Last week I wrote up a summary of a project I threw together that leveraged ColdFusion and Twilio to enable the reunion crowd to vote for their favorite performance.

Well, everything went off without a hitch on Saturday! In fact, I spent an hour on Friday night changing how the system worked to cater to both smartphone and "dumbphone" users. I promised a writeup on how it worked and what the results were, so without further delay...

Promotion

We printed up about 1000 stickers - just plain old Avery mailing labels - with two ways to cast your vote. First was via SMS to the number printed on it. The second way was for those "in the know" who understood what a QR code was.

The parade commentators plugged the voting in the warmup before the parade started, between acts and again at the very end. This definitely helped our cause - there was nothing else to pay attention to during those times, so the exclusivity of the promotion really stood out.

We handed out the stickers to as many spectators as we could along with each of the reunion classes while they were lining up for the parade. After a quick explanation of what was at stake (a new award!), some classes eagerly set to work with their phones. They loved that there was something to do while they were waiting for the parade to start.

This was the extent of the promotion. For an app that came together really quickly, there wasn't time to get word out in advance -- and honestly it wasn't necessary. This was a very "event specific" thing that required no prep on the part of the participants.

How It Worked

There are two ways to cast a vote: SMS or using the QR code. The original idea was to use the QR code to launch your text messaging app with the appropriate class year already entered as the body of the message (we'd print unique stickers for each class). You can't do that on iOS - only Android. We then realized that was dumb - if you were going to text, it's easier to just do that rather than fiddle with a barcode reader. There had to be something nicer for the barcode crowd.

So Friday night around 11:30 I sat down with Dreamweaver CS5.5, jQuery Mobile and ColdFusion to toss together a really quick web-based mobile app. One hour later it was skinned, released and running. One hour!

Results

All told, reunion attendance was around 1000 people. There were unregistered spectators and probably some unregistered guests floating around too. Out of this crowd, we collected more than 1200 votes! Roughly a tenth of them were submitted using the mobile app. The URL was not public, so the QR code would be the only (easy) way in. At a couple cents per SMS, this was good, cheap fun - and nothing went wrong.

Lessons Learned

• PEOPLE LOVE TO PARTICIPATE! Everybody wanted to know the results before they were announced. They were really amused when I pulled out my phone and showed them the graph of results...up to the second
• QR codes look really scary to people who don't know what they are
• QR codes CAN be safely dressed up! I took advantage of an excess of error correction code built in to the QR structure and "Fireworks-ed" in the Lehigh shield. It looked less intimidating.
• Make sure auto refresh was active for your Twilio account (thankfully mine was...though my heart stopped when I got an email in the middle of the parade from them!)
• The alumni band will, upon finding out they lost, make plans to hack the vote next year. Bring it.
• Do not send an acknowledgement for every vote - you'll hit a limit pretty quick.
• Call-to-vote? Entirely possible with Twilio. Might be fun to add it just for fun!

One key enhancement for next time: Screens at the reviewing stand showing the real time voting totals. With ColdFusion, Blaze DS and Flex this is maybe another hour of work.

The Award!

The result was a decisive win for the class of 1976. Their re-enactment of Rocky was entertaining, colorful and energetic...and they certainly weren't shy about voting for themselves!

For their efforts, they were the inaugural winners of the Stephen C. Rittler '99 Reunion Parade Fan Favorite Award!

On Tuesday my colleague Chad Davis and I had the wonderful opportunity to present at the CASE District 2 meeting on the topic of "Your Alumni are Moving onto the Mobile Web. Are You? : Mobile Apps for Alumni Engagement." Chad is an Associate Director in the Lehigh Fund at Lehigh University, responsible for the annual giving efforts of Lehigh's 15 youngest classes, a demographic that is increasingly difficult to maintain contact with through traditional means. Embracing mobile technology appears to us to be an ideal means for connecting with this demographic, so there was plenty for us to collaborate on for this talk.

The session description:

In this session we will boldly go where email, Facebook, Twitter, the alumni website and an online community simply can't: directly into the pockets of alumni.

