Lessons Learned: My Portfolio

Like a lot of my school, college and university clients I know I need to get the word out about the great things that are happening in my business. But I'm often so busy living the story that it's a challenge to make the time to tell it.

For the last year, I've wanted and needed to add a portfolio feature to my web site to showcase the projects I've been working on. At the same time, I've been striving for more regular blog posts. Inconsistent posting can kill even the best of blogs and mine has been idling for a month as I've been traveling, presenting, and creating the work.

Solution: Each of my next 10 to 12 posts will feature one of my projects. By the end I'll have my work up and out for all to see and I will have fueled my blog.

Each project will focus on a lesson learned -- key insights that become part of AJ's School of Thought.

Photo by StreetFly JZ

Campaign Communications: 7 Steps to Move Beyond the Typical

Even before I meet with schools about campaign messaging I can guess what their fundraising priorities are. I bet you can too.

Scholarship, faculty, facilities. There’s a good reason for that. A school’s ability to meet these three needs drives its success. So how do you engage donors -- many of whom have heard it all before – in the same ol’ same ol’ priorities?

That was the challenge for Germantown Friends School, Turnaround Marketing Communications and me two years ago when the school asked us to develop its campaign communications. During its feasibility study a major donor prospect said the priorities sounded like “the typical independent school stuff.” At this year’s CASE-NAIS conference I had the pleasure of teaming up with Germantown Friends School Director of Development Sally West Williams and Turnaround Marketing Communications Principal Liza Fisher Norman to talk about what we did to move the message beyond the typical. Here’s an excerpt from my part of our session called, “From Basic to Brilliant: Not Your Typical Campaign Communications.”

For Germantown Friends it boiled down to a seven steps that I think can serve as a roadmap for any school.

1. Tap into the Human Need to Be Part of Something Bigger than Oneself
Donors are people who believe in their ability to make a difference. They give to schools because it’s an opportunity to make an impact on an issue they care about. They give to be part of something new, important or unique. They give out of loyalty and pride. All these motives equal a human yearning to be part of something bigger than oneself. Great campaigns tap into that yearning.

2. Find Your North Stars
These are the people who love and support your school and can articulate why. (I usually interview scores of people to understand a school. North Stars are the voices that stand out and tell me what makes this school different from the rest). At Germantown Friends, our guiding voices were the head of school, three donor-parents, one donor-alum, one teacher, and one legendary quote.

3. Ask Your North Stars the Right Questions
Some of my favorites: If this school didn’t exist, why would it need to be founded today? Where are the ambiguities at this school? What difference will it make to the world in 50 years if you’ve gave to this campaign?

4. Name What Sets Your School Apart (and have the proof to back it up)
In listening to Germantown Friends’ North Stars, we identified five distinguishing characteristics:

Germantown Friends . . .

• Is a “Niche” School
• Has a Vibrant Culture of Intellectual and Creative Ambition
• Is a Daring 21st Century Urban School Model
• Is a “National Treasure”
• Is a Catalyst of Hope, Interconnection, and Positive Impact

5. Match Your Campaign’s Tone and Approach to School Culture
While campaigns raise money for the same thing, school cultures are vastly different. Is your school culture bold, proud, thrifty, intellectual, entrepreneurial?

In Germantown Friends’ case, we knew we had to balance ambition with the school’s traditional restraint when it comes to fundraising.

6. Make Your School’s Story Your Campaign’s Story
Using your “what sets you apart” messages, translate the typical three-part every-school campaign to a unique and exciting philanthropic call to action. Germantown Friends’ daring, its Quaker values of social action for the good of its community, its sense of equality – that you don’t have to be rich to make a difference and be counted – led me to think about social entrepreneurism and a micro-finance model where the collective energy of many individuals could make a huge impact. The result was an unpacking of the usual three-part campaign into seven projects that together fuel a national treasure.

The Germantown Friends School Voices for the Future Campaign Call to Action:
7 Projects to Change the World

• Fueling a National Treasure Endowment
• Extraordinary Teachers Endowment
• Faculty Innovation Endowment
• Sustainable Urban Science Center
• Middle-Income Family Tuition Relief (Later became Access and Affordability Financial Aid Endowment)
• Community Scholars Program
• GFS Generations Fund (The emphasis was on all generations participating in the annual fund, particularly young alumni. Later became simply GFS Annual Fund.)

