blog: Green alumni offices

Beginning with an internal audit
Mike McCamon, iModules Marketing Consultant

More and more organizations are re-examining long-standing practices when it comes to consuming natural resources as part of their day-to-day business. This trend is impacting the way many view air travel, commuting to work every day, what some eat, and for some alumni and admissions offices, how much paper they ship out the back door.

Withstanding definitive research on the topic, I would suggest admissions and alumni relations to be the two departments at educational institutions who have the greatest carbon imprint. These activities have normally included an aggressive outreach effort to solicit commitment to your institution. For decades the proven strategies of these offices have been the handshake and the envelope.

Think there's not a problem? Look at the facts. Industry-wide, 100 million trees are destroyed each year to produce direct mail. Creating and shipping direct mail produces more greenhouse gas emissions than 2.8 million cars. And finally what about the beloved printed alumni paper directory? Using published statistics from a single vendor in the education market, I estimate its print directory business alone destroys at least 120,000 mature trees each year and would fill 227 shipping containers with paper. Development, advancement, alumni and admissions offices of today are well positioned to become best of class examples of efficient modernization and automation by reducing their carbon imprint and being good stewards of our planet. But where do you start? Just raising your offices' consciousness of the problem is the first step.

I suggest you first start with an internal audit with your team. Over the last school year, catalog every piece of direct mail you sent from your office and estimate the amount mail that is sent back to your office. Keep track of how many pages each item was, how many people received it, and the distance it might have traveled to be received by its recipient. Be sure to carefully scrutinize partnership programs as well that might add volume to your direct mail impact. The goal here is to compute an overall volume of your direct mail efforts.

Once you've completed your audit, define a goal like, "We will reduce our print mailing volumes by 40 percent," and develop a communications strategy to meet it. Get aggressive with direct mail list hygiene, and develop ways to continuously more tightly segment your lists, so offers can be targeted to the right audience. Perhaps even consider an e-mail campaign specifically asking your alumni to either opt-in or opt-out of future direct mail campaigns.

But most importantly, get more of your marketing and communications online. Send alumni their newsletters via e-mail, and make them available online. Always, I repeat always, offer an online alternative to a response card or postal mail for every type of interaction you have with your audience. Allow them to register for events, contribute, and find alumni using online systems. Target e-mail campaigns, so they are meaningful and interesting to their audience. And lastly, scrutinize the value of printing alumni directories – more and more alumni have no use for them.

While there is likely no way to be a "no-impact" alumni or admissions office, just becoming conscience of how each of us impact the environment is the first step in building a greener future for all of us.