Best Practices for .Edu Social Media Advancement Campaigns

Over the past few weeks, we’ve published four blog posts about innovative uses of social media in school, college and university marketing, advancement, and fundraising:

• The Blue Pig campaign: conceived by Emory University to boost undergraduate class giving


• Powered By Orange: a campaign by Oregon State to raise awareness of its programs and alumni


• Flight of the Flyers: an award-winning campaign by Nazareth College to increase reunion attendance


• How Northfield Mount Hermon School: uses social media and integrates it into their school website

These were all part of a presentation that Elizabeth Allen from Caltech and I did at the CASE Summit. We believe they illustrate emerging best practices for how social media can be integrated into an interesting and effective campaign.

1. Multiple channels: Each of these campaigns uses multiple channels to achieve its objectives. PBO integrates Twitter, Facebook, a Google map, and image galleries into its website—as well as a blog that feeds other OSU websites, too. The Blue Pig campaign used email, a Facebook profile, ads in the student newspaper, and posters as part of its campaign. Flight of the Flyers involved stuffed college mascots that were sent around the country to reunion class members, who entered them into a Google map after photographing them.

2. Multiple sources of content: All of these sites involved multiple sources of content, generated by professionals at the institution and by site visitors. Northfield Mount Hermon uses its Flickr group to feed images to its website (and will incorporate even more social media feeds into the new site it will launch this summer). PBO features an image gallery, to which many people can contribute. With the help of this user-generated content, there is the potential for these sites to grow substantially as awareness of the sites builds. This is particularly true of Powered By Orange, since OSU has the potential to reach a large number of people and may turn some of them into contributors.

3. Sense of humor: The Blue Pig and Flight of the Flyers in particular don’t take themselves too seriously. Kerry Gotham, director of alumni relations at Nazareth College and the person who conceived the Flight of the Flyers, told me, “To be honest, I was surprised at how well it did take off …. I thought it was kind of a harebrained idea. We wanted to have some fun-I had no idea how much people would like it.”

4. Evolution: None of these programs launched and went on auto-pilot. They continued to evolve. David Baker from OSU refers to the university’s attitude toward PBO as “Launch and Learn,” meaning that he and his colleagues are monitoring the site and adjusting their tactics-and strategy-as they see how their community responds to it. At Northfield Mount Hermon School, initial experiments at integrating Flickr feeds into the school website convinced the staff that visitors would appreciate even more social media integration into NMHSchool.org.

5. Results: While some of these programs were launched without explicit targets for results, measuring results is important to all the programs. Results for the Blue Pig (higher undergraduate giving) and Flight of the Flyers (increased reunion attendance) are easy to quantify. Results for PBO are harder to measure, though Baker and his colleagues are hard at work to do just that.

We’re very interested in hearing your feedback about your views of emerging best practices for social media campaigns—and finding more examples to add to our list. Please contribute comments below or email us (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)).

Posted by Michael Stoner
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