Mobile devices and near-ubiquitous internet access have made immediate information access not only possible but widespread. A well-designed mobile application will open up new opportunities for alumni to connect with both the institution and each other regardless of where they are at the time -- including solutions for special events and targeted micro-campaigns. We'll talk about the strategic use of the "small screen", location-based services and ideas for their use (home and away venues), and tools for building and supporting these applications.

Chad's case study on the Lehigh/Lafayette Challenge was especially well received. That campaign integrated print, email, Facebook, Twitter (a TON of Twitter) and (most interestingly) "text-to-give" functionality. The results were off the charts (over $14k fundraised in a week, a bunch of first-time donors, amazing buzz) that completely contradicts the thesis of the author of this CASE Currents article (login required) that mobile giving isn't a good fit. Lehigh proved it a success through a consistent, well-messaged, and extremely cost-effective effort.

To those of you who were in attendance, we thank you for choosing our session! We were especially happy to introduce some of you to Angry Birds and sorry for the sleep that you're likely to lose in the coming weeks.

Key takeaways from our talk:

Do not just repurpose what you have

You will not get the installation, utilization and feedback that you expect if all you do is pump RSS into a mobile skin. Make it faster and easier for your alumni to interact with the institution and you'll reap dividends for a very long time.

Everything should prompt an action

An engaging application is one that does things. Your app must be functional in order to be useful and as we discussed, only the truly useful apps find a home on the first screen of your moblie phone. If you're not there, you might as well not exist.

"Mobile app in a box" is a lousy shortcut

Several vendors are offering a single "mobile app in a box" solution that is practically useless when held up against an "actionable" standard. I see the attraction - "yes, we're now mobile!" - but the app won't get reuse beyond the intial installation if it doesn't do things that benfit the user. Reading campus news and looking at an event calendar is not substantive engagement - you're wasting your precious resources going down this road.

Segment and target aggressively

A single campus-wide mobile application will contain too much irrelevant content for too many people. Alumni don't care about campus bus schedules (unless they're on campus for reunion), students don't particularly care about regional club activity, faculty don't care about which alumni recently got married and so on. Build niche, targeted, relevant, useful and functional apps and you'll find happy users.

Mobile Web is the way to go

While performance isn't the best, getting something out there that works and can be iterated on quickly is key. Mobile web apps give you that because they can be built using the same skillset that your current web development staff have. Pure native apps bring with them a host of issues including app store approval, the need for completely different development skills for each platform and the cost that inevitably follows. "Near-native" using PhoneGap, Appcelearator, Sencha and others are coming along strong to bridge the gap.

Your campus (and alumni experience) is unique

Every campus is special because the relationship is personal. When I meet with universities to talk about projects, we talk about "emotional resonance" and finding ways to tap in to that to meet institutional objectives. Your mobile presence, whatver it is, should be deeper, more meaninful, more representative of what your institution is all about than just some colors and branding. Do something novel and the alumni will find their way to it. Who doesn't want to be proud of their alma mater for being innovative and inspiring? Seek that out.

Links and our slide deck

Our slide deck (which is fun, but not nearly as fun as the narration that goes along with it): Mobile Apps for Alumni Engagment (pptx) | Mobile Apps for Alumni Engagment (pdf)

Links to mobile/social/mashup services that were mentioned in our talk:

• Lehigh/Lafayette Challenge - giving by text message
• Cornell Compass - purely for fun (geolocation)
• Zinck's Night - an online dimension to complement a f2f event
• Princeton's Reunion App
• Cornell's Reunion App
• CASE Mobile - and an associated writeup on it

Thank you again to those who attended and to those who subsequently review the content of the presentation. I'll be more than happy to do a webinar for any school who is interested in thinking through the mobile app landscape and visit onsite once my leg is no longer broken!

Chad and I are happy to answer any other questions you have and help you find your way as you begin to evaluate mobile application opportunities.

We recently had the privilege of working with Andrew Gossen in Cornell's office of Alumni Affairs on a sweet little mobile project.

