Welcome to the CASE Social Media Blog!

Welcome to CASE Social Media, a blog exploring trends and best practices in the use of social media in educational advancement. Our goal for the blog is to extend the work of the CASE social media task force by engaging a wide variety of members of the advancement community in the discussion.

The blog is for advancement professionals who:

• Work in advancement services, alumni relations, communications, fundraising, marketing or an allied field
• Work at independent schools, community and technical colleges, or public and private colleges and universities
• Are based in North America, Europe, Asia or elsewhere around the globe

In short, we hope to talk about social media best practices across the advancement landscape. We don’t want to talk to ourselves, so we invite and encourage you to join the conversation.

About the Task Force

The Joint CASE Task Force on Best Practices in Using Social Media was the brainchild of Kim Manning, chair of the CASE Commission on Communications and Marketing, and Andy Shaindlin, chair of the CASE Commission on Alumni Relations. The commissions serve as think tanks of advancement practitioners who advise CASE on trends in the profession and develop resources to help serve it.

Kim and Andy wisely realized that since both commissions were wrestling with the topic of social media, CASE had an opportunity to integrate perspectives through a joint task force. The task force now includes current and former members of the alumni relations, communications and marketing, and philanthropy commissions. We, the co-chairs, are Charlie Melichar of Vanderbilt University and Andrew Gossen of Cornell University.

Task Force Goals

Many advancement professionals are interested in leveraging social media on behalf of their institutions, but we realized that there is no reliable roadmap. Our hope is that the task force will develop resources to help people at CASE-member institutions grapple with social media issues in a relatively coherent, organized and rational way so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time.

We also hope to develop CASE-wide content for conferences, CURRENTS magazine, white papers, etc. and raise the bar of conversations about social media in general. Task force members realize that everyone’s at a different place in the conversation, though, so we know will lose people quickly if we end up saying “here’s what we have that will work.” Instead, we know we need to be and stay at the strategic level and engage the entire profession in the discussion.

Why a Blog?

Here’s how we respond to the question in CURRENTS:

Andrew: As we thought about what the end product of the task force was going to look like, we realized there was no way we could issue an authoritative white paper on best practices without having that white paper be obsolete as soon as we hit “save.” The environment is evolving so rapidly that our product has to evolve in recognition of that as well. And that’s why we’re focusing more on the notion of sharing the material at conferences in CURRENTS, and in a blog.

Charlie: There aren’t just easy mathematical answers about where this is going, so I think the way to go is to have the conversation out in the open with as many voices participating as possible. If the philosophy is that this is something that should evolve and be participatory, then why not open that up in the process?

CASE Social Media will be active throughout the life of the task force or as long as it meets the needs of the advancement community. We plan to talk about best practices, tools, guidelines, resources, organizational structure and more.

What are the social media topics and issues on your mind? Let us know and we’ll feed them into the work of the task force and the blog.

Comments

[Jack Sedam]

You don't think it's a little odd to brag about starting a blog in Aug '10? It's so very Web 1.0 of you - congrats. ;)

[Todd]

A "reliable road map" is only of value when you know your current location, having a destination (a goal) is also worthwhile. Then again, some of the most rewardinng journeys are guided only by a passion for seeing what lies beyond the horizon, especially in uncharted territory.

I wish you luck with this endeavor, and hope that it sparks some interesting conversations along the way. Really looking forward to it AND thanks for playing!