Communicating effectively with students
We’re currently in the middle of the last week of our Stanford Class of 2009 Senior Gift Campaign, and it has been interesting speaking with seniors as they’re finishing up classes, making preparations for graduation, and making their gifts.
We started recruiting the committee in early October and had our first big event in the middle of January. It went ok, but we didn’t get a lot of turn out. We sponsored a class pub night in April, which went really well – tons of gifts, and a lot of brand awareness was built. We had a repeat of last year’s most successful event, but only a as many people showed up, and we were apparently not clear enough that there was an open bar (on a side note, Stanford undergrads don’t drink nearly as much I remember drinking in college, but that could just be a Canadian thing).
We sponsored a photo booth a la Amilee at their senior formal, which almost the entire class attended, and got a ton of people aware of the campaign. I think we did a terrific job promoting our brand and getting people to join our facebook cause – a firsts for Stanford’s development office. We started to campaign pretty heavily at the beginning of May by sending emails, many of them with embedded video, from members of the class committee and Stanford administrators like Dean Julie. She has been our most successful solicitation so far, and our tabling in white plaza, the main campus thoroughfare, is more frequented this year.
What has been interesting is hearing the wide range of feedback. Some people hadn’t heard about the campaign at all, and asked how we had been promoting it. Other people come up and apologize for procrastinating for so long before making their gift. Often, people reference specific points from our emails – ‘I can’t believe Dartmouth got 96% of their seniors to give!’ or ‘I’m coming to the Margarita thing on Friday with my family, it’s $20.09 for the gift, right?’. We’ve had feedback that we haven’t been clear enough about what the campaign is raising money for, that we’re being too competitive in comparing ourselves with east coast peers, or that we should have started earlier or should be going into people’s dorms. In short, the feedback is all over the place, and there doesn’t seem to be much consistency – either positive or negative.
I guess what it boils down to is that no matter what we do, or how often we do it, we need to keep doing everything. Events, emails, peer to peer promotion, facebook groups and causes, campus solicitation … maybe even, dare I say it, snail mail. It seems that the only pattern emerging is that we’re going to reach different members of the class, at different times, with different methods, at different events, focusing on different aspects of the campaign. So no matter how annoying I feel we’re being, or how many messages we’re putting out there … we can always do more. I guess the take away here, is marketing mix is important.