The College’s Office of Advancement frequently communicates with alumni and donors through efforts including The College Connection, invitations to our Food for Thought series, and our impact reports. We also distribute communications on behalf of the College’s academic units.
These communications include departmental newsletters, invitations to events, and select solicitations. Read more about each type of communication below.
The Office of Advancement has historically supported academic units with the creation and deployment of alumni newsletters. In the past, each unit’s newsletter has differed greatly in terms of length and style.
Going forward, in an effort to increase alumni engagement and reinforce a sense of consistent, branded identity for the College, we are actively partnering with units on a new approach.
We will assist by creating communications consisting of four features:
Every newsletter will also include a passive solicitation on its index page. See an example of what that looks like here, via the Department of Political Science.
When your academic unit is ready to start organizing its next newsletter, reach out to Director of Advancement Communications Raymond Fleischmann.
Please reach out at least six weeks ahead of when you’d like your newsletter to be finished.
From there, we will determine a date of publication and get the process started. As a first step, we will send a designed email to your contactable alumni base, requesting news and updates.
We will also begin planning and writing the in-depth story of impact, which will be about 700-800 words.
This article will be coordinated with the College’s Office of Communications and Marketing and, in addition to being included in your newsletter, will be featured on the College's homepage and social media channels. This will provide your unit with a great deal of additional exposure.
During this part of the planning process, you’ll also request news updates from your faculty, to be comprised in the “Faculty news” feature.
We will also request a letter from your chair/director at this time.
After all the features are complete, we will design your newsletter on your website.
Once reviewed for any edits/corrections, the newsletter will go live site, and we will design an email in Salesforce that links to both the newsletter in its entirety and each of its individual features. This allows us to track which pieces of content are most engaging to your alumni.
That’s okay! Certain departments and programs within the College independently create and design their own newsletters—the Department of Biology, for instance, and the Department of Chemistry—and in these cases, our office will still assist you with sending your newsletter to your alumni base via Salesforce.
We cannot, however, assist with the creation or design of the newsletter itself, simply due to bandwidth and our ongoing commitments to other communications priorities.
Many academic units previously created PDF versions of their newsletters, but the university has a strict policy against the use of PDFs, simply in keeping with the university’s policies on accessibility.
Because of this, we cannot assist with the creation a PDF version of your newsletter, nor can we send one to your alumni.
Got an event coming up that you’d like help promoting? A lecture series, for instance, or an alumni-student networking reception here in Bloomington or elsewhere?
We can help! Our office frequently partners with academic units in promoting events to alumni, and the process is simple and straightforward.
First, reach out to Vanessa Cloe (our Director of Alumni Engagement) or Raymond Fleischmann (our Director of Advancement Communications) and let them know about your upcoming event. For both in-person events and online events like livestreams, it’s best to reach out two months ahead of time to start the process.
We will work with your unit to create and deploy a Salesforce mailer on your behalf, which will invite alumni and friends to the event. Depending on your preferences, this will look like either a personal letter from the chair/director or a more general invitation. Both types of messages have similar open rates and click-through rates; it’s largely a matter of how you’d like to approach your marketing for the event.
In either case, the mailer will look as though it’s coming from your department/program. In other words, your wordmark will appear at the top, your unit’s name will be in the sender information, and your social media buttons will be included at the bottom.
We do not typically help promote events like departmental meetings, student presentations, or events without a clear appeal to alumni.
Our office will also organize the e-mail list for you, which will be directly uploaded into Salesforce.
Maybe. And, if you do need to collect RSVPs or have a dedicated “landing page,” we can help you with that, too.
Remember: Your mailer—even if it takes the “personal” invitation approach—should be brief. So, if you feel as though there’s vital information about your event that you can’t include in the mailer due to word count, that might be a sign that you need a landing page.
Landing pages are great for including specific details about an event: dress code, speaker bios, etc. They’re also an excellent way to collect RSVPs, since it’s easy to embed an RSVP form in a webpage.
If your event is straightforward—a one-hour lecture hosted via Zoom, for instance—you may not need a landing page at all. In a case like that, your mailer would simply link readers directly to the Zoom meeting’s RSVP page, where further information about the event can also be included.
Once your mailer is written and tested—and once your landing page is created, if necessary—our office will deploy the mailer via Salesforce.
For in-person events, we aim to deploy a mailer at least four weeks before the event itself. For online events, we like to deploy a mailer at least two weeks before the event.
You may also want to send a follow-up reminder message to your alumni. Mailers like these are typically deployed the week of the event or sometimes even the same day as the event.
If you’re interested in a follow-up, just discuss it with Vanessa and Raymond.
Ultimately, the mission of our office is to raise funds that support the College and its students, faculty, and research. As such, we do organize certain solicitations throughout the year, sometimes in partnership with specific departments and programs.
This process is complicated, however, and it involves careful coordination between our office, the department/program itself, and the IU Foundation. Solicitations are not brief or simple projects, and the process of each solicitation is entirely unique.
If you’re interested in learning more about this process, please contact Gillian Johnston, our Director of Annual Giving and Donor Relations.
No.
All solicitations must abide by certain legal requirements and go through the proper channels and approvals via the College and the IU Foundation.
Typically held in April, IU Day is an annual event organized by the IU Foundation. It’s a global celebration of IU and its students, faculty, and alumni, but it’s also an occasion to raise funds for your academic unit via crowdfunding campaigns.
Our office coordinates the College’s IU Day celebration and solicitation, and we’re also happy to support your own crowdfunding campaign. Like solicitations in general, this is a complicated and lengthy process, and it involves extensive coordination between our office and the IU Foundation.
In the months leading up to IU Day, you’ll hear from Director of Annual Giving and Donor Relations Gillian Johnston about the event, and she’ll ask that interested units contact her if they’d like assistance.
In the meantime, you can read more about IU Day at the Foundation's dedicated site for it.
If you have questions about alumni communications, contact Director of Advancement Communications Raymond Fleischmann.
