When it comes to educational marketing, universities and independent schools can seem worlds apart. But today they face similar challenges—competition for students, the need to demonstrate value, and the pressure to stand out in a crowded market. By recognizing each other’s strengths and learning from different approaches, universities and independent schools can enhance their marketing strategies, create stronger student connections, and remain competitive in an evolving, and often challenging, educational landscape. 

From tracking alumni engagement to presenting fundraising data to leadership, dashboards are creatively solving problems and making day-to-day work more efficient for advancement professionals. Here, five Circle of Excellence Award-winning dashboard creators provide a deep dive into the origins, execution, and successes of these projects. 

Advancement professionals share stories of data in action. They are using the metrics and insights that come from participating in CASE’s industry-leading surveys to set strategy and goals, benchmark against peers, target constituent groups, enhance programming, meet campaign goals, and add new staff.

More than ever, higher education enrollment marketing professionals are targeting, segmenting, and personalizing their content. Winning 2022 entries had tailored messages to well-defined audiences such as low-income, high-achieving students; those who are undecided about a major; Spanish-speaking students; admitted students; nontraditional students seeking an online education; and parents. 

In fall of 2016, the CASE Commission on Alumni Relations created the Alumni Engagement Metrics Task Force to address the need for an industry-wide framework to measure alumni engagement. The result was the Alumni Engagement Metrics survey, CASE’s first truly global survey. Now, with results from three years of AEM, advancement professionals who work in alumni relations are benefiting from measuring their results in four areas: volunteerism, experiential, philanthropic, and communication. The ability to document positive outcomes is already elevating the profession. In this article, we hear from CASE members who participated in AEM and how it is changing their work for the better. 

One of the hallmarks of development operations is the abundance of data. But how can a small shop stay afloat in such a tremendous tide? In this excerpt from their book, Carrie Collins and Necie Liggeons look at why metrics matter for small shops, benchmarking, and which metrics matter most.

How can small teams accomplish great things, even with tight budgets? Here’s how four small teams accomplished award-winning work in communications, fundraising, events, and recruitment—and key takeaways on how teams of any size or context can work resourcefully.

The seeds of alumni support are sown even prior to enrolling in college.  Formative pre-college experiences play an important role in shaping pro-social habits, mindsets, and dispositions that predict later-life support for one’s alma mater.

Many agree that collecting, storing, and analyzing qualitative data is vital to advancement’s growth and an important balance to departments’ continually growing quantitative data capabilities. But is there a method that’s scalable? How can advancement professionals work with data that is, by its definition, difficult to measure? 

What is race equity as it applies to education institutions? How are advancement teams approaching this work, which experts say involves a wholesale transformation of organizational cultures? How are institutions and individuals moving forward in the name of equity?