Alma mater magazines are important in our marketing and communications toolkit, serving a different purpose from digital and other communications tools. These magazines are a gift you give your alumni that they didn’t have to do anything to receive. They didn’t have to ask a question, or decide to research a topic, or click on any links.
Given the power such a gift has, we should balance how individual school-based magazines fit with the university’s magazine to ensure alignment.
With higher education’s siloed nature, separate budgets, varying timelines and different stakeholders, we often didn’t know our university magazine covered faculty or alumni until we read the published piece.
And with a six-issue annual publishing cycle, versus our two-issue cycle, there was a chance we’d cover the same topic. Having the respective teams aware of what the other is planning will make it more cohesive for the reader and not make it look like we don’t know what we are doing.
At the school level, you can generally include stories from a vantage point that the university should not. The university magazine writes business stories that need to engage nursing alumni, whereas individual schools do not.
When I published my first issue, I saw what made our stories special: our readers related to each other’s journeys. The magazine was a place to share commonalities and leverage affiliation.
The power of the magazine to enhance the brand also differs between the school and the university. The university’s brand has to stretch across the breadth of its universe, whereas the school can dive deeper and be more nuanced.
Understanding this distinction and identifying the nuances you will emphasize helps you ensure the gift you give drives alumni affiliation in the ways you want. You are the one picking out the gift and wrapping it for them.
At Wharton, following our redesign in 2016, we focused on global scope, intellectual ambition and the unrivaled quality of students, faculty and alumni. Then, we wrote content that reinforced those brand aspects. These themes made our stories tighter and more focused.
The school magazine and, in particular, business schools are the place for class notes. With a smaller alumni count, the school generally allocates more space for them, and most alumni look there first.
At Wharton, at least half of the entries received were alumni seeking connections through career and life updates. At the university level, these updates are often too diluted to be as meaningful. In addition, this structure leverages the alumni connection. Alumni affiliate with the business school more than the university writ large, and so choose to share their updates there.
Keeping these points in mind helps to ensure your gift hits the spot with your alumni. Invest your time where it matters most, and let your editorial team drive the stories. Forcing stories on editors can often be as aggressive as social media’s algorithm and damage the integrity of storytelling.
Remember, your school magazine is possibly the one place where you aren’t asking alumni for anything other than reminding them to be proud of where they went to school, which is the best brand reinforcement there is.
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