Proven Strategies for Community Engagement with Candie Fredritz

In this episode of Nonprofit Nation, Julia Campbell sits down with Candie Fredritz, the Director of Alumni and Parent Engagement at Kent School, a prestigious 9-12 boarding school in Kent, Connecticut. Candie shares her journey from a young worker in the school's stables to her current role, where she plays a pivotal role in fostering strong connections between the school's past and present.

We discuss: 

• How Kent School leveraged Zoom and other digital platforms to stay connected with alumni and parents during the pandemic.
• Overcoming significant challenges such as finding a new registration platform under tight deadlines and re-engaging alumni from different decades.
• Candie’s goals for the future of alumni and parent engagement at Kent School.
• Tips for other schools and organizations on engaging alumni and parents, and using technology effectively.

This episode is sponsored by RSVPify. At RSVPify, you can host ticketed events for free - no subscription required. Host any free event with a monthly or annual subscription. Use the code NONPROFITNATION50 at checkout for an 50% off any annual subscription (discount applied for first year only) - or 50% off any monthly subscription for three months (billed at full rate subsequently).

About Candie Fredritz

Candie Fredritz serves as the Director of Alumni and Parent Engagement at Kent School, a 9-12 boarding school nestled in the picturesque landscape of Kent, Connecticut. With a keen understanding of the evolving needs of both alumni and parents, Candie is dedicated to bridging the gap between the school's rich history and its vibrant present by connecting alumni and current students in meaningful ways.

Drawing upon her experience in community outreach and relationship building, Candie's primary mission is to ensure that today's Kent resonates deeply with alumni and parents, both past and present, fostering a sense of belonging and connection among its diverse stakeholders. She is committed to meeting them where they are, whether it's through innovative digital platforms, engaging events, or personalized interactions. Candie continues to strengthen the bonds that unite Kent's past, present, and future.

In her free time, Candie enjoys time with her two sons and three dogs. She is also involved with her local community and currently serves as Vice-President of Hope Rising Farm Therapeutic Riding Center, LLC in Amenia, NY.

Connect with Candie on LinkedIn

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Transcript

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I'm your host, Julia Campbell, and I'm gonna sit down with nonprofit industry experts, fundraisers, marketers, and everyone in between to get real and discuss what it takes to build that movement that you've been dreaming of. I created the nonprofit Nation podcast to share practical wisdom and strategies to help you confidently find your voice, definitively grow your audience, and effectively build your movement. If you're a nonprofit newbie or an experienced professional who's looking to get more visibility, reach more people, and create even more impact, then you're in the right place. Let's get started. Hello. This is nonprofit Nation. I'm so excited to be here with you today. Wherever you're listening, I'm your host, Julia Campbell. And in this episode, we're going to talk about proven strategies for community engagement. And I am sitting down with Candy Frederic, the director of alumni and parent engagement at Kent School, a prestigious nine to twelve boarding school in Kent. Those are grades, not ages, in Kent, Connecticut. And Candy is going to share her journey from a young worker in the school stables to her current role, where she's pivotal in fostering strong connections between the school's past and present. I'm just really so excited to talk to Candy about how the school uses events, uses technology, and uses their current strategies to really build that alumni and parent engagement. So, Candy, thank you for being on the podcast today. Thanks for having me, Julia. It's a really great opportunity to share some experiences. Yeah. So tell me how you got into nonprofit work. So, I think, you know, it starts at a young age for most of us. You know, in high school, I was a part of the helping Hands organization, Special Olympics. Not necessarily as meaningful as I would have expected it to be. As we move forward in life like you do those kind of club activities, not thinking about how your future is going to be, but just. It's a part of something that you felt passionate about at that time. I started at Kent School when I was 14, working in the stables. It was a job that I could have access to pretty easily because I grew up in the town of Kent and I would work every Saturday with the barn crew up there. And then fast forward. I spent time in Ohio at the University of Finley and then moved forward to a career in either private school education, in the medical field and in the legal field, and eventually came to Kent School almost seven years ago now for work in the development office. And we've really been able to kind of watch the transition take place pre Covid, during COVID and then now what the future holds for us as we move forward. Post pandemic. And when we talked earlier, I mean, your role was created for you. It was. I started at Kent School as an administrative assistant in the alumni and development office. I worked for the director of the parent fund, kind of moved through the ranks, became eventually the parent director for two years. And then last year we really had a niche where we needed to have that engagement piece. The fortunate piece for myself is that all along I've been working with alumni and parents and kind of moving through. So they knew me. I was a familiar face to them, which was important. And so we created this role. It was offered to me and I jumped at the chance to just be more involved in really getting all the good that Kent does out into the universe. We're really good about communicating internally. And then we think that everyone knows about us. And I think that as we move forward, it's just so much more important to be very diligent about communicating, not only with the community that we're surrounded by, but then also our alumni and parents in very strategic ways to make sure that they're staying connected with Ken. How have you seen alumni and parent engagement shift since COVID. During. Before COVID we really expected that our alumni and parents were going to come to campus. If anybody researches Kent School in our location, we are sort of in the middle of nowhere in the northwest corner of Connecticut. As a kid growing up living in Kent, we were 20 minutes from every place you wanted to go to. And our sidewalks rolled up at

