Sometimes the best publicity for your institution has nothing to do with the institution.

ESPN broadcaster Jay Bilas is one of the best analysts in college basketball—and one of the most vocal critics of the NCAA. A starter for Duke University from 1982–86, Bilas helped lead the Blue Devils to the men's NCAA championship game his senior year. After graduation, he played professional basketball in Europe, then returned to his alma mater in 1990 as an assistant coach while attending Duke's law school. His experience informs his criticism of the NCAA's amateurism model. "It's wrong to the point of being immoral that everyone is paid what they're worth in the multibillion-dollar business of college sports except the revenue drivers—the athletes themselves," he says. While his opinionated nature may not endear him to NCAA leaders—"I would be so much better off if all I did was talk about basketball," Bilas jokes—it has won him legions of fans and more than a million Twitter followers.

As the creator of DonorRelationsGuru.com, an online resource for stewardship and other development professionals, I'm regularly asked for advice on donor relations challenges. Among the most common: "My supervisor says Non-profit X is doing (insert horrible practice here) and that we should do it, too."

About 10 minutes into class, all 25 students are tapping on their smartphones, not even trying to conceal the devices from the instructor. A contagious case of bad business etiquette? Nope. It's a requirement for Managing a Social Media Presence, one of 18 free courses offered through Duke ProComm, a professional development program for communicators at Duke University in North Carolina.

Imagine watching the following scene unfold on an organization's Twitter feed: Several staff members have been pulled into a meeting and fired. One of them is the brand's social media manager, and she's holding her mobile device. She begins live-tweeting—and not from her personal account: "Just overheard our marketing director (he's staying, folks) ask, ‘How do we shut down Twitter?'"

When six Macalester College alumni couldn't travel to Minnesota to visit their alma mater, they gathered at one alumnus's home in Arizona for a wine and cheese party and chatted on the phone with the college president in a virtual town hall—along with thousands of other alumni worldwide. In Wisconsin, Beloit College recently hosted its annual on-campus folk and blues festival—and nostalgic alumni watched remotely from home. From class reunions to networking, more and more universities are getting savvy at hosting virtual events. Here's how eight institutions are doing it right.

About four years ago, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, conducted a crowdfunding campaign and gave the institution $86,000. The university's reaction? Anxiety. "Everyone wanted to know where the money came from. He was a good kid doing a good thing. But from the university's perspective, it set off alarm bells," particularly with how the gift could be distributed within Berkeley's guidelines, says Richard Swart, who became the institution's crowdfunding scholar-in-residence in 2015.

For Hannah Brencher, postcollege life in New York City wasn't what she expected. Depressed and struggling to find purpose, she reached out to others with words of kindness and support by leaving anonymous spirit-lifting love letters throughout the city. In October 2010, she blogged about the experience and promised: If you send me your address, I will write you a letter. Her email inbox filled up. Eleven months and 400 letters later, the project turned into MoreLoveLetters.com, a website where people can request love letter bundles for people in need or volunteer to write them. More than 20,000 volunteers—including students belonging to the site's 60-plus Campus Cursive chapters—have helped send more than 100,000 letters to people around the world. Brencher's memoir, If You Find This Letter: My Journey to Find Purpose Through Hundreds of Letters to Strangers, comes out in paperback in spring 2016.

We thought we were on the right track. After months of preparation and construction, Friends' Central School in Pennsylvania launched its revamped website in fall 2014. The responsively designed site aimed to show off the Quaker school's offerings and give us an advantage in a highly competitive market: The percentage of students enrolled in the greater Philadelphia area's more than 130 private schools has decreased by 5 percent in the past 10 years. We needed to focus on the first impressions of prospective parents and make our value proposition clear.

Remember the last time you saw an old friend? Perhaps you spent the first hour laughing at fond memories and reliving the past. But then the conversation moved to the present: How's your job? Where are you going on vacation? What books have you read lately? Your relationship is rooted in the past, but it takes common bonds and current interests to inspire more dinners and drinks.