I am today? Blogging is my initial thought, but I'd be really excited to take advantage of any ideas you may have."

What a great idea! The only thing is - we didn't have an alumni blog. Yet. One of the wonderful things about working for this small-but-mighty shop that is the Office of Alumni Relations and Communications is that everyone embraces a good idea and these ideas can be implemented quickly and nimbly.

After an informal conversation with the Director and Assistant Director, the alumni blog concept was approved and ready for take-off. The Assistant Director, aka the Blog Guru, went to work and created the new alumni blog, currently titled Alumni Dispatches. The woman who originally emailed me with the idea, Kate Robertson, was our inaugural post and as of this moment we currently have a total of 3 posts submitted, with several more in the queue.

We are excited to see where this goes, as I expect it will be well-received. We are promoting it through our alumni e-newsletter (to 19,000+ people) tomorrow so I'm anxious to see what kind of response we'll get. It's a simple and easy way to engage alumni as well as learn where they are and what they have been up to. What could be better?!? We plan to promote the different posts through social media and I'm confident that some will generate great story ideas for the Portfolio alumni magazine.

So, thank you to Kate for her email and thanks to the team for recognizing and supporting a great suggestion and running with it. If you are an alumnus interested in blogging, please contact Dean.Pajevic@colorado. We'd love to hear from you!

You can check out the variety of Leeds School of Business blogs at www.cuboulderblogs.com

There's a lot of discussion about how to make alumni magazines more relevant and viable against a rising tide of online content, not to mention dynamic competing media in a variety of formats; the blog Alumni Futures recently covered this topic in a post titled "Be Read or Don't Bother."

 

We've had an exciting time with our latest issue of Portfolio, the alumni magazine of the Leeds School. For example:

- A Taste of Leeds: We held a food fair event here on April 30 which highlighted this issue's theme, our alumni working in the food and beverage industry. We had 16 booths featuring food and drinks and approximately 200 visitors in our atrium on a Friday afternoon. Faculty, staff, students, alumni, and friends of the Leeds School attended. Current students chatted it up with alumni. Alumni caught up with their former instructors. In a word: Connection. In a phrase: Living our brand.  

This delicious event (to see photos, visit our Facebook Page by clicking here) was born out of a brainstorming session as the magazine was pieced together a few months ago. Writing about the smorgasbord of alumni got us in the Alumni Relations and Communications staff thinking about (read: salivating over) all the variety of products. Wa-lah: An event is born! We're now considering a magazine-related event to kick off every new issue of Portfolio. (Pssst .... The theme for Fall 2010: Technology. Email us if you have any ideas we should check out.)    

- Speaking of technology, our alumni magazine uses Zmags, a page-turning media-rich format that allows embedding of links to, for example, the blogs, Twitter and Facebook accounts, video clips, etc., of the featured alumni in the print publication. Zmags allows us to highlight the multimedia dimensions of our alumni in a way that is both engaging and immediate with a simple click right then and there if the reader/viewer so chooses (instead of hoping readers/viewers head online once they are done reading the print version).

- Web extras: This section (you can see our latest offerings for the Spring 2010 Portfolio by clicking here) is a great way to add even more storytelling opportunities to the alumni magazine. In this issue, our web extras included lavender recipes, an audio slideshow of a tea shop with live music and tea ceremony, a video segment on how strawberry sorbet is made, podcasts on LBOs and Revaluing the Food Chain, as well as Q&As (text, podcasts, and videos) with our featured alumni. Traditional publications, while still valuable, are no longer limited by the cost and space of the printed page when universities utilize their web space and embrace online content if that content is complementary and symbiotic. And sometimes the extras, if executed well, instead of being the final piece can be the gateway by introducing outsiders to the print publication, and to what the Leeds School is for and about.  

Case in point: Our audio slideshow web extra of the Ku Cha House of Tea (which is featured on the cover of this issue of Portfolio) was picked up by the main campus communications staff (their photographers worked on the piece for us and their shared it with their colleagues) and placed prominently on the homepage which you can see by clicking here. In the reporting of the print story, I saw the shop was a gorgeous locale (meaning GREAT photography) and learned they had live music every Sunday (meaning a chance for GREAT audio beyond just an interview). 

Simply put, this was a storytelling opportunity that could engage the senses and provide context to a story about two of our MBA alums (and in their own words). And it's bringing traffic to our YouTube channel, as the video has more than 200 unique views as of today (typically one of our videos gets 10-15 unique views).

