Encouraging Alumni Involvement

Keeping alumni involved after they graduate can be a difficult challenge. After all, they’re busy building a career, starting a family, and may have even moved across the country. Despite the challenges, keeping alumni involved is a worthwhile goal since it offers plenty of benefits to your chapter.

To keep alumni involved in your chapter, give them the chance to help the chapter and/or to help the current members of your chapter. One excellent opportunity for alumni to aid the chapter is to become a member of a committee that guides the chapter, such as the board of trustees or the housing corporation. If certain alumni are more inclined to participate in philanthropic activities, perhaps there’s an opportunity for them with your national philanthropy. Another option is creating a rush scholarship and inviting alumni members to join a committee that decides which applicant is awarded the scholarship.

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Creating Content for Alumni Newsletters

Following up on our last post about how frequently to send out alumni newsletters, we’re going to discuss what to include in alumni newsletters. For many alumni, especially those that no longer live near your chapter, the newsletter is their only method of involvement. The decision of what to include in a newsletter is even more important considering some alumni will just glance at a few sections of the newsletter, and dismiss it entirely if the content they happen to browse isn’t something that interests them.

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Keeping Alumni Informed

Alumni are a tricky group to keep happy. Send them too many updates, and they’ll complain that you’re spamming them with information. Don’t send them enough updates, and they’ll grumble that they have no idea what’s going on in the chapter. We recommend a two part approach: short 1-2 paragraph email newsletters once a month, and a more lengthy printed newsletter once or twice a year.

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Updated: Directory Export

We’ve updated the directory export feature to include four output options. Group admins are now able to export complete member contact information, members’ custom profile fields, member mailing addresses, and parent mailing addresses.

The most exciting part of this new feature is exporting mailing labels. Both members mailing addresses and parent mailing addresses can be exported. There are two format types for exporting mailing addresses: CSV and PDF. CSV files can be used with Microsoft Word or another word processor for a mail merge. PDF files are formatted to print on Avery 5160 or 8160 address labels. Sending out printed newsletters just got a whole lot easier!

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Using Filters to Reduce Inbox Clutter

Student organizations send out plenty of emails. Some are extremely important, and others aren’t worth the space in your inbox. Using filters in your email program is an effective strategy to make sure only important emails end up in your inbox.

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Parent Email Lists for Strong Parent Relations

Having support from parents is important to any college student, and having a strong parent relations program is important to any greek organization. There are plenty of reasons your fraternity or sorority should put in the effort to develop a parents relations program. For one, many parents are uneasy about their child joining a greek organization, and describing the benefits of going greek can greatly ease family tension for these members. Furthermore, parents are generally happy to contribute to your group. Sometimes its a financial contribution to a new house, other times its sending brownies for rush or finals week. Regardless of the situation, its worth it to be on good terms with the parents.

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Managing Inbox Clutter using Multiple Email Lists

When’s the last time you’ve heard about someone missing a meeting because they didn’t get the email? In many student organizations, it’s a common problem. Some large college groups send out more than 50 emails a day, so its easy for the important messages to get lost in the clutter.

Because so many emails are being sent every day, it’s important for large student organizations to use multiple email lists. Using multiple email lists offers many benefits:

1. Emails are grouped according to their subject, allowing for easy filtering.
2. Members can pick what topics they’re interested in.
3. Fewer unwanted messages make the important ones more likely to get read.

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Feature Update: Newsletters

We’re excited to announce the release of newsletters. Newsletters is a tool that simplifies the process of creating email newsletters, and makes it easier to stay in contact with parents and alumni. Not only does it take fewer than 5 minutes to send out a newsletter, your newsletter will look great too. In three short steps, you’ll be able to create a newsletter that looks like the picture below.

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Caching Images Using Attachment_Fu and Amazon S3

Caching images improves the user experience and reduces S3 costs.  It improves the user’s experience because web pages load quicker and it reduces S3 costs since you have fewer transfers.

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