As Steve noted in the Nov. 4 ALTogether Now, the Advancement Leadership Team (ALT) is committed to fostering a culture of continuous innovation. Thank you to everyone who submitted proposals to the innovation challenge issued that week! I am pleased to now report on the proposals funded, and how ALT will put the modest annual budget surplus that has accrued as a result of current staff savings to work to help move our business forward.
The following are new projects funded for 2019-20.
- Refreshing our brand focused on the impact of Queen’s, and developing an awareness campaign. This will be our first brand review since 2007.
- Refreshing our websites to develop integrated on-brand websites that drive engagement and demonstrate impact. We currently experience an average of 900,000 page views annually across all our sites, mostly from service-seeking alumni. Refreshing our websites will create an opportunity to convert users to higher levels of engagement.
- Redesigning the Queen’s Alumni Review (QAR) to integrate it into our brand and message ecosystem, including the print and electronic versions. Redesigning the QAR was one of the top recommendations in our recent readership survey completed earlier this year.
- Piloting LiveAlumni. This is a new information platform to enrich the information we have in Advance using public sources.
It is also worth mentioning that other ideas that were submitted will be rolled into our longer term planning. Technology to facilitate student testimonial or thank-you videos will be incorporated into our multi-year communications plan (see more about this later in this newsletter). And we remain committed to developing a new online giving platform after the new events and mass mailer systems are implemented.
Finally, there were some additional ideas that are more operational in nature that we will be considering how to implement. These include several ideas about professional development opportunities and process improvements.
Thank you again to everyone who submitted proposals. As we move into a new strategic plan it will be imperative for everyone to consider what we may need to evolve in order to achieve our new ambitions. So please don't let the brainstorming stop — continue thinking about innovations that advance our business, and please keep bringing your ideas forward!
Register Now for the Holiday Party
All Advancement staff are encouraged to join us Tuesday, Dec. 3 from 11:30 am to 3 pm at the Donald Gordon Conference Center for our annual year-end celebration! We welcome you to wear your best holiday ugly-sweater, and to enjoy the delicious holiday lunch, fun, games, and prizes our organizing committee has arranged for us.
Registration for the event is $10 and can be completed online from Nov. 18 to 26.
As in previous years, Advancement has selected a charity to whom we would like to share the gift of goodwill and donations during this special time of year. This year’s charity of choice is Addiction and Mental Health Services - KFLA. Please consider giving to this wonderful cause.
Don’t forget to register, and we look forward to spending a relaxing afternoon of celebration ALTogether.
What's Your Holiday Style?
Like it or dread it, the holiday season is upon us. Well, here is a helpful blog applying DiSC profiles to assessing our holiday party style, just in time for the Dec. 3 Office of Advancement holiday lunch. What’s Your Holiday Party Style?
Bringing the Vision into Focus
The November ALT half-day meeting was last Thursday. One objective of these monthly meetings is to review progress towards annual goals, so last Thursday we dedicated time to reviewing a preliminary framework for the multi-year communications plan that will be developed by the end of 2019-20.
The strategic objectives of the new communications plan include: demonstrating how the Queen's community and a Queen's education contribute to a better world; reorienting our messaging, delivery, and visual identity; and transitioning our users from transactions to interactions within a co-creative environment.
There is still a lot of work to do — including the development of the three-year operational plan to implement the vision — but the expected result of this effort will be compelling and personalized donor communications characterized by targeted key messages and brand consistency across our various channels. Results will also include web content that is easy to navigate and inspires conversations.
We all look forward to learning more about this plan as it evolves!
Online Survey Results
We now have another set of data to inform the next strategic plan for Queen's advancement. The final report on the results of our online alumni survey are now available for review.
As previously reported, there was a 30 per cent response rate to this survey — nearly double what is typically achieved from surveys of this nature. So together with the results of the online internal survey previously released, this provides some very strong indicators for the future direction of Queen's advancement.