Has Tech just all the sudden got lazy on reaching out to alumns in 2018? With Tech and Tails taking a year off, I don't see any Tech in Towns scheduled.
There's nothing posted on the Alumni Association site except some expired events.
Has Tech just all the sudden got lazy on reaching out to alumns in 2018? With Tech and Tails taking a year off, I don't see any Tech in Towns scheduled.
There's nothing posted on the Alumni Association site except some expired events.
Good point. I hadn't really thought of that, but we usually see the leadership at Tech taking an alumni tour of DFW, Houston, Baton Rouge, etc....this time of year. But unless I missed it, I haven't seen or heard about anything like that taking place this year.
God I hope our people aren't getting lazy.
Maybe it wasn't paying off in Alumni donations, memberships, etc. They don't do these things just to jolly us.
Well, doing nothing isn't really energizing our alumni base.
Does the University have to do everything? Maybe we just have a bunch of lazy Alumni who want to sit back and wait for someone else to cater to them. It's easier to blame someone else. As the famous saying goes -- Don't curse the darkness. Light a candle. Have a game watching party at your house and invite other alumni. Don't just go to some bar. Maybe I don't do these things but I'm not complaining about what the University is doing. Perhaps we don't like one another. From a lot of the arguments on this forum that seems to be the case.
Last year's summer tour was announced about this time, so maybe it still will happen.
You are way off here. More like we have great alumni who volunteer to get things together, but the alumni association refuses to help out. Good luck ever getting a local/regional alumni contact list or seed funding for an event. The alumni association wants to be in total control of everything and turns away grassroots efforts from alumni. Our alumni association has been poorly run forever. It's truly amazing what the NWLA Tag has accomplished and also very sad the alumni association didn't step in to help out to keep a great tradition going.
I offered to help out a couple of weeks ago and asked someone to contact me. Haven't heard from anyone, so I guess everything is going quite well.
I used to organize the DFW stuff and I'll be honest, support from the association was hit or miss. Adam did get a coach to come over every now and then so that was a +, but other times it was hard to get anything. I tried to get them to start regional or city chapters of the alumni association for years, and got told they don't do that. Lots of other universities do/did and it works great.
When Reneau left things did improve some, and they do have local alumni chapters available in some places. It just became too much for me to do, and no one took it up for a while. The DFW group is making an effort now, which is nice.
What really was depressing was when I offered to cold call DFW alumni. I was provided a list of people that lived in DFW, but that the university hadn't contacted/had contact with in a long time. I called a large number of people on the list, and the stories of why they did not give to the university or why they lost touch with Tech were depressing. There is a couple of generations of alumni out there where the university really made no effort once they graduated and those alum just don't care now.
It is not all on the university, but it is on them to reach out and try, especially when someone has just graduated and is trying to start their life in the real world. Just say hey, we would love you to join the alumni association, LTAC etc... there was a time with some of them we didn't even have a coherent, organized, way for people to give to athletics.
It is a two way street, but the effort from the university for a long time was 0%. We lost a lot of potential donors that we simply never got back.
I guess everyone just say the Bulldog Blitz has been announced. So the summer isn't dead.
Glad they are doing it again, it should always be there, but it doesn't reach many newbies. Every time my wife and I go we see the same group (again nothing wrong with this it keeps the core group engaged.
I just want to see a lot more emphasis getting the recent grads to give #1- if they give a little now, as they advance in their profession hopefully it increases and we created a life long donating alum. #2 and this is harder is to reach back in pull in some of the older alum that we lost along the way etc.
If we have a core of maybe 10,000 alums who give (someone probably has a closer figure i'm spitballing) then just getting a new 10,000 to give $100 a year is another million we don't currently have.
Alumni donations are a almost free revenue stream that we don't capitalize on as well as a lot of other universities.