Reinventing Your Alumni Program 

You need to do more than just plan events for your alumni. You need to understand how to connect with them to engage them where they are – which could be a region, Facebook or Twitter, or in a letter. Then you need to measure that engagement to determine what is working, where you should apply your most valuable resources, and what should discontinue taking up time and money.

While Alumni Programs have been a cornerstone of educational institutions for years, we in the profession still struggle with measuring our impact and making the case for increased staff and budgets. In this Gonser Gerber Institute workshop, we will discuss the issues for the modern day alumni program, including technology and metrics to track engagement, volunteerism, student recruitment, lifelong learning, and giving.

In this two-day workshop, we will discuss "Meaningful Engagement of Alumni", which moves beyond event and membership dues discussions. We will talk about the shift from “what can we do for our alumni” to “what alumni can do to strengthen the institution”.   In addition, we will review a Case Study from Hope College, who uses a systematic approach to evaluating alumni engagement through an “involvement rating” metric that they have created and track. We will learn what this data means for Hope, and how they apply these metrics to identify donor and volunteer prospects, make strategic decisions as a team, plan and set goals.

In this workshop, we will review these topics and more:

• Role of the Alumni Program
• Rethinking Your Alumni Engagement
• A Modern Alumni Communications Plan
• Effective Alumni Involvement in Institutional Leadership
• Alumni and Lifelong Learning
• The Role of Technology and Metrics in Your Alumni Program
• Creating Your Own “Engagement Rating”
• Planning, Objective and Goals

Registrations and Hotel

Gonser Gerber Institute workshops cost $995 per registration, $895 for each additional registration from the same institution. Current clients of Gonser Gerber receive a discounted fee of $795 per registrant. This fee includes breakfast and snacks both days of the workshop, and lunch on Thursday. We have secured a limited number or rooms for our workshop participants at the single room rate of $139 so you should make your reservations now.  Reservations must be made by May 9, 2017. Find out more on our Workshop Fact Sheet.

Your Faculty:

Scott Travis has been working to engage alumni and parents at Hope College since 2006. He serves as Executive Director of Alumni Engagement and is responsible for leading the Alumni and Family Engagement, Hope Fund and Annual Giving, Communication, and Data Services teams within the division of Development and Alumni Engagement at Hope.

He studied management and communication at Hope College and earned an MBA from Grand Valley State University with an emphasis on marketing and non-profit management. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Beta Gamma Sigma honor societies and has owned his own sports camp business, worked in media relations for the Philadelphia 76ers, coordinated conferences on Hope’s campus, and helped organize a centralized ticket office at the college. He has also served as a First Year Seminar Instructor and Academic Advisor.

Scott has presented at multiple conferences on alumni engagement and data analytics and led Hope’s latest economic impact study. His work with colleagues has been recognized by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE). You can follow Scott on Twitter via @satravis.

Kent Huyser, senior consultant at Gonser Gerber, has more than 12 years of experience in non-profit and advancement leadership. Prior to joining Gonser Gerber, he was Associate Vice Chancellor for Advancement at Metropolitan Community College, Kansas City (MCC) where he led a successful advancement program and launched the first comprehensive campaign for $20 million and reaching record fundraising levels. Prior positions also include Director of Development at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) Foundation where he led fundraising efforts for the School of Medicine, leadership positions at William Jewell College (MO), including Regional Development Director and Executive Director of Alumni Relations and Annual Giving, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.