The Cornell Compass web application uses geolocation features exposed through mobile browsers to determine the distance and bearing from where you're standing to the center of Cornell's campus. It's fun! It would be way more fun if the orientation of the device was exposed as well (then we could make the compass dynamically spin in real time).

Once your location is determined you have the opportunity to "Check In" and drop a marker on a map with your name and class year (both optional). The map is visible both on the mobile device and via the website (we do some browser sniffing so the content is device-appropriate). All visitors are encouraged to share the link to the site via Facebook and Twitter.

The Compass app is optimized for iPhone, but is functional on both Blackberry and Android devices as well. The backend (which is trivially simple) is ColdFusion with Microsoft SQL Server. The bulk of the front end work was done using jQuery and a few assistive javascript libraries for doing the bearing calculations.

We're working with Cornell to design the next version of this application with more features that make it useful to Cornellians all over the world looking to deepen their relationships with each other. Interested in learning more? Please drop me an email! We're interested in working with other organizations to enhance the usefulness of the app including integration with alumni online communities and CRM systems.

An article in this past weekend's New York Times profiled our alma mater's amazingly successful alumni career solutions program.

Undergraduate career services are widely known but not nearly as many folks know about similar services that the truly class-leading alumni associations under visionary leadership started providing earlier this decade. Alumni databases existed long before the days of Facebook and LinkedIn; leveraging that information (and the requisite institutional affinity) to keep as many alumni employed as possible seemed like an obvious win-win. Lehigh's alumni director Chris Marshall (now at Cornell) saw the need and hired two great people to staff this new program; the next challenge was giving them the right tools to maximize their impact. Undergraduate populations are easily served (they're all in one place) - serving a globally-distributed alumni body...not so much.

Lehigh's program has been able to assist far more people due to their heavy use of a system we recommended to them: Adobe Acrobat Connect.

Every week, Lori and Robin put on multiple web seminars on topics immediately useful to alumni in transition like salary negotiation, interview skills and grad school prep. These aren't pre-recorded sessions; they are presented live at a variety of times so that alumni can sneak it in over their lunch hour or later in the day at home. When all you need is a web browser to participate, the barriers to getting help are significantly lowered. Acrobat Connect has kept the cost of providing this service to an affordable minimum while maximizing the number of people served every month.

We're happy to have pointed them in the right direction so they can help as many alumni as possible, especially in these challenging economic times. Congratulations on getting some well-warranted recognition, Lehigh!

Keep an eye on (and contribute to!) the topic wiki for the Higher Ed Barcamp happening in Philadelphia late this spring or early summer.

I'm especially interested in this barcamp as the topics are sure to span everything from emerging technology to legacy integration, admissions to alumni relations. There's a reason we're in to the whole higher ed world -- it's so broad that there's always something new and interesting to work on.

So...even if you don't necessarily work in higher ed, you are almost certainly a product of it. What would you apply from your day job to the operations of your alma mater to provide a better learning environment, customer experience and lifelong connection?

Share your suggestions on the higher ed barcamp wiki.

Today we launched the third major update to our event management system for alumni relations and university advancement offices. We're especially proud of this one. as it represents a huge leap forward in both functionality and usability over the previous release.

• Built in ColdFusion (Mach-ii) with a hefty dose of AJAX to make the software incredibly easy to work with
• Revamped skin. now easy on the eyes
• Event API for integration with external systems (notification on registration. payment. address change request etc.)
• Feed API for populating event calendars (used for our Flash/Flex event calendar control)
• Plug-and-play with Authorize.net and Verisign/Paypal payment services
• Tagging is used to profile each event; tag data is used by our ad engine and CRM system to market events to niche affinity organizations

EMS3 is in production use right now and has received an overwhelmingly positive reception from our clients. We'll write more on the integration features at a later date - we view them as a major advantage over other systems currently on the market. Building a proper API is a challenge unto itself and we have found that our clients are eager to simplify data exchange whenever possible. We feel we have met that need with this release.

Screenshots

Modifying a reservation is easier than ever thanks to our consolidated user interface. Generate a PDF copy of an invoice. process payments and apply discounts to reservations all from one screen.

