Institutions face both challenges and opportunities in communicating with external constituent groups, from marketing new programs to attracting visitors and soliciting alumni. A college or university's tight-knit community of students, alums, and friends adds a special dimension to the higher education experience; bonds formed in college often…

Advancement technology is reshaping the business of fundraising, alumni relations, communications, and marketing. Through all of these innovations, the backbone of advancement systems remains the constituent database. This article takes a look at advancement databases that track constituent data.

For the past couple of decades, customer relationship management has been quietly establishing itself as the way everybody does business. Migrating to the education community only in the past five years or so, it has acquired a more genteel transcription of its acronym: constituent relationship management. However one decodes the letters, CRM is…

Fundraising has never been a strong suit for most community colleges. But in recent years, it's become a major focus. Forced to offset a decrease in government funding to help pay for student scholarships, capital improvement projects, and additional personnel to launch new educational programs, community college leaders have been forced to…

A chart of 40 alumni-development database systems provides information on vendor/Web site, address, contact/phone, software name, price range, minimum suggested workstation/suggested server, standard reports/reporting tools, minimum/maximum record capacity, and number of installed sites/client type. (DB)

Once a community college foundation is well established, an alumni program can be developed, although the focus should be on making contacts and gaining supporters rather than raising funds. The following steps can help establish a successful alumni program: (1) conduct a feasibility study on campus; (2) form a committee to establish program…

Discusses the use of Total Quality Management (TQM) in education and describes the use of a database management system to evaluate and monitor university course effectiveness. Principles of TQM and feedback from students, faculty, administration, alumni, and employers to monitor the content and structure of various courses are included. (13…