06: 6:10

00 p.m. without fail. And so being able to expect alumni to kind of come to us when we're not in a city where there's easy access to hotels and things along those lines. You know, we had a notion early on that alumni and parents sort of came to us for what we needed. When the pandemic happened and we had to send all of our kids home that march, we really had to pause and figure out how do we keep people connected to us. We didn't want to send students home without knowing that Kent school was still here for them. Our students had a year where they had to do remote learning, and then the following year, we were able to bring them back on campus. But it was a closed campus for the most part. And so finding a way where we knew parents just couldn't drop by to see their child, but to be able to keep them connected with what's going on so that they felt that we were a safe place and taking care of everyone's emotional, mental, physical needs as we moved through the pandemic was really important. So my office took a stance to Zoom with parents every Tuesday. Never failed. Four

Tuesdays a month, I was on that Zoom 07: 7:31

00 p.m. for an entire hour with a different group of constituents, being able to let them know what was happening on campus, answering any questions that they had, making sure that they had access to the head of school, maybe a dean of students, whatever it was, on whatever topic really was important at that moment in time, so that they felt that their student was safe and taken care of. And we did the same thing with alumni, so we were really able to start engaging them with maybe meet the coaches zooms or something along those lines that made it so that we weren't spending almost three years of a pandemic where nobody was hearing from us. We actually became more purposeful and strategic in what they were hearing from us. And then that allowed us to keep moving forward post pandemic, where we recognize the fact that because we are a boarding school and we have international students as well as domestic students and day students, we need to find a platform that allows everyone to get together at the same time. The only way you can do that is through Zoom. So our Zoom platform is still alive with regards to that. Every year we host different events on Zoom to really get different groups of people in different timeframes and time zones together, to be able to make sure that they can stay connected and meet each other, which just fosters some communication on their own outside of Kent, which is really what we want. If they're talking about Kent, then the good is spreading elsewhere. And I saw, unfortunately, a lot of radio silence during the pandemic and even afterwards from organizations and schools and nonprofits and institutions that just didn't really know what they should be doing. But I

love the idea of just saying, I'm going to show up at 07: 9:20

00 p.m. and we're going to talk about something. And I might have a speaker and I'm going to address your questions, but I'm going to show up and show up and show up and show up. And that is just such a huge piece of building that trust and affinity that's really going to help, you know, help the community trust you and invest in you and want to be a part of what you're doing. So I love that just, that just showing up, just showing up, just putting in the work, just doing it and knowing that you're going to be there for the alumni and parents in the community and therefore they know that you're going to be there for them. So, yeah, so what right now are some of the key events and initiatives that you think are particularly successful in fostering that sort of sense of belonging among Kent's alumni and parents? Yeah, I think our key events are the events where we are traveling to them. I think that, you know, my personal thought process on engagement is that because we really are, you know, in such a remote location compared to some other boarding schools that it's time that we don't necessarily expect or require, if you want to engage with Kent, that you have to actually come to campus. And so we have hold, we have held events in Washington, DC, and we've had Florida events. We've traveled to California this year. We've traveled to Asia. And so now we're able to really get to the people and host events and move it forward and in a meaningful way where they're asking, you know, when are you coming back? How can I be involved? I had in the DC event, an alum say, I will raise my hand to be a representative, representative for the DC area. We've not had a DC rep before that I know of. So I think, you know, just showing up and telling them that they're worth our time and effort becomes very key in how they start to engage with us. And some of those people that maybe weren't signed up for our June reunion are now signing up because we're there and they saw us and they had some conversations with us that made it so that they want to reengage with Kent and be able to see what we're all about today, which is what's important. I think one of the other things that we do, or that I encourage alumni to do is to, when they can come back to campus, to then make them be engaged with the students currently. It's always nice to come back and kind of relive your alumni years. That's what reunion is all about. But meaning even more meaningful is to be able to come to campus, sit in on classes, speak to students, have that interaction so that, you know, that the traditions that you had at Kent so long ago haven't been lost. I think that's sometimes what our alumni fear is that, you know, classes of 1959 had certain things that they experienced at Kent and they really worry that the kids today aren't experiencing that. And as much as I will tell a