7. Make Your Case Tangible, Doable, Fun
While the campaign message needs to be inspiring and lofty, it also needs to be practical and fun. When I wrote the Germantown Friends case I thought of the leave behind piece as a social entrepreneurism catalog – an approach that seemed fitting for a school whose donors are not ostentatious and have an ethos of bettering the world. The “fun” for this school is the ability to actually make a difference no matter how large or small the gift.

To date, the school has raised sixty-five percent of its goal and donors have accelerated pledges and turned bequests into outright gifts even in challenging times. Sally West Williams told session attendees that when the economy took a nosedive what made all the difference was the fact that the campaign’s priority had moved from typical stuff to the specific magic of Germantown Friends School.

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Institutions, Don't Waste Your Time

Tomorrow I will attend a friend's funeral. She was 40 years old and leaves behind three little girls under five. It's heartbreaking to all who knew her. At the same time I am working with a college readying itself for a major event in its institutional life. Dozens of members of this community have been drawn together to craft a great occasion. Yet during the last several months I've seen time and talent wasted in campus intrigues.

We tell ourselves campus politics go with the territory but they don't have to. When I think about the energy my friend's community generated to sustain her life, to encourage and nurture her children and to comfort and inspire one another over the last year and a half, I am in awe of the power of our collective energy.

Schools, colleges and universities are brilliant energy sources. Let's not waste our time on the insignificant.

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ROI is not Materialism

The New York Times recently featured a story on making college “relevant.” The basic premise is that colleges have gotten wise to the fact that students and their parents see a connection between going to college and their ability to earn a living. (Imagine that!) A connection that has been both obvious and debated for decades.

The difference between this piece and so many others I’ve read is that it does not include an impassioned faculty member arguing that the only “correct” reason for attending college is to be an educated human as opposed to the crassness of getting a job. Rather the premise of the piece is that colleges and universities have decided if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em, axing philosophy departments in favor of “anything prefixed with ‘bio’” because students have “wealth as a goal” as opposed to “developing a meaningful philosophy of life.”

“The shift in attitudes,” the article’s author writes, “is reflected in a shifting curriculum.” One could easily get the idea that more mercenary students are pushing cash-strapped institutions to change their curricula. But the article leaves out some very important context.

The source cited for more money-conscious students is UCLA’s national survey of college freshman, the largest and longest-running survey of American college students. (It started in 1966.) The same survey also found that the most important belief among entering freshman is in raising a family and that "the importance of helping others” is the highest it has been in 20 years.

As John H. Pryor, director of UCLA's Cooperative Institutional Research Program’s which conducts the survey has said, “It would be simplistic to view today’s college students as materialistic because they feel it is important to be well off financially. In fact, students are also very interested in raising families and helping others, both of which are accomplished with greater ease if one is well-off financially.”

Another point of context is that the survey has also revealed that more students report they will get a job in order to cover college expenses than at any time during the 32 years this question has been asked. In addition they are more likely to use their own money to help pay for college than in years past and they are less likely to matriculate at their first choice college because of financial considerations.

With money and earning ability front and center leading up to and during a student's college years, it's no surprise that, as the article states, “Even before they arrive on campus, students — and their parents — are increasingly focused on what comes after college. What’s the return on investment, especially as the cost of that investment keeps rising? How will that major translate into a job?” But this doesn’t mean that “jobs and making money have replaced learning” as one sarcastic Twitterer commented about the article.

As a writer and communications consultant to colleges and universities, my job is to answer the question, "What makes hefty tuitions worth it?" I got into this business because I am a true believer in the power of education (from studying philosophy to bio) to change lives for the better. When students invest as much as $200,000 for that education, by necessity a better life better include being better off.

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College Admissions as Metaphor: Lessons for Consultants

As prospective students were learning this week if they'd been accepted early admission to colleges and universities around the country, those same institutions were letting many consultants know whether they'd been accepted as well. I don't remember so many RFP decisions coinciding with early admission season in the past, but for some reason the last two weeks have brought a number of yeas and nays to me and several colleagues.

Because I often team up with other firms I have been in the interesting position of knowing not only how I did but of seeing how other consulting friends have fared. One colleague, a talented golden boy, has been "accepted" by every school to which he applied including the Ivies. Another colleague was wait-listed -- make that short-listed -- at an Ivy, rejected by a little Ivy and accepted by a great public. As for me, I was accepted by an Ivy, rejected by another, and accepted by two top-tier liberal arts colleges. (Yes, I'm pleased.)

Now that the waiting is over, like families whose kids were accepted and rejected, these colleagues and I have been discussing the whys behind the decisions. I've taken away these lessons for consultants:

• In the end, no matter how talented a consultant is, institutions that want to sell prestige choose prestige. Whether consciously or not, institutions "trade up," choosing consultants who have worked with the institutions they admire. This can hurt you with "reach" schools but also help you identify schools that would welcome your counsel.
  
