The Council for Advancement and Support of Education’s Summit for Advancement Leaders is CASE’s premier gathering. Unlike the District Conferences and the many CASE discipline-focused workshops and conferences, the Summit is designed to provide sessions that are more big-picture- and strategy-focused. This years topics include a session covering the upcoming election with a couple of heavy-hitting politicos (including Frank Luntz, who provided strategic messaging and polling for many Republicans in the past several election cycles); and many topics related to issues specific to education.
You can find out more about the Summit program here, and follow CASE’s blog until the conference ends on Tuesday. You can also sign up for notification of new posts via RSS. And you can follow my posts here on mStoner’s own blog.
One of the CASE bloggers is Andy Shaindlin, who writes the Alumni Futures blog and is one of the most cogent thinkers about the changing role of alumni relations in advancement and the challenges of communicating with key audiences in the era of wildly proliferating communications (and social networking) choices for everyone.
Shaindlin’s first post on the CASE blog explores the “biggest” risk in social networking for higher ed administrators.
Quick: what would your answer be? What’s the biggest risk in an investment in Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn—or any of the other social network environments?
Here’s what Andy says:
Want to know whether social networks are “worth it”? Try some of them out. Want to know which features will work on your site? Try them on someone else’s site and then make up your own mind. The biggest risk to higher ed’s use of online networks won’t be choosing the “wrong” tools, or using them the “wrong” way. It will be failing to experiment because we’re afraid of making mistakes. That will inevitably perpetuate the usual trend of only doing what someone else has already done, instead of inventing something new that might benefit our alumni even more.
I’m with Andy: stop worrying about making a mistake and dive in. I’m betting that your alumni will be more forgiving than you imagine. And they might even applaud your efforts.
Michael Stoner Co-Founder and Co-Owner Was I born a skeptic or did I become one as I watched the hypestorm gather during the dotcom years, recede, and congeal once more as we come to terms with our online, social, mobile world? Whatever. I'm not much interested in cutting edge but what actually works for real people in the real world. Does that make me a bad person?