1959 alum that, no, our kids probably don't have to wake up at 05: 12:36

00 a.m. and go to the dishroom to be able to prepare for breakfast, they are still in the dishroom. They're still doing the jobs program that we have here at Kent to make them actually be a meaningful member of our community and what that is all about. And I think that that's reassuring to our alumni, that there are still traditions that aren't lost just because the generational span is so great. That's something a lot of fundraisers, marketers, community engagement professionals have to deal with the demographic shifts and the, you know, the different generations that often we are tasked with engaging and sustaining and cultivating. So I think this is a great example. You know, how do you balance honoring Kent School's rich history, you know, very long history, while ensuring that it is relevant to current students and families? I mean, that is a tightrope to walk. It is a tightrope to walk. And Kent School started out back in 1906 as a boarding school for boys. We didn't have a school for girls until the sixties, and so it became, there's such a different culture shift. You know, we have a group of men now that remember no women ever being on campus. And then we have, when we did have females be able to attend Kent School, there was actually two campuses. There was the hill campus, which is four and a half miles away from this main campus on top of a mountain. And very few interactions between the two groups kind of happened. It was almost like two separate schools in some regards where, you know, I listened to alumnae and just the men alum be able to give us, you know, feedback. And I'm like, oh, I'm like, you know, that was definitely a different world in a different time. And then in 92, 93, the campus merged together to have everyone on one main campus. And so we sort of have three different time periods to really work through as we invite everyone back, because those are very distinct experiences that those alums had. And so making sure that our current students, who would have no clue that the Hill campus was even a thing, is so important. So being able to teach that history, we have a whole archival department at Kent to be able to really start that new student seminar piece where they're learning about the rich Kent history, they have to do projects on it. And so through all of that, we're able to really keep that connection of what Kent was at the same time as then teaching our alums what Kent is today. And if we can kind of merge in the middle, then we have meaningful relationships moving forward. And in our events, it's really nice because we're inviting all spans of ages. So in the fact that we may go to the head of the Charles in October, which is a large crew regatta, we will have a tent where there are alums that rowed in the seventies talking to alums that are rowing in 2019 and 2020. And so they all look at the pictures and they point each other out, and they're really able to sort of connect on what they're doing. And that just gets them coming to events is important because we do invite that age span, and at that point in time, they start to make some meaningful friendships. I know that in DC, I had one alum that asked where their friend was and just expecting the fact that it was, you know, it's a 1959 alum asking me if so and so registered, and I was like, oh, I was like, you know, we'll have to look. And so in my mind, I'm expecting another 59 alum or someone in that age group. And it turned out to be like a 2019 alum that they chatted and have been friends for a while because they probably met at some other event and they're in the DC area together. So, you know, it was nice to see those connections take place. And that's really how we keep the balance going, is to connecting the different generations together in a meaningful way. Oh, I love that. I think that it's so important when you emphasize how you take the events to the alumni rather than expecting them to sort of come to campus. I think this is a great analogy for nonprofits that are really just sort of expecting people to either come to them, come to their website or come to their social media or come to their email list or just sort of find them somehow in a Google search or something. How can we, you know, how. How can we shift in this shift, this strategy? Because I'm sure this was a huge shift that you needed to persuade people to make. And how has it been received by your community? It's been very positive by our community. You know, they're impressed when we give them the list of places that we're going next. I think one of our bigger challenges is probably making sure that they know about it. We've spent some time, and we will continue this new year to spend time in asking, how do you get your Kent information? Is it on Facebook? Is it because you read our newsletter? Is it because you saw us on Instagram or LinkedIn? Where are you actually receiving our information? Because once we can kind of hone in where they're actually learning about all the things that we're doing, then we'd be able to promote that in a much more meaningful way, and we'll get more buy in with regards to participation and touch points as we move forward. I think that being able to have the digital platforms that we have, long ago, you kind of were Facebook and probably not much else. And now I can't even keep up with the amount of places that we could actually go post our information. Some of our alumni association has a Facebook page and an Instagram page and a LinkedIn page, but we also have, maybe the crew team has their own page. So if everyone starts to have their own pieces, we need to be able to know where they are. So we rely on our marketing and communications team and then on our teachers. If I want to reach young alums, I'm asking one of our teachers that's connected to those young alums to reach out instead of just hearing from us. As an institution, I think they think alumni and development. You