Creating an event is significantly faster now that we've pulled all activity information forward. Set a default price for an activity and specify activity options (dropdowns) all in one screen.

Changing event information in a popup window. We've included a nice DHTML date/time picker control that renders consistently across all browsers.

Modifying activity prices.

Reports have been streamlined - pull attendance lists. extracts for outside systems and nightly transaction reports for reconciliation purposes from an easy-to-understand screen.

The NEAR group is an informal consortium of alumni relations directors from 13 small colleges in the northeast United States. To better facilitate communications among the member institutions. we've launched a suite of services for their use on their new website. http://www.nearweb.org/

ARAMP

Our Alumni Relations Assessment and Metrics Program platform was the driver for the whole project. Created for our friends in PCUAD. ARAMP is a survey and data analysis toolkit used to assess the performance of an alumni association within the context of a community of practice. In essence. comparing you to your peers (in this case NEAR) on a set of agreed-upon data points and evaluating your progress based on a scoring/weighting schema. Helpful features include the ability to send email to any peer within the system. view commentary on successful programs. run customized reports and build a custom dashboards of selected data points.

The system was implemented using a healthy combination of Flex and ColdFusion (word to the geeks: Remote Objects rock!). Performance is greatly improved over PCUAD's version of ARAMP (10x...no lie) as is the user experience. The decision to re-implement ARAMP in Flex really was a no-brainer. We have the ability to do better data validation. richer charts and graphs and build a cleaner UI using Flex than with CF/Ajax/CSS/JS. We'll be rolling this new version out to PCUAD later this spring and other communities of practice as the opportunity arises.

Farcry

No organization seems to be truly complete without a functional web presence. We implemented one for them powered by the popular. open-source Farcry CMS. They are in the process of dressing up the site content following a brief web conference/training session. Uptake has been swift. and it's hoped that the CMS will minimize the amount of time required to update the site.

Galleon Forums

Naturally. not all conversation is structured or belongs within ARAMP. so we rolled out the web forum software that Ray Camden has released for community use. We've worked with Galleon before and like it an awful lot. so thanks. Ray! Now you can count "advancing the profession of alumni relations" among your lifetime accomplishments.

One neat feature of note: Dayne devised a nice bit of code that implements a single sign-on (single session) between ARAMP and Galleon. reducing an irritating possible double login effect that could have happened in the transition from the Flex to the CF environment. The users of the system will never know it's there. which was exactly our intent!

We were able to implement a LOT of functionality using open source software. leaving most of our time to work on the Flex/ARAMP implementation. The combination is very powerful and I hope to see us use it more over time.

So if you're curious or want to know more. drop me a note on our site contact form or AIM:scrittler. I'll be happy to demo the system(s) to you!

Higher education is a unique business. Where else can you find an organization that functions like a town within a town. providing housing. financial services. education. athletics. recreation. social and career services. and entertainment? All of this functions basically as a benevolent dictatorship - student government isn't terrifically strong. faculty are notoriously strong on issues of academic freedom and guiding the ship is a president usually promoted within higher ed to lead the whole thing. One president remarked once that being president of a university is like being the captain of the ship. but the wheel is disconnected from the rudder. I believe it - much of university life is functioning on a 10 year cycle. To those on the outside it's painfully slow. but even with something changing and evolving at this pace is too fast for many.

Taking it to the next level. think of how revenue to run the place is generated: some income from current residents (varies campus to campus). some income from other outside sources. and (this is the kicker) a substantial chunk from former customers. Seriously. If you bought a Honda and then 25 years later they came back asking for a "donation" to ensure the continued creation of new excellent automobiles. you'd laugh!

But there's something about higher ed that is incredibly attractive to us. It's the passion that people feel for an institution. the strength of the bond that is created simply due to people being in the same place at the same time. Identify yourself as an alum of a school to another alum and immediately you're no longer a stranger. Shared experience. even if it wasn't simultaneous. is one very special form of community.

This is the business we've established ourselves in.

We help alumni associations build community. increase alumni engagement online and off and conduct efficient operations by providing tools for communication. management and measurement.

Next installment: challenges and opportunities