You have to be on social media. That’s why you’re on it. You measure it as best you can, collecting likes, shares, and comments. And there are great free tools to help you do that.
The problem is that the analytics you’re collecting focus on aggregate data. You can see how many people have liked your most recent post and how much your audience has grown over time. But the true value of social media is understanding the individual users who make up that aggregate data.
The identification, cultivation, engagement, and solicitation strategies that have been at the core of advancement for decades depend heavily on detailed knowledge about your alumni. Knowing the class year of each individual who engages with you on social media, what they care about, and how they want to connect with your school is what will lead you to build meaningful relationships, which in turn will foster goodwill and increased giving.
Of course, compiling individual data is a lot harder than collecting aggregate data. Data from social media can be a substantial asset to your existing institutional database giving you a picture of who each alum is at this very moment. This full, dynamic view of your alumni is extremely manual. Unless you have the right tools.
In the most recent episode of Advancement Live, Stanford Alumni Association Director Adam Miller and EverTrue founder and CEO Brent Grinna join host Andrew Gossen to talk about these challenges and opportunities presented by social data.