Annual Fund

It looks like lip synching is the new black in college online videos (or is it that I really like lipdubs and feel compelled to post about any new one I stumbled upon?)

I watch this very well produced online video after Dale Keiger, Associate editor of Johns Hopkins Magazine, posted about it on the CUE listserv.

Published on YouTube on December 21st, 2009, it has more than 22,000 views at the time of this writing.

It’s a really great high-energy-feel-good video including an original soundtrack recorded by students and adapted from the song “I Thank You” written by Isaac Hayes and David Porter as well as some dancing and much more.

So, please take 3 minutes and a half to watch this video.

Targeted to donors, this video was created and produced by Jay Corey, director of Video Strategy at Johns Hopkins University. As soon as I finished watching his video, I emailed him to ask a few questions about what it took to produce these 3 and half minutes of great online video.

1) How long did it take to write, direct and produce this video?

The ideal situation would have been to have a least 6 months to work on this piece. Unfortunately, as is often the case, the
turn-around time to complete this video was tight. The idea of Johns Hopkins University doing an end-of-year video was first introduced at the end of October 09. The only guidance that came with the idea was that the video should be fun to watch and have a “thank you” theme.

From concept to finished produced piece it took about 5 weeks. I started with the music, first by re-working the lyrics to make them more academic themed and then recording a basic rhythm track with guitar, drums, bass and a scratch vocal with my audio production partner David Schmelick. I then added keyboards, a horn section featuring students from the Peabody Institute and finally polished vocals provided by the Johns Hopkins acapella group Octopodes.

From there it was just a matter of logistics. I worked with several driven colleagues who worked tirelessly to keep me running from place to place, rapidly taping and cajoling, for the most part non-dancers and non-singers to perform as if they were.

2) This video uses the technique of the lipdub, a genre recently made popular by students lip synching while showcasing their campus. Why did you choose this technique?

As far as using a lip dub / lip synching technique, once we decided to make a music video, I don’t know of another way to do it. I chose the Sam and Dave tune I Thank You because it obviously fit the theme and because an R&B song would have relevance to largest group of viewers/listeners.

3) How did you secure the rights to use the song? Was it a long process?

In securing the music rights my colleague Glenn Simmons did an amazing job. This process can often be a difficult and lengthy one. By working through a music agent he was able to negotiate a workable rate and finalize a contract with the publishers in less than 2 weeks. Usage rates are fluid and vary greatly depending on the popularity of the song, how it will be used, where it will be seen, etc.

In higher education, we don’t like to talk about money, especially about how much students have to pay to get an education.

Until recently some institutions didn’t even want to display a clear price tag on their offerings (to avoid sticker shock?), and made prospective students and their parents chase the information about costs on their website after a real treasure web hunt.

Things are changing though – because of the economic situation, but not only – as more and more university websites now feature cost and financial aid calculators demanded by students and their parents.

While most non-profit institutions don’t like money talks (unless it’s to get or report big donors’ gifts ;-), it’s a talk more and more of their target audiences want to have.

Well, Dartmouth College has chosen to have this talk in 2 minutes and 21 seconds with a video about its “wacky” business model (via Karlyn who works there).

And, let me tell you this is brilliant and very well done, so drop everything else and just watch this video to find out how to justify the cost of an Ivy League education in those tough financial times.

Like it? Hate it? Tell us what you think by posting a comment!

Reach 25 million people via podcasting???

Ok, there is a bit of marketing hype in the title of this post, but I got your attention – right?

Besides, it’s not all hype since this upcoming 3-webinar series by Higher Ed Experts includes a session about iTunes U, Apple’s free audio and video streaming hosting service – with strings attached though – provided to some institutions such as MIT, Yale, Duke, Bowdoin College and NJIT.

If there are some plans at your institution to start a podcasting program for marketing or academic purposes, this series scheduled on November 6, 7 and 8 will help you get started on the technical and promotional aspects in no time especially if you invite all the parties involved in your project.

Your $150 registration fee will cover for a group – as long as you use a single computer connected to an LCD projector – AND a free on-demand access to the recording for every staff member working at your institution the week after the live event.

You can register online by Friday at www.higheredexperts.com/podcasting

Here’s the program:

• November 6, 2007 1PM-2PM ET
  Podcasting 101: How to record and produce your podcasts with ease
  Micah Ovadia, Digital Designer at the University of Cincinnati and Author of “PoducateMe, Pratical Solutions for Podcasting in Education,” will tell you what you need to know to get your institution started with podcasting. He will share a simple plan to get your institution ready to plan, record, produce and publish its first podcasts in 30 days.
• November 7, 2007 1PM-2PM ET
  Give voice to your recruiting efforts: how to engage prospective students and their parents with podcasts
  Dennis Miller, director of marketing and public relations at Mansfield University of Pennsylvania, will explain how podcasts can become powerful tools to engage students and their parents. He will share best practices and good tips to make sure your podcasts found their audience.
• November 8, 2007 1PM-2PM ET
  To be or not to be an iTunes U(niversity)? Get the scoop from an insider
  Ken Ronkowitz, Web Manager at NJIT, will explain what it takes to sign, plan and implement iTunes U for your institution. He will also share tips and tricks to optimize your presence and avoid pitfalls.

Executive Director at the Caltech Alumni Association, Andrew Shaindlin has been blogging at Alumni Futures since last February, but managed to make my list of 5 bloggers that make me think last May by posting regularly well-researched, well-written posts targeted to alumni professionals.

1) Why did you decide to start your blog Alumni Futures in the first place? Can you tell us a bit more about your experience with blogging?

