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Each month we highlight areas of development and alumni affairs that could benefit from practical Internet tools and services for advancement and alumni professionals. These services save time, increase communication and fundraising, decrease your costs, and provide a significant return on investment.
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The IAC Saga: A decade on the Internet
Don Philabaum / President & CEO
| Hard to believe it’s been nearly 10 years since I founded IAC. Back in 1995, AOL had less than 2 million members, and CompuServe was the leading provider of Internet access. Netscape hadn’t even been launched yet. At first, IAC was just a small blip on the Internet.
We started out by creating free home pages for our clients and offering them free email capabilities.
If you’re a bit of a geek, you might find it interesting that our first server had a 286 processor (incredibly tiny by today’s standards) and about 100 megabytes of storage (now people build ‘em with mega-gigabytes). Our connection to the world was through a very basic ISDN line—no such thing as DSL and high-speed cable back then.
But it wasn’t long before people from nearly every continent were using our free home pages to share photographs and information. Around the end of that year Steve Zohn, the guy behind all the IAC technology and programs, informed me that we were getting nearly 500,000 hits a day! He said our ISDN line was overloaded, our server was ready to crash, and—bottom line—we had no choice but to invest in new equipment.
Full Story >>
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No funding for an Internet Strategy?
Diana Schumacher / Executive VP of Client Relations
| In just the last ten years your campus has become a wireless community. New technologies give your students access to nearly all the information in the world. But there’s so much more that can be done! What about using that technology to make the most of your alumni relationships?
All of us at IAC dedicated to helping our clients engage and involve alumni via their online communities. The need is great, and that’s why we’ve grown rapidly—from 2 staff members to 40 people this year.
What continually surprises me is how often we talk to alumni associations that receive no funding to create an online directory and community. Why surprising? Because as most educational institutions readily accept the fact that they need to spend money on technology to grow their student base, provide more relevant teaching techniques and give students access to information, they have failed to see how that same technology can tap the goldmine among their alumni.
Full Story >>
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Best Practices – Check this one out
Knowing what works for other alumni associations is worth a lot. At IAC we’ve been collecting that kind of information for the past year at a series of Best Practice Webinars.
We invite alumni professionals like you from all over the world to share with us and with each other low cost ideas that have paid off and were easy to implement.
Here’s a Best Practice from Weber State University… They got nearly all of their graduates to register in their online directory—BEFORE they even crossed the stage on graduation day.
Full Story >>
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