Hats Off to Donors

I wanted to share an idea I had in my role as Sr. Director of Development and External Affairs at Oregon’s Law School. In order for the idea to make sense, I want to provide some background.

I am relatively new in this position, having come across the country from to take the job a little more than 1.5 years ago.  My initial assessment was that, on the whole, the law school’s alums were not engaged – and that was NOT their fault, it was ours. By engaged, I don’t mean just not philanthropic, I mean involved, interested and aware. One part of the problem was that my office ignored the current students. While it is true these individuals will be unlikely to make a six-figure gift in my tenure at the law school, if not my lifetime, my assessment told me we needed to start changing the culture. My office needed to start engaging with this group, connecting them with alums who felt good about the school and helping them to understand the impact private giving has on the school.

Thus, we’ve hatched “Hats Off to Donors,” which is to be a student-focused celebration of our donors, and the impact these donors have made on the Oregon Law experience. Amid the festivities, we are planning to share exactly how these donors have made a difference. As part of this event, we are asking students to sign thank you notes to all those who have donated in the past year (there were more than 1,000 individual gifts).

We need this event to be successful, which means we need to ensure attendance. We have about 440 law students, and I want at least 25% of them there. So, that means free food and drink. Because we have a limited budget, we also need to ensure that we get the count for catering correct, so people need to RSVP. The problem is that students don’t RSVP. Trust me. They don’t.

As it turns out, our students need a bit more incentive than free food and drink.  So, because I have extra money in my budget (I’m very frugal…or cheap), and because I am personally passionate about reducing our student’s debt-load, I wanted to give away money. As it turns out, it’s nearly impossible to do…unless I hire them for a special project. To hire someone for a special project, I have to have some sort of formal application process – something to which I think students are proverbial allergic. So, how do I make it easy for students to apply? Here’s what I came up with!

I am offering 4 awards of $500. To be eligible, I will ask our students to explain on Twitter in 140 characters or less what they would be willing and able to do to help us thank our donors.  The tweet will need to include @Oregon_Law and #hatsoff.  I asked them to be creative, and said we will choose 4 student tweeted suggestions and they will each be given $500 in exchange for implementing their idea(s) about thanking donors.  Oh, and they have to be present to win.

Tune in next week for the results!

SM is BS?

I just finished Social Media is Bullshit by B.J. Mendleson and I wanted to share my thoughts while they were still fresh. Overall, I didn’t want to like the book because of what I perceived to be the author snarky, know-it-all attitude. If I attempt to uncouple the book from the author, I will admit I appreciated some of the content. In the end, I find myself more skeptical of social media than I was before, so if the author’s goal was to persuade people that social media is indeed bullshit, he gets a B- from me.

I agree with Mendelson’s assertion that the largest companies with the largest advertising budgets are the ones who stand to gain from social media. I also agree that usually the perception that these social media advances are actually a combination of traditional media spending, and social media. (See the Old Spice and Kia case studies).

One of the things that troubled me most about these big company “success stories” was that the gain in sales in many cases were a very large amount of money to the average business. However, in terms of amounts relative to these companies’ overall budgets, many of the gains were tiny. As with the Dell example, they supposedly gained $3 million by using Twitter…but their revenues were $61.1 billion. So, in scaling that to an amount that normal people can understand, if someone were making $61,100 a year, their Twitter gain amounted to just $30. Furthermore, this success was not sustained year over year, as they lost a whopping $9 billion the following year. Maybe they should have focused their time on innovation.

Mendelson says, “Unless there’s something to be gained by being on Facebook, you shouldn’t have a presence there. All traffic and attention should always be focused on one Web site – one that you own.” (pg. 101). I wholeheartedly disagree with this statement. Very few websites are interactive, but Facebook is. I believe that smaller companies, especially local businesses, can stand to gain from this interaction. I think it can work if the small business manages their presence, or more likely, if they have an engaged owner who simply likes using social media. I think a well-done social media presence, in particular a good Facebook page, can go a long way to engage an audience. While it may not bring in much new business, it can help entrench a very loyal, regular customer base.