I started a listserv called ALUMNI-L back in the early ’90s. It eventually grew into an international forum for almost 1,500 people before I asked CASE to take it over. ALUMNI-L is a place where people ask others for their past experiences and hindsight. I started my blog, Alumni Futures, and named it quite deliberately, to ask the opposite kind of question. Instead of “What have you done in the past?” I want to ask “What are we going to do next? What would be interesting for us to pursue next in our profession?”

I also believe that there’s a potentially important role for blogging within alumni organizations (and we could have an entire separate conversation just about that). By blogging, I hope I’m getting alumni professionals to think about how blogs work and what they might be used for on campus. And since we’re devising a couple of alumni-related blogs at Caltech, I’m looking for potholes to avoid down the road in my own work.

When I started Alumni Futures I not only had no experience at all with blogging, I wasn’t even reading any blogs. I researched higher education blogs and found that the number dedicated to institutional advancement was very small – and there were none about alumni relations. Mostly I found blogs about communications, marketing, and public relations. So I decided to dive in, on the principle that if you’re the first person to do something it’s unlikely that there’s a right or a wrong way to do it. You take your best shot, and make changes downstream, as it becomes clearer what people want or need.
I’m still very much learning as I go.

2) How is your blogging received by your institution and your professional peers?

My situation is similar to what Karlyn Morissette described on your site recently. Not many people on my own campus are probably aware of the blog. We’re a completely centralized alumni shop – there are no “school and college” units, or separate alumni societies. Unlike Karlyn, however, I didn’t bring up the idea before I started blogging.
I waited until I had a few weeks of postings online, with no problems or negative repercussions, and then mentioned it to my own staff members, my boss and others. I’m not giving away trade secrets, or airing “dirty laundry” so I don’t think Alumni Futures is going to raise any hackles internally.

I’ve received some strong positive feedback from peers in the profession and their supportive comments affirm that starting Alumni Futures was absolutely the right thing for me to do, and that it has a potentially valuable role to play.

3) You are also very active on Linkedin and Facebook. In your opinion, which one is the most useful for higher ed professionals?
Why?

I think that a site’s utility depends largely on what problem you are using it to solve. If you want to connect with individuals one-on-one for specific purposes (such as finding job applicants or locating alumni from your institution within a specific industry) then LinkedIn is a good choice. If, on the other hand, you want to find people who share a cause, or you want to communicate using online calendars and bulletin boards across a broader audience, Facebook is pretty good for that.

LinkedIn is a business-networking site that has never pretended to serve a social function. It is slowly moving toward becoming more of an “online community” – for example it offers members the ability to ask questions that can be answered by others in their network. But it doesn’t yet allow you to upload a photo to your profile, invite people to an event, or list your favorite bands.

Facebook was born as a way for undergraduates to connect with one another socially. But now Facebook sees the enormous potential of the age 35+ market segment and is trying to appeal to people with more formalized networking needs. These two particular sites may never converge completely, but we’re still in the “Wild West” period of social network sites so nothing is final yet.

Now that I think about it, this makes things even more interesting – because someone in our professional network, maybe somebody reading our blogs, will figure out a creative use for a social networking site and push a piece of our business in an entirely new direction. The profession of alumni relations in particular is small enough to be influenced measurably by a single person doing something new.

That’s my goal for Alumni Futures – to encourage people to think up new things to do, and new ways to do old things. Until then, I’m learning a lot myself and meeting a lot of impressive and helpful people along the way.

Dori Sonntag, who just started to blog at Inspired Annual Giving, found this pearl.

The video is 2 minutes and 37 seconds and was produced by Yale students (Prep-Hop Productions) to promote their senior gift giving drive earlier this year.

It’s actually a parody of a Saturday Night Life TV segment that got a lot of YouTube mileage a few months ago after it was posted uncensored, “A Special Christmas Box,” (beware before clicking on this link — the original title is a more explicit “D**k in a Box”). Several parodies were created by YouTubers.

Not sure your president or board of trustees would let you use this kind of video, but it definitely gets the message across to the target audience (including the call-to-action web address in the credits at the end) while surfing on a kind of popular tune and trend.

The video was posted 5 months ago and got 6,806 views at the time of this writing.

So, what do you think?

Jay Lipe, the blogger behind Smart Marketing, has just confirmed the power of peer pressure in a recent post titled “Peer pressure: A strong marketing motivator” where he recalled his experience with a very clever fundraising piece: a Printer’s Proof of donors to his MBA class at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

Stenciled across this newspaper formatted document are the words “Proof”, and the sentences “Is your name not listed and you would like it to be? It is not too late!” are found in the mouse type further down page 1.

Guess I’ll have to dust off that checkbook and do like Steve and Alice.”

It might be a good idea to share this post with your favorite person in the Annual Fund Office.

You’re not the only one who’s trying to back up all your initiatives with external data. Lipe’s blog post makes a great real-life example to back up the peer-pressure approach.

You might want to share this article, Getting to Know Your Online Givers Can Pay Off (PDF file), with your favorite fundraiser on campus.

In his paper published by CASE, Peter B. Wylie presents the results of a study performed in 2004 on the records collected in the following way:

Five four-year higher education institutions ranging from small, private to large, public sent me a random sample of about 10,000 records that included regular givers and non-givers but no online givers. Each institution also sent me all their online givers. The smallest group of online givers I got was slightly over 200 records; the largest was about 750.”

Wylie made a surprising discovery about online donors: they are better givers than regular givers.

“The median level of lifetime giving was much greater for these online givers than for regular givers (without exception) across the five schools. For example, in School C, where the difference between online and regular givers was the least, the median for online givers was still 50 percent higher than the median for regular givers.”

Beyond the convenience for donors (especially for the last-minute gifts comes December 31), online giving has definitely a lot of potential for higher ed advancement offices.