Flight of the Flyers: Social media and real-world action

Flight of the Flyers, produced by Nazareth College in Rochester, NY, was developed to be an amusing and engaging way for the college to connect its reunion alumni—and for them to connect with each other.

Nazareth also hoped to reconnect with inactive alumni; increase attendance at reunion (yes, its face-to-face reunion!); and improve the information it had on alumni. And to build pride in the Nazareth—one goal that has been surely furthered by the two CASE awards the site has already earned.

The judges’ report for the 2009 CASE Awards of Excellence for websites, in which Flight of the Flyers won a Gold, noted:

One judge remarked, “This is the coolest thing I’ve seen in this judging. A smart use of the web that promotes engagement and prompts action in the real world.” The site definitely exhibits a sense of humor-and appeal-given that 47 percent of visitors came back for two or more visits and pre-registration for Reunion is up 22 percent. Nevertheless, this is one of the sites that generated a lot of discussion among the judges. Some of the judges argued that the site deserved an award because of the way it linked the real world with the virtual one; others noted that it seemed a bit childish and its design is uninspiring. But, as one judge put it, “You can’t argue with success. That’s increased engagement in a time when perhaps people can’t afford to travel to reunions, or perhaps older people can’t travel to reunions but this is a way they can engage.”

The current Flight of the Flyers site represents the second generation of the project. According to Kerry Gotham, Nazareth College’s director of alumni relations, the program actually began in 2007 as a way to encourage participation in the college’s 2008 reunion—the second year in which reunion was to be held in spring, rather than fall.

“At that point, we wanted to grow our program. We had 450 people at our 2007 reunion and wanted to do better in 2008. I was intrigued by the Travelocity commercials featuring the roaming gnome and wanted to see if we could find a way to do something like that to build interest in our reunions. We wanted to go beyond the norm, do something different with the potential go have a peer-to-peer component.”

Thus was born Flight of the Flyers. The college decided to send stuffed “Golden Flyer” mascots to alumni in reunion classes and invite them to forward the birds to other reunion alumni. [That’s a total of 3,000 potential alumni who are registered members of reunion classes and can receive a (stuffed) Golden Flyer mascot by mail. Nazareth has 23,997 addressable alumni.] They set up a simple forwarding system using the U.S. Postal Service’s Click-N-Ship program.

Despite comments by naysayers-one of whom said, “Alumni will never pay to send these things to other alumni”the program took off. During that first year, Nazareth staff logged in the travels of the Golden Flyers and added alumni comments to their website-by hand. “It was a lot of work,” Gotham said.

Planning a web-enabled Golden Flyers program

Believing that the campaign would be more engaging if it was web-enabled-and that the college could save a lot of staff time-the alumni staff began focusing on integrating the 2009 edition of Flight of the Flyers with some innovative social media tools.

The Flight of the Flyers website that Nazareth launched last year took the “Golden Flyer Challenge” to a new level. People who receive a Golden Flyer could take a photo of it in location, check in on a Google Map on the site, and send the Golden Flyer to another reunion classmate. Members of reunion classes can request a bird through a form on the site.

And alumni in other classes can participate by printing out a Golden Flyer and taking a photo of it, then checking it in on the Google map.

The site incorporates a lot of features that encourage alumni to engage with each other:

• • Alumni could post their own updates and read info that others posted via the map and a profile generated by visitors to the site;

• • Alumni could invite less-active classmates to participate;

• • “Lost” alumni could request a Flyer and reconnect with the college, sharing their contact info through a form on the site;

• • The College collected the updates and data in a database, rather than hand-entering the information as in the previous year.

All told, the site took about 310 hours of staff time to plan, build, and manage. Wall to Wall Studios provided strategy, design and development for the project. Gotham said that Nazareth was planning to use the same basic site for five years, allowing them to amortize staff time and direct costs and resulting in a very cost-effective campaign for Nazareth.
The Flight of the Flyers site was very much a team effort, Gotham said. “I have great partners here—it wouldn’t have been possible to do this without everyone pitching in.” In particular, he credits Mimi Wright,
Kerry VanMalderghem, Colleen Brennan-Barry, and Fran Zablocki.

Results

Nazareth is delighted with the results of the Flight of the Flyers—indeed, it’s successful by any measure of engagement for a small college.