In the end, I agree with a lot of what Mendleson says. I also think he’s a blowhard, and he is a little off the mark.

As a post-script, of note to me was that Mendleson’s “epiphany” comes on a failed road trip to raise money and awareness for people to check themselves early and often for what is presumably cancer. Mendleson states he employed every thing he knew about social media, and it just didn’t work. As a professional fundraiser with more than a decade of experience, I could have saved him the trouble of making the trip by telling him that is simply not how fundraising is done. His epiphany is bullshit. 

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Faculty Meeting

I deleted my previous post to share an email exchange I had with a faculty member following a point he brought up in a faculty meeting today. I am SO glad I took this class to help prepare me for this conversation. 

Some names have been changed to protect the innocent. 

From: Law Faculty John Doe

Date: Friday, February 14, 2014 at 3:11 PM

To: Law Faculty & Staff

Subject: law-fac-staff: Oregon Law is not on Facebook, but our applicants are; We rock on Twitter

Dear colleagues,

Oregon Law is not on Facebook, but our applicants are.  Does that matter?  I think that it might.  If I have made mistakes in this message, please point them out.  I am not attached to what I have written. But there is good news too.  We rock on Twitter, compared to our closest competitor law schools.

I mentioned some numbers and information about Facebook and our recruitment efforts today during the faculty meeting.  I want to share that and some more information here.  Please note: I am NOT criticizing Admissions or Communications or any department or person.  My concern, however, is that we could improve our presence in the media that our potential applicants use to gain information.  

1a.YOUNG PEOPLE USE FACEBOOK AS THEIR VERSION OF THE WEB

The following statistics suggest how important FB is:

48% of young people (ages 18-34) check Facebook when they wake up.

28% in that age range check Facebook before they get out of bed.

I asked during the meeting how any in the room check Facebook at least once a day.  About 8 people, I think, raised hands — just some of them faculty members.  Obviously we have something to learn about the current generations of law students.  We don’t all need to be on Facebook (I am on FB and Twitter, but not on 

1b.OREGON LAW HAS NO OFFICIAL PRESENCE ON FACEBOOK

It appears that we are not in sync with our students or our applicants.  But perhaps our Facebook page is at least reaching our potential applicants, right?  No.

When you search in Facebook (for university of oregon law) there is no official Facebook page.  Instead, you get a Facebook page that was somehow populated with  information from Wikipedia.  https://www.facebook.com/pages/University-of-Oregon-School-of-Law/109399069078428  

But two of our geographically closest competitors are using Facebook aggressively:

Lewis & Clark Law School: https://www.facebook.com/lewisandclarklawschool (1,749 “likes,” 53 ratings at average 4.7) (17 postings by L&C since January 13)

University of Washington Law School: https://www.facebook.com/uwschooloflaw (2,341 “likes,” 8 ratings at average 5.0) (5 postings by UW Law since January 13, including $1,000,000 give from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation)

2.TWITTER

Oregon Law is doing much better on Twitter.  And we are using it.  Compare:

Oregon Law: https://twitter.com/Oregon_Law (3,449 followers) (56 Tweets since January 13)

Lewis & Clark Law: Does not appear to have its own Twitter feed.  Lewis & Clark College does, which the Law School shares: https://twitter.com/lewisandclark (3,067 followers for the entire college, not just law school) (only 5 Tweets since January 13 with the word “law” in them)

University of Washington Law: https://twitter.com/UWSchoolofLaw (5,590 followers) (35 Tweets since January 13)

3.OTHER EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS ARE ON INSTAGRAM

Some other social media tools could be used.  Neither Oregon Law nor our near competitors are using Instagram, but our “parent” institutions are:

University of Oregon (not Law School): http://instagram.com/uoregon 

Lewis & Clark College: http://instagram.com/lewisandclarkcollege 

Perhaps this information could help us continue to think about our electronic media strategies.   Or perhaps my little Google research is not helpful.  Anyway, I present it.

