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This page appears courtesy of Snow & Associates, an international research organization dedicated to helping educational, fraternal and professional institutions maintain better information on their alumni/ae, communicate more effectively with them, and relocate those who are lost. Click HERE to visit our home page.
Why use e-mail to communicate with alumni?Regional telephone companies are now compiling e-mail addresses of their corporate customers. Here are a few good reasons why your institution should compile e-mail addresses of your alumni, and some thoughts on related issues:Electronic mail is the wave of the future. It's faster than Fed-X, but without the high price tag; it doesn't require paper, ink, or postage; recipients can respond to e-mail far more easily than snail-mail; and it costs almost nothing. For economic reasons alone, e-mail is sure to play a growing role in the efforts of educational, fraternal and professional organizations to communicate with alumni. Ameritech and other regional telephone companies are now including e-mail addresses of corporate customers in their latest telephone directories. Can residential listings be far behind? Because college graduates are far more likely to use e-mail than the public at large, efforts to track e-mail addresses of alumni, and use it as a medium of communication with them, are sure pay off in the future. E-mail can help institutions lower other costs associated with communicating with alumni too. For example, many schools now publish their alumni magazines on the World Wide Web, and some notify alumni of new issues via e-mail. Some alumni now prefer not to receive their magazines in printed form, reducing the cost of printing and postage for the parent institution. And this trend is sure to grow in the future. Are your alumni environmentally conscious? Communicating with them via e-mail instead of direct mail saves trees, by reducing the need for paper. It also reduces the content of landfills and incinerators. One drawback of e-mail is that there is not yet a widely accepted method to transfer funds via e-mail, other than using credit card numbers. For this reason, it is not yet feasible to conduct large scale fund raising via e-mail. However, the development of widely accepted forms of 'virtual checking' is not far away, and could dramatically lower the cost of conducting annual giving programs, in conjunction with e-mail. Another problem with e-mail is that addresses seem to change with alarming frequency, more often than postal addresses. Educational institutions should lead the way in providing permanent e-mail addresses. Some schools already allow their alumni to keep their student e-mail addresses after graduation, as a benefit of membership in their alumni association. This is a prudent investment of resources, since it will allow the school to maintain contact with active alumni more easily, and more inexpensively, than using conventional mail. E-mail is faster, cheaper, more responsive, and more friendly to the environment than snail-mail. For these reasons, it's here to stay, and steadily growing. Educational, fraternal and professional institutions will benefit from starting to compile e-mail addresses for alumni now, and from moving steadily toward electronic communication with constituents, rather than using printed matter. Efforts to help alumni maintain consistent e-mail addresses will also pay dividends over the long run, and should be encouraged.
Tips from Previous MonthsClick HERE for info about the benefits of compiling social security numbers for your alumni. (June-July '97)
Click HERE to read a brief discussion of the 'National Change of Address' service, offered by the U.S. Postal Service. (April-May '97)
Click HERE to see the results of an informal survey about the accuracy of databases maintained by the int'l headquarters offices of greek letter organizations. (March-April '97)
All text and images © 1995-97 by Snow & Associates.
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