New relationship between Alumni Association, USD Foundation seeks to increase efficiency
In an effort to save money and time, a realignment of the USD Foundation and USD Alumni Association is underway, resulting in greater communication between the two entities and a decrease in staff.
In June, USD announced the “strategic alignment” of both organizations to move forward to more closely align alumni engagement efforts. USD President James Abbott said the move comes after administrators found that activities of both entities were being duplicated.
“In looking at the functions of both what I find is that we’re duplicating (efforts) in several instances,” Abbott said.
In one case the USD Foundation had someone who was writing articles for them while another person was writing articles for the USD Alumni Association. Still another person from USD Marketing Communications & University Relations would also sometimes help write articles for both organizations. All of the articles would then be sent out to the same group of alumni.
“The point was, it didn’t seem to me to be reasonable to be doing those three things in three different places,” Abbott said.
The two entities also maintained separate lists of alumni, which Abbott said didn’t make sense since the two could share one list.
The total budget for the Alumni Association in the 2014-15 fiscal year, the last year data is available for, was about $532,000. Out of that total, $200,000 was being spent on staff salaries while another $110,000 was spent on supplies. USD’s contribution was about $331,000 with the rest coming from the Alumni Endowment.
Due to the new “strategic alignment,” two positions were cut. One employee still works at USD in a different capacity and the director of the Alumni Association, Kersten Johnson, has now taken a job with the State of South Dakota. The two entities will remain separate, for now, for a three-year experimental period with most functions of the Alumni Association coming under direction of the Foundation and its director, Steve Brown.
“The intent is not so much to save money but to be able to do more with the money that we save by combining some of the functions,” Abbott said.
Michelle Green, the assistant vice president for constituent engagement for the USD Foundation, said that due to the alignment, both the Foundation and the Alumni Association will be able to increase their focus on engaging with alumni while working to streamline their efforts and decrease the duplication of work.
“We are fortunate enough to have an alumni base of 70,000 alumni and friends of the University who we are really focused on and that we are really focused on building that lifelong relationship with USD,” Green said. “The beauty of the strategic realignment between the Foundation the USD Alumni Association is that now we get to think of these 70,000 people and the segments that fit within them.”
Green said a survey was recently sent out to 20,000 alumni asking for feedback on programming that both the Alumni Association and the Foundation do and about 2,000 people completed the survey.
“Data collection has been really important to us and we wanted to really hear from the alums on what programming is important to them, what they want, what they want more of, what they want less of, and we did that through a survey that was distributed to about 20,000 of those 70,000 alums,” she said.
Green said both the Alumni Association and the Foundation are working together to come up with a list of goals that they want both entities to complete in the next three years. Meanwhile, the programming and work the two are doing to engage with alumni is aiming not just to raise money, but to also get alumni to share their time and experiences with USD students.
“So, really, it’s about finding a way for those alums to get involved with USD whether that be through their time, their talent or their treasures,” she said.
