UAB's Alumni Affairs and its yearly Annual Giving campaign have created a new and innovative way to communicate and foster positive relationships with alumni this year with a mailing that features a survey aimed at graduates from each school.
"We've sent approximately 70,000 of these mailers out, and we're very excited about the response we've received from alumni," says Becky Watson, associate vice president of Alumni Affairs & Annual Giving. "We've had only positive feedback concerning the marketing effort."
The NAS had mailers created that are tailored to graduates from each of UAB's nine schools. Graduates of The School of Nursing, for example, received a card that had a note geared toward the school, pushing the message that it remains "committed to developing leaders like you."
"It was a way for each school to communicate with their individual alumni," Watson says. "For the College of Arts and Sciences, this was the first time they were able to address to their alumni what it's all about. It's a great tool for the alumni and for us."
After the personalized message, recipients are invited to tell UAB more about themselves and their UAB experience by visiting their own personalized website.
"The piece invites you to go to, for example, beckywatson.youanduab.org, and you have a 15-question survey that enables you to tell us about your UAB experience," Watson says. "Once we get the data back, we will share it with each school so they can learn more about their alumni and develop more meaningful relationships with them.
"We don't know how to effectively communicate with alumni if we don't understand their experience," she adds.
The UAB NAS now has more than 9,000 members with 60 chapters around the world. It has provided more than $750,000 in scholarships, grants and gifts back to the university.
There are more than 105,000 UAB graduates living around the world. Watson acknowledges that the current campaign, which reaches out to more than half of those graduates, is ambitious. But, she says, it's a project important to strengthening the legacy of UAB.
"This has really been Alumni Affairs' first branding campaign in a while," Watson says. "We believed we needed to find a way for each school to be able to tell their story to alumni, and learn more about their alumni. What was their experience like here? What are they doing now? What can UAB do to make them a bigger part of their school? It's really an effort to create an ongoing dialogue so UAB can better serve its graduates."
Faculty and staff who are alumni members and received a mailer are encouraged to answer their survey if they have not already.
For more information on the Annual Giving Campaign, e-mail Becky Watson at bvwatson@uab.edu or visit www.uab.edu/alumni.
