What difference do alumni publications make to an advancement office?

What difference do alumni publications make to an advancement office?

CASE’s International CASE Alumni Relations Survey (ICARS) and Ross-CASE Survey collect information on alumni relations staff, non-staff and publications costs. The data illustrates the importance of engaging with your constituents and the impact it has on the bottom line.

More than half of the institutions taking part in ICARS state that their alumni publication is tailored for all constituents while two in ten institutions state that they don’t have an alumni publication. Six in ten institutions state their alumni office is responsible to deliver their alumni publications.

When looking at the inputs in terms of staff and costs, institutions with one alumni magazine seem to spend more and employ more FTE staff as compared to those that publish more than one alumni magazine.

Median alumni relations costs excluding magazine costs for institutions with one alumni magazine were 58 percent higher than institutions that published more than one alumni magazine in 2012–13. This reduced to 22 percent in 2014–15 but institutions with more than one alumni magazine seem to making savings in terms of costs consistently. This could be partly due to the difference in FTE staff in alumni relations. Institutions with only one alumni magazine had 4.69 FTE staff working in alumni relations, which was more than the institutions with more than one alumni magazine (3.63 FTE staff in alumni relations) in 2014–15.

Median alumni magazine costs were comparatively similar across institutions that had one alumni magazine and those that had more than one alumni magazine. However, the mean figures give a very different picture with mean alumni magazine costs for institutions with one alumni magazine being 38 percent lower than those that had more than one alumni magazine.

Institutions with one alumni magazine and more than one alumni magazine spent around a fourth of their total alumni relations costs on the magazine in 2012–13 and 2013–14. This changed slightly in 2014–15 when median percent of alumni magazine cost to total alumni relations costs was 18 percent for institutions with one magazine and 26 percent for institutions with more than one magazine.

When comparing philanthropic income across institutions based on the number of alumni magazines they published we see a clear trend that illustrates that institutions with alumni magazines secure more funds than institutions that don’t. This is reflected not only in income figures but also in median cost per pound raised and received based on total fundraising costs and institutions with more than one alumni magazine had the lowest return on fundraising investment.