• The old adage about not judging a school by the tour guide works here too. To have a sense of whether you'll win the business, ask yourself if you have a great connection with more than one person at the school. Even if that one person is the dean of admission or chair of the board, it's not enough if you are not a good fit with the rest of the team. You may still win the business but if that key person leaves the value of your work for the institution can erode dramatically.
  
• Never let 'em see you sweat. While every institution wants great value, an over-eager or Avis we-try-harder approach can backfire. Especially in this economy, institutions want turnkey results and a sure thing. Rather than instilling confidence, revealing too much of the inner workings of your operation and decision-making can detract from a perception of out-of-town expertise, translating to weakness.
  
• If you're going after a reach school -- meaning you don't have similar institutions on your list -- you better have a special talent your competitors don't have. For prospective students that may mean being an Olympic fencer or holding a patent at the tender age of 17. For prospective consultants that can mean having a formula for successful search results or proven social media ROI.

I've often said that families choose schools that strike the right balance of prestige, cost, and outcomes. And so it is with institutions selecting consultants. When I consider the consultant choices made by several institutions this season, inevitably they each chose the consultant whose client pedigree, proven outcomes, and cost was right for them. Four years from now it will be interesting to see how many believe they made the right choice.

The good news for talented consultants, like talented kids, is there are so many fantastic institutions in this country -- a great match is possible for everyone.

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3 Mistakes Alumni Magazines Make

Want your alums to read more than class notes? Here's some advice from Swarthmore College's award-winning alumni magazine editor, Jeff Lott.

Jeff chaired the CASE Annual Publications Conference in Pittsburgh this year. After seeing him in action during a fast-paced critique session he calls "Triple Play" I asked him to write this guest post.

From Jeff:

One of my favorite sessions at the conference was an America-Idol version of publications critiques in which a panel of three experts is given just three minutes to offer some cogent criticism of a publication submitted by a member of the “studio audience.”

The beauty of Triple Play is that your school’s piece is under the gun for just 180 seconds. In reality, you don’t have that much time to impress your actual audience before your publication is headed for the recycling bin. A lot of the publications we saw were magazines with three common problems.

Design Overload.
This is not a new criticism, but today’s designers have way too many tools at their fingertips—a hundred fonts, a thousand graphical elements, a million ways to layer more images, colors, and information onto a page. Some can’t resist what I call exponential design: “If something looks good, square it.” Cut it out! Readers of teen tabloids will pore over these kinds of pages. But your educated, college-graduate audience needs a break. Calm, quiet design coupled with cool, easy-to-comprehend editorial will give them a chance to think.

Editorial Hierarchy.
A number of magazines ignored the following reality: Almost no one reads your carefully written articles, no matter how good they are. Research shows that only 10 percent of readers make it past the first paragraph of your body copy. So how can you get your message across? Most of us are skimmers—it’s how we cope with the flood of information we’re bathed in every day. So, if you’re designing or editing a magazine, tell your story through the following hierarchy:

• Catchy headline with an active verb (avoid gerunds)
• Summary subhead that, if it’s the only thing readers take-away, tells the story
  
• Crunchy, fact-filled callouts that help fill in the details
• Captions that don’t just name who or what’s in the picture, but tell something about them or it
• Short, engaging sidebars, lists, and charts that provide additional entry points to the story
• Last and least—the story itself

Magazine Architecture.
Go to a good newsstand and buy 25 different consumer magazines—from The Atlantic to The Bark, from Smithsonian to People. It will cost you about a hundred bucks. Back at the office, pick them apart. What are the common organizational elements? You’ll find that there’s a standard architecture to great magazines, just as there is to great buildings. And if you deviate too much from the expectations of readers—the conventions set by the magazines that they actually pay to read—you do so at your peril. Whether you start reading a magazine from the back or the front, architecture matters. Too many institutional magazines ignore the defining details that make readers comfortable, risking the impression that your publication is not a “real” magazine. To be taken seriously, you must be real.

If you would like help with any of these concepts Jeff has kindly offered to receive questions via email at jeffrey.lott@gmail.com

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When You're Out of Ideas

Stuck on a concept, theme, brand development or story? Try some wisdom from the design world that works just as well for writers and marketing communication folks.

Michael Bierut's "Lazy Designer's Guide to Success" featured in Azure.

Andrew Bosley's The Brainstormer (possibly a new iPhone app).