As we begin to think about the next issue, we continue to seek these opportunities for a multimedia and multi-dimensional story and take these creative risks

Recently some free stuff came our way, which is always exciting (I mean, seriously, who doesn't love free stuff?). So our staff decided what would be even more exciting would be to pass it along via social media. Here is what we did:

- You scream, I scream: In our Spring 2010 issue of Portfolio, the alumni magazine of the Leeds School which is on its way to alumni mailboxes right now, I wrote about alumnus Scott Roy, owner and operator of Boulder Homemade, a local and natural ice cream manufacturer which supplies Whole Foods and other groceries and restaurants with yummy delicious frozen treats. Scott has had shared with us a video clip of its production process (part of an effort to make the alumni magazine more multimedia, which I hope to write about in a future blog post here). When I returned his USB drive, he generously gave me a box of ice cream samples to share with the office on that sunny day. So we in turned decided to give away some on our Facebook Page. We invited people to just show up; we took their pictures and shared that on Facebook, too. We saw a lot of smiles that day. 

 - Ignite Boulder 10: As a proud sponsor once again of Ignite Boulder, we were allotted 10 free tickets to use. Since it's such a hot local event, we decided it would be another engagement opportunity to give the tickets away via social media. We posted trivia questions on both our Facebook Page and Twitter accounts over two consecutive days. It was exciting to see people engaged (and engaged quickly, might I add, within minutes of posting the trivia) with these two social media platforms.

Some people actually thanked us (which I am a big proponent of social media manners, so thank you!, thankful people). Some of the winners were alumni of the Leeds School, an added bonus since two strategic goals of ours is to 1. strengthen relationships with key external constituents such as alumni, business community, and donors and to 2. increase external awareness and internal understanding of the Leeds brand.

Opportunities like this can show up without warning, and can be yours if you want it and embrace it, showing once again social media can work for you and your goals if you are social, active, and generous (and not just with the free stuff, but with your time and energy, too). 

By Sarah Grace Martens

Last Thursday I participated in a free Alumni Attitude Study webinar titled "What is an event and how do we measure its success?" I was intrigued by the topic because my job requires that I put on many events for the school and I was interested to learn more about how to quantify event success and how it is measured by other institutions.

The success of an event, like many facets of alumni relations, is difficult to measure. Sure, there are a lot of intangible ways such as:

• How many people came to the event?
• Did the guests appear to enjoy themselves?
• Was the speaker engaging?
• Did the event flow smoothly without any A/V problems or interruptions?

These questions are important but they certainly don't allow you to quantify anything, much less a ROI. So, 50 people came to your event - is that a success?

I was surprised when the webinar changed gears from discussing 'brick-and-mortar' events (like the questions above apply to) and began talking about 'events' in the realm of social media. For instance at typical brick-and-mortar events, like a career-enhancement seminar or a faculty presentation, valuable information is shared only once. Expert presenters, vivid slideshows, engaging question and answer sessions exist and are experienced only by the individuals in the room that day, at that time.  

However, with social media, these events can be broadcast live on the internet and watched from a desk at work; they can be recorded and shared via YouTube or your institution's website or even uploaded to your school's Facebook Fan Page. The options are truly limitless.

Suddenly it's a lot easier to quantify the reach of the content you created, or the virtual 'event' that you just hosted (see The Metric Messiah). How many people clicked on that particular link from the alumni e-newsletter? How many people have watched the YouTube clip of the faculty member discussing her research? How many people read the Dean's Blog last month? These numbers are big and they are getting bigger.

With dwindling higher education budgets, and growing alumni bases it's extremely rewarding to know that you can still engage alumni in places that you'll never be able to host a physical alumni event. In fact, an event featuring a popular faculty member presenting on a 'hot' topic might draw 50 individuals (like the one we hosted in Chicago last summer), or the same faculty member presenting on the same issue can draw 400+ views on YouTube. That's incredible stuff and it's worthy to note that it has and will forever change the field of alumni relations.

Some may say that nothing can replace a good handshake and face-to-face networking - and they would be right. But it's nice to know that there are vibrant alternatives when time, money and resources make 'brick-and-mortar' events unfeasible or at least few and far between. As the webinar presenter mentioned last week, we certainly want our alumni reading our e-newsletters, joining our LinkedIn groups, and watching our YouTube videos - and if they come out and attend an actual event, that is just icing on the cake!