By now, you know that St. Paul’s School won our first ever Customer Summit Challenge amid some pretty steep competition. As promised, we’re sharing the great ideas and techniques from three more of the challenge’s standout participants: Phillips Exeter Academy, Choate Rosemary Hall, and Brewster Academy.
These three institutions did an amazing job promoting their respective Community apps to increase their young alumni adoption. All set out to win our Customer Challenge, and all acquired some amazing results.
Phillips Exeter Academy
I spoke with Mike Nagel, Associate Director of Advancement Communications at Phillips Exeter, who is “still finding email to be our most successful way to reach out to folks to facilitate immediate app adoption.”
He continued Exeter’s regular email blasts for ⅕ of its alumni body—segmented by reunion years—with one touch point every week. The school also ran a series of Facebook mobile ads, targeting only the youngest 20 alumni graduation years. Exeter ran three different ads; two were significantly more successful than the third. One included a screenshot of Community’s map, while the other used the Exeter and LinkedIn logos. The school spent $28 for a total of 224 clicks, converting to over 100 new users. Mike was very excited to receive that new contact data which he referred to as an “enormous value for us.”
Choate Rosemary Hall
Monica St. James, Director of Alumni Relations at Choate Rosemary Hall, who took a personalized approach to attracting new users by taking advantage of the “Invite to App” banner at the top of each Community profile. She did this on a class-by-class basis.
Instead of using the invitation language auto-populated by Community, Monica added her own personal invitation to speak more directly to Choate’s alumni:
EverTrue is Choate’s mobile alumni directory. Connect with friends, update your contact info, and network, network, network! You’ll love finding alumni who live nearby and who work in the same industry as you—or the one you want to be in. Check it out.
-Monica
Choate also continued to send dedicated app emails and was ultimately able to attract over 175 new users to the app between July and September.
Brewster Academy
Last but certainly not least, I spoke with Whitney White, an Annual Fund Officer at Brewster Academy. She helped create a rollout plan for each month from the beginning of the challenge and made sure she and her team “stuck to it.”
In addition to a Facebook Mobile ad, dedicated emails, Facebook posts, and tweets, Brewster Academy was creative in harnessing the power of particular alumni. The team reached out to its most active alums already using Community and solicited fun testimonials about the app. Through Community’s “Alumni Nearby” feature, one of Brewster’s alums had a powerful anecdote about a long-lost classmate who ended up living around the corner from him; now the two regularly have dinner together with their wives. The school shared this moving story via one of its e-newsletters.
In the end, Brewster Academy was able to add over 100 new users from July to September with these marketing efforts.
A big congratulations to Exeter, Choate, and Brewster for your great successes! Thanks for sharing your stories! Congratulations, too, to all of you who worked so hard to consistently and creatively promote your app throughout the challenge at your respective institutions.
Keep it up and please reach out to your Relationship Manager if you have any questions or want to share your story!