get the development, you get the advancement, you get the fundraising piece. But we're not just fundraising. There is more meaningful work that is happening besides that. And to be able to use your key people on our campus to help us reach the groups that may not be just automatically connected to us is so important. And so having people that we can rely on that are either faculty or staff that are connected in different ways to groups of students. And so encouraging our young alums and even our older alums to spread the word, word of mouth is key. Not everybody calls us to be able to tell us that their email address has changed or their address has changed. And so the only way we find out is if something is bounced back or mail is returned to us. But our alums specifically, which is really kind of funny, is if somebody tells me that I live in Blank City, I can do a pin on a map, and I bet you I can find ten plus alums that are really close by that you probably didn't even know were living near you. Because our Kent alums sort of settle together without realizing that they're settling together, which is kind of impressive when I look at a world map or a US map as we pick the cities that we're going to that particular year. And so just getting everybody connected and knowing that, you know, it's key for any office nonprofit organization to know that it's, it takes more than one email, one touch point to be able to get yourself out there. When I was working for the director of the parent fund, I did a mini research analysis. In the month of December, we had a why I give campaign. And so for four weeks in the month of December highlighted a family, why they were being philanthropic to Kent. And in that process, we figured out that minimally six touch points with regards to emails, phone calls, whatever it may be, but at least six before somebody was able to turn that around into some meaningful piece of the pie, whether it became making a gift or reaching out to us and having conversations. So as much as you think you're doing enough, you can always do more. They're probably not seeing, they're not realizing that you maybe are sending them twelve different things, but through those twelve different things, changing your subject line, changing the header, changing where the RSVP button is in your email. You know, at the first send, I may put it at the bottom because I want them to actually see information by the time my event is nearby. I'm putting it at the top because I just want to know if they want to come and I don't want them to have to search and make it harder on them. So being able to have that at the ready and schedule send and kind of develop how your campaign looks as you move forward. Every event really is a campaign. It's not just campaigns for fundraising, it's campaigns for events to get people to attend makes it meaningful as we move forward. And so really strategically looking at how you're putting things together and getting it out there and not being afraid to send four emails in two weeks, six emails in two weeks to a group of people that maybe didn't open it the first three times, but all of a sudden, because I said in my subject line tonight we're having an event in Boston. They're like, oh, I'm sorry, still free. I can go. Changes things. Yes. I think that is so important for fundraisers, marketers, engagement coordinators, volunteer coordinators, to understand that we are not the top priority for our alumni, our parents or our donors, our volunteers, our board members, our stakeholders, we are not the top priority. And it does take quite a few asks. And these are fairly engaged people that you're talking about. They're not complete strangers. It's not like you're reaching out to an email list you purchased or to people that have maybe signed up for your email list and don't know what you do. I mean, these are really engaged people and you still have to reiterate the message several times. I think that is such an important point and something that you've clearly tested and learned from, and now you have that data point and you can say, okay, we know that we need to do it this many times. We know that this is going to get us the best return and the most participation. So having that data point and understanding what works and what doesn't work is really important. But you've got to test it, you've got to try it, you've got to see it. You can't just assume, oh, I don't want to get six emails, so no one else does. But the point is, I mean, really, the reality is, are we going to read all of those emails? No. Well, in our most engaged constituents, I would argue as our parents, our current parents have kids here, so you would think that they would be the ones paying attention to an email that says, kent school coming across the top. We made a concise effort with our marketing and communications team as a whole school to do the weekly newsletter versus giving parents emails from the athletic department and from choir and from, you know, you name it, whatever department it is. Yeah, well, who gets those emails all day long from? My, my kids are in two different school districts, so it's a lot of emails, but thank you. Except for the fact that we had a Greenwich event this fall and I had parents that are like, I just found out about this event. You didn't publicize it very well. And I'm like, oh, well, it was in the newsletter for the past four weeks, but okay. And then we had other parents that our head of school writes a little message, you know, at the top, telling what the week was, whatever it may be. And he's always got a very wonderful and lovely message. But after we were talking to a group of moms. They're like, oh, we stopped there and start texting each other. And so they paused from the newsletter to say, oh, did you hear? You know, did you see the message? Did you see the picture? Did you see whatever it may be? And the problem is, is that they don't go back to the rest of the newsletter. And so all of