College Alumni Relations Benchmarks

This report gives critical data about the alumni relations efforts of North American colleges. In more than 115 pages and 400 tables present hard data on alumni affairs office budgets, marketing expenditures, use of print publications and the internet, directory building and fundraising activities, among other topics. The report, based on data from 60 colleges, gives the end user highly specific benchmarking data such as the percentage of alumni that participate in reunions, earning from insurance plans and credit cards offered to alumni, spending on promotional materials for alumni clubs, percentage of alumni for whom the college maintains a working email address, and hundreds of other useful benchmarks and datapoints. Useful benchmarks include alumin office staff size, staff time spent on specific tasks, impact of the internet on alumni communications, relations with the Office of Institutional Advancement, plans for the print directory and much much more. Data is broken out for public and private colleges and by size and type of college and by size of the overall alumni population.

This 160-page report is based on a survey of 89 American colleges and universities and covers a broad range of issues of interest to alumni and advancement professionals including but not limited to: trends in staffing the alumni office, use of the alumni office's work time, alumni office budgets and priorities, governance of the alumni relations effort and level of cooperation among various administrative units and alumni organizations. The study provides highly detailed data on alumni participation rates in various kinds of alumni activities, including reunions, and a close look at alumni department budgets including salaries, travel, promotion, costs of alumni clubs and events. In addition, the report presents detailed data on alumni department revenues from credit card, insurance and other services for alumni, as well as alumni office spending on consulting and information services. Other areas covered include: means of fundraising from alumni, use of alumni surveys, percentage of alumni who attend various kinds of events and the percentage who give to the college, nature of links to alumni clubs, athletic booster clubs and other alumni-related organizations, use of direct mail, telephone solicitation, social media and email to connect with alumni, and the relative success of each method, the future of alumni publications and directories and many other issues of interest to college alumni and advancement staff of private alumni organizations and college departments that often deal with alumni such as advancement, marketing and athletics.

The study presents detailed benchmarking data on alumni relations from 55 North American colleges. The 200+ page study covers fundraising and outreach strategies, alumni office staffing and budget trends, analysis of alumni affairs staff time use, use of social media and other marketing and outreach vehicles, relations with alumni clubs, spending on consulting, travel, telephone solicitation, and direct mail, and much much more. The report also gives highly specific data on participation rates in various kinds of alumni reunions and overall participation in the alumni association, among other data points. Data is broken out for public and private colleges, and by enrollment level, general Carnegie Class and annual tuition charged, to enable more precise benchmarking.

College Information Literacy Efforts Benchmarks presents the results of an information literacy higher education benchmarking study. More than 110 colleges from the United States and Canada participated in the study; data is broken out by size and type of college, for public and private colleges, for US and Canadian colleges, and even by number of in-class instructional sessions given. Uniquely, this report also breaks out data separately at institutions at which librarians have faculty status, an at which they do not.

. Data in the report is based on a survey of 55 North American law libraries drawn from law firm, private company, university, courthouse and government agency law libraries. Data is broken out by size and type of library for ease in benchmarking. The 120+ page report covers developments in staffing, salaries, budgets, materials spending, use of blogs & wikis, use of legal directories, the library role in knowledge management, records management and content management systems. Patron and librarian training, reimbursement for library-related education and other issues are also covered in this latest edition.

Academic Library Website Benchmarks is based on data from more than 80 academic libraries in the USA and Canada. The 125+ page study presents detailed data on the composition of the academic library web staff, relations with the college and library information technology departments, use of consultants and freelancers, budgets, future plans, website marketing methods, website revision plans, usage statistics, use of software, development of federated search and online forms and much more. Data is broken out by enrollment size, public and private status, Carnegie Class, as well as for libraries with or without their own web staff.

The Survey of College Website Management Practices, a 171-page study, presents more than 500 tables of data about college websites, and is based on data from 68 North American colleges. The study presents detailed data on budgets, software preferences, editorial control, staff size and composition, use of consultants, plans for website redesign, and a broad range of other issues confronting college web site staffs. The report helps to answer questions such as: what kind of disaster management and campus crisis policies do college web staffs have in place. How do staffs track end users, and how many visitors are different college web sites attracting? Which college departments are most influential in managing and directing the website? Does the web staff consider itself in charge of content, IT questions or both? How many individuals can enter content to the site without the permission of the webmaster? What role do social networking sites play in the college web staff's future plans? How often does the webmaster review departmental sites and how much control does he/she have over them? How often are major website revisions planned and how are the best results for end user "buy-in" achieved?