“Demographically, we have a good range of participation pretty through the years, with as many as 60 participants in one class; we had 10–15 participants in the the classes with the lowest numbers. We had more than 260 people participate in all. We had 600 people at reunion this year.”

The broad response was a surprise to Brennan-Barry, the person in marketing responsible for oversight of the Nazareth website. “We had some initial concerns that our “older” alumni might not be as comfortable and engage with the site as much as new alumni. That was happily proven incorrect when we realized that the classes that were placing in the top three for Flyer miles traveled included the classes of ‘59, ‘64 and ‘74!”

This is an important reminder, she points out, “that we can certainly reach different segments of our core population via different media, and that the preferred media of those segments is changing and evolving all the time.”

Plus, Gotham added, “We’ve had a lot of great anecdotal and written comments about Flight of the Flyers. People said how how much fun it was to take the picture of their Flyer—they enjoyed being creative with the photo and showcasing where they live or where they were traveling.”

Also, the site worked in helping people to connect with each other. “People did make connections, they followed up, and we know that in addition to boosting attendance at our reunion, the site sparked informal reunions. People used a Flyer as a rallying point to get together in their area.

Brennan-Barry noted that visitors appreciated the absence of a direct “ask” on the Flight of the Flyers site. “I am glad that we made the decided choice not to use this site as a vehicle for direct fundraising, but more as a vehicle for connection. We did include a “Donate to Nazareth” link on every page, but we listened to users when they told us that they have solicitiation fatigue from ‘constantly’ getting asked for money from every organization to which they belong. Our choice to make this more of a place for us to connect with alumni and raise excitement for Reunion 09 was, in retrospect, a good one.”

As far as metrics are concerned, here’s some data from this year’s effort, from 1 June 2008 to 30 June 2009:

• • 3127 unique site visits.

• • 1867 visitors viewed 5.91 pages/visit and spent an average of 3.56 minutes on the site.

• • 47% of visitors return for two or more visits.

• • 180 alumni checked a Flyer in via the site (note: only four Flyers per each of 10 classes have been circulating since 6/08).

• • 123 alumni used the form on the site to request that a Flyer be sent to them.

And of course, the CASE awards don’t hurt: the entire program won the Grand Gold in Alumni Relations in addition to the Gold for the Flight of the Flyers site.

Lessons and advice

When asked what surprised him about the Golden Flyers program, Gotham replied, “To be honest, I was surprised at how well it did take off, both years. 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.”

One ancillary benefit of the Golden Flyers program is that it’s brought the Golden Flyer mascot to the attention of people on- and off-campus, Gotham said. “We’ve only had an athletics program for about 30 years, and many people just didn’t connect with our mascot. So this was a clever, visual, and direct way for them to make that connection. And they have.”

Gotham noted that there were a few skeptics when the idea was originally floated. “But I did have the support of my boss, our vice president. Without that, it wouldn’t have been possible.” In the two years of the program, only one complaint has surfaced about the cost of shipping the Flyer to the next recipient (it costs about $5 and it’s easy to print the Click-N-Ship label from a computer).

As far as the site production is concerned, Colleen Brennan-Barry noted, “We did some light usability testing about 2/3 of the way through the project and I cannot stress how important and useful this was! I know that testing is almost always the first thing to be cut if a project is short on time or resources, but never discount the value of user feedback as you’re creating this kind of interactive site. For a handful of $5 Starbucks giftcards, we received back a great deal of helpful information that saved us time and user confusion in the end.”

Speaking to the need for monitoring how people use it, Gotham noted that next year, Nazareth is planning to simplify the Flight of the Flyers site. “Even though the website is cool, we are going to make some changes in it. Alumni weren’t as interested in the individual birds as they were with connecting with other people in their class. We’ll make it easier to find who in your class has already received the birds, and who wants them.”

Brennan Barry noted, “As we look at revising and reestablishing Flight of the Flyers for the Reunion 2010 classes, we will be looking more closely at the communications by which we publicize the site and the program with the world. This year, the site received strong traffic and interaction with minimal communication; I’m excited to think about how we might be able to connect with our alumni if our communications are stronger.”

And next year, Gotham noted, they’ll work out a definitive solution for the fact that the site worked too well, disappointing some alumni: not everyone who requested a bird actually received them. That will change next year, he asserted.