a sudden, they've missed some other information. So being able to know that it can't just live in your weekly newsletter, even with parents who have students here, that it has to live in other places or you have to send them, you know, use a product where you can get a separate email out, have it come from a particular person versus just the institution. You know, all of a sudden, it makes a difference. People know my name because I've been a part of the parents association and kind of running that from behind the scenes for the past four plus years. So those groups of parents are able to now know, oh, Candy's sending me something. Let me go look and see what it is, if I need to respond to her or if it's just information. But all of a sudden, now we're able to start getting some people that maybe will now talk to other parents and be like, oh, I'm going to this event. Are you going to this event? Or did you see X and Y? And it really starts to make a difference because if they can start to talk amongst each other, then, you know, we've kind of done our job with regards to starting the conversations and then just making sure that we're delivering on what we're asking them to accomplish or attend or whatever it may be, because the programming needs to be as meaningful as getting them there. I do think that's a huge problem with a lot of events, is it's not necessarily meaningful, but also, there's not really a way to build community and let other people that are in community with each other contact each other and talk about it and share and network, and that's a huge piece of it. So I wanted to talk about. I do want to talk about technology, but I want to talk about a strategy that, when we had first talked before recording, you mentioned a strategy that you introduced of getting in front of recent graduates immediately rather than waiting for their first reunion. And this was not something that Kent had done before. And it was almost like a really huge shift in mindset for the fundraising department, for the engagement department. So can you talk about this strategy and how has it changed, you know, engagement outcomes? Yeah. Pre Covid I think Kent school, like many high schools, kind of took a stance on their graduating. Let them go graduate, let them have that college experience, let them, you know, not constantly hear from us, don't badger them, you know, just keep them moving forward because we've set them up for success by having them come to Kent School. So now we're, you know, proud little fledglings go and have that experience. But as we move forward and as we look at this and I've had years to watch this take place even though it wasn't my role initially. Those are the years where now we're struggling to be able to have them engaged with us. Maybe I don't have a current email address or if I want to send them something I have to send it to their parents because they don't contact us. And we made a very conscious effort two years ago to start using the online platform that we have as an alumni directory to be able to say before you leave Kent school, sign up now, don't use your Kent school email address because that's going to be shut down. Then you really won't get anything but give us an email address that you will check and one that then you can be a part of the community still as you move forward. And so two years ago when we did it, we started it in like April. We graduate early June. So we had, you know, just over 50 days to really kind of get everybody believing that we want to know about them as they move forward. This year we started in January. We were like, we need to get them in, we need to get them on. We need to do the best that we can and make sure that they stay connected. So through every month, minimally, they have a form meeting where the seniors are all together. So we were able to get some FaceTime and we've been in front of them a number of times since the winter term to be able to be like, this is why you want to stay connected to us. You know, worst case scenario, you want. Giving them the incentive not just saying stay connected. This is why I love that. Exactly. And telling them, worst case scenario, if nothing else comes out of it. Next May, I'm going to invite you to a party and you're going to want to be there. Like, this is your first alumni thing that you're really going to want to be coming to. And if you don't have some other email address or a way of contact, I don't know how I'm going to let you know about it. And then we continued this series that we offered with regards to being able to not only be in front of them at their form meetings, giving them some emails, they have student announcements weekly and just kind of constantly reminding them week after week that we're still here. Last Friday, we held the blue and gray reception, which is their first induction into the alumni association. Our alumni council is on campus, and so they get to have a reception together. They get a gift from us as the school to be able to just say, thank you for your time here, stay connected, and then we will keep moving forward with them. We will reach out and hopefully do some college visits next year, which will sort of be new for us, where if we have someone on our campus that is traveling to a particular place, great. Are you near a college? So if you're near the Boston area, and I have five alums or recent grads in that area, then I want you to go find a local pizza place and invite them there. So keep coming to them. And to be able to just do these little but meaningful things shows them that Kent still cares about them and cares as they're moving forward and making sure that they get on that alumni platform. Our alumni directory. I was just speaking to an alum probably 30 minutes ago, and he's like, so what is this really all about? And what does it do for me? And I'm like, well, once you're on, like, let me show you. If you want to look up a particular alum by name, you can do that. If you want class