John D.

From: Jake L.

Date: Friday, February 14, 2014 at 5:53 PM

To: Law Faculty & Staff

Subject: Re: law-fac-staff: Oregon Law is not on Facebook, but our applicants are; We rock on Twitter

Hey John,

Just a quick FYI – you probably didn’t see our Facebook page pop up on your search because search engines deliver results to the user based on his or her personal browsing history. If you don’t use Facebook all that much or at all, it likely wouldn’t show up on a Google search. Now, if a person went to Facebook, then searched Oregon Law, it should pop right up. 

I will say that I would definitely like to see our Facebook “likes” increase, but that doesn’t really tell the whole story. A lot of our prospective, current and former students instead use alternative groups or pages like “Class of 2016” and similar such pages. 

Thank you for pointing out how great we are on Twitter! My team has been working on this over the past year. It turns out, “the kids these days” use Twitter A LOT more than Facebook. In fact, young people are leaving Facebook in droves right now because too many of us “old people” are using it…apparently. I was actually shocked at the data: http://business.time.com/2014/01/15/more-than-11-million-young-people-have-fled-facebook-since-2011/

In the coming year(s), the next big thing is Instagram, on which we do have an active page (again the search engine thing was the likely culprit). Timely that you mentioned Instagram because we are in the process of putting together our “storyboard” for that platform right now. 

Another area in which we have a tremendous following is LinkedIn, which it turns out our alums use quite a bit. It seems to be a better place for “professional school” alums to connect than any other platform. 

Based on our staffing level in communications, I feel like we are punching a bit higher than our weight class. Though I don’t know Lewis & Clark’s org-chart, as a point of comparison, Seattle U has three full-time people on their communications team, plus .50 administrative help compared with our 1.75. UW has 11 people in Advancement alone, plus they get a lot of help from central communications. (And their stuff isn’t that good!)

As with anything, there is certainly room for improvement. We continue to tweak and change what we have, and as I mentioned in the faculty meeting today, my team is planning on digging into our web presence in a big way this summer, and using social media as part of that strategy will be a large part of that conversation.

Thanks for making this a part of the community conversation. Let’s get together if you have any more thoughts or questions for me or my team…also, like us on Facebook if you haven’t already ;-) 

Jake Logan

Sr. Director of Development & External Affairs

University of Oregon School of Law

I Don't Like What Liking Instagram Says About Me

After reading an article about Why Instagram Will Be The King of Social Media in 2014 (And How To Leverage It), I decided it was probably time to start learning how to use it. I had actually started an Instagram account in early 2011, way before all the cool kids were using it, but it sat mostly dormant until a couple of days ago when my friend Ian came over for dinner and showed me how he was using it, hashtagging the crap out of things.

This conversation reminded him to post a picture he’d taken of his dog earlier that day, so he posted it. Throughout dinner, he kept looking at his phone, elated that more strangers liked his photo, and I was kind of on his case about it…in fairness, it is a pretty cool picture: http://instagram.com/p/j8FmnipDvk/.

The next day, I started posting some of my #beerporn. 

I have to say; I was kind of thrilled to have a bunch of strangers liking my photos too! They found me! That means they really like me! But the thing is – they don’t. When I take a step back and really think about it, I wonder, “What kind of insecure need for validation does this fill?” If I’m posting pictures so strangers will “like” me…I feel myself spiraling into self-loathing. I wonder how in the world my priorities got so terribly skewed.

But, this is a thing. I would guess millions upon millions of people are feeling the same way.

It got me wondering about why Facebook doesn’t feel the same way? Is it because I have reliable group of friends on whom I can count to regularly validate me by liking, commenting and sharing whatever it is that I post. Or is it because Facebook (for me at least) is so seven years ago. Who knows?

The point is that I’m concerned. I’m worried about being part of a society that rewards pandering to strangers. I’m worried about us not living the life that’s right in front of us. But ultimately, I’m worried that Ian is going to get more “likes” than me.