What Do You Want to Know About How Institutions are Using Social Media in Advancement?

If you have thoughts about what you’d like to know about how schools, colleges, and universities are using social media in their advancement activities, now’s the time to let us know.

That’s because we’re designing the questionnaire for the 2011 CASE/mStoner/Slover Linett survey of social media in advancement. We’ll review the first draft this week and launch the survey in early February. Share your thoughts as a comment below, or send an email to me (Michael.Stoner(at)mStoner.com).

Last year’s survey results provided a benchmark for how schools, colleges, and universities were using social media in marketing, fundraising, alumni relations and other advancement activities—essentially those that involve interactions with external constituents. We’ll survey the same group this year.

While we want to see what’s changed since 2010, we also wanted to fine-tune some of the questions we asked. We fine-tuned “current position” titles and categories (e.g. added titles like “coordinator”), revisited the list of “motivators” and “barriers” to implementing social media, and tried to provide more fine-grained explanation of how the survey categorizes divisions and departments (for example, a communications unit within an alumni office).

We also will explore how (or whether) respondents are using social media to conduct research on their audiences and how they are marketing social media activities.

We weren’t very happy with the data we collected about staffing last year; this year, we revised questions on staffing committed to social media to capture both “dedicated” staff and staff who have multiple responsibilities but who spend at least one-quarter of their time on social media.

Finally, this year we’re planning to contact enrollment management/admission staff and invite them to respond to the survey. They were underrepresented in last year’s survey. See this post for a sense of what we learned about how social media was used by admission/enrollment offices last year.

But what did we miss that you want to know? Again, Share your thoughts as a comment, or send me an email (Michael.Stoner(at)mStoner.com).

We’re planning to unveil the results of the survey at the CASE Social Media & Community conference, to be held in San Francisco on 13–15 April.

And in case you missed them, here are the topline results from last year’s survey and a white paper discussing the implications of the survey.