year. Would you like industry? If you want to go into journalism, and we have alums that picked journalism as their industry, you can now find them, and you're not connecting with just somebody from a particular class, but all alums in that particular area, we have mentoring programs that are on there as well that we intend to even beef up this fall. To be able to be like, I'm willing to help the next Kent alum with whatever it may be. And being able to connect in that meaningful way and having it in a secure portal makes it just such a great piece of the puzzle of staying connected not only to us, but even more importantly to each other. Kent is the common tie that binds everybody together. And so by being able to, keeping them connected in some way to each other, I would almost say is more meaningful than connecting them to us. We can find them. We can invite them to parties. We can have receptions. They'll have reunions. But knowing that there is a complete community out there that has the common thread of Kentucky is really important to myself and to Kent, as a whole. Everything you're saying is very applicable to the entire sector, every organization, whether or not they are a school and have alumni, you're talking about maintaining relevance, having an incentive to stay connected, connecting people together who have a common shared purpose and interest, and building that community, giving them opportunities to connect with each other, really helping them understand why they should stay connected to you on social media or via email. That is so important. Rather than just saying sign up for our email updates. I mean, that's not really an incentive to me. So just constantly thinking about the person at the other end of the message, having empathy for your audience and your stakeholders and who you're targeting, really crafting that message to what is interesting to them, not necessarily what is interesting to you and your agenda. And this is where I think there should be some huge mindset shifts for the entire sector as a whole. So how do you use technology effectively for alumni engagement? And what are some tips on using technology to kind of maybe make that's simplified? I think our key is to always stay open to the new technology coming out. I think being able to have, you know, the standard Facebook works for our older alums, but our younger alums aren't on Facebook. They probably have no connection to Facebook whatsoever. So knowing that Instagram is available and TikTok and YouTube and, you know, all of those pieces, it's forces us to stay on that cutting edge. We have to get above the noise. The only way to get above the noise is to keep learning how the best way to use our tools are and to also, from an internal standpoint, make it easy. Like, I don't want to have to do ten extra steps if I can have a program that will take care of it for me. So being able to research and find the programs that work best for your particular nonprofit is very key as you move forward. We were fortunate enough to find some programs that really allow us to, you know, do the auto sentence and to be able to have a streamlined registration site. By having a streamlined registration site, we were now able to also put in, which I think is really key for reunion. Like, if anybody is a school that is working with a reunion side of things, you really focus on reunion giving at the same time as focusing on having an event of reunion. But what you can't do is give them some kind of an email that says click here to register, click here to give. Click here to see this. Click here to see that. That's taking them off of a page that they will now maybe never get back to your original side. We now have programs that allow us to, let's go through the registration site, be able to pick what you want to do for reunion. Oh, and the last question I'm asking you is would you like to make your gift now? Because if you want to make your gift now, then you are able to do it. And when you process your credit card to pay for reunion, you're doing your gift at the same time. And you never clicked away from anything. So if there is something for your. Audience, understanding your audience. Right. And. Exactly. And that's so key is to know that, you know, we'll have fundraisers that may come and be like, can we do this? And I'm like, well, we can do it, but let's really be thinking how meaningful it is and what can we do to streamline something? You know, I think they say in the industry, three to 7 seconds before somebody clicks and moves on. I think that's even getting shorter as we continue to move forward with the different generations. And so, you know, I'm fortunate enough that if you're clicking for a use reunion as example, because in about five weeks we have our very large reunion where 300 people will come to campus to be able to experience and relive their memories of Kent. But being able to do so, I really need to figure out how to capture them. And the way to capture them is to use the tools that we have very strategically and set it up in place. I even have people in our office that will be like, would you like to do a save the date for, you know, the party that we have in December? I'm like, no, I don't want to save the date. I want to open registration now. Yes. I don't want them to free, I don't need them to save the date. I need them to register to come. I can remind them about the date as we move forward because we have tools to use to send them those reminder emails. But what I don't want to do is have a postcard pasted on their fridge that maybe gets lost somewhere in the mix. And then all of a sudden now they're like, oh, there's something, but I don't remember what it is. And maybe they'll send it and then that's more emails that they have to pay attention to. If I got their attention on the first thing that I sent and they're like, oh, I really want to go to that. I remember that from last year, then I want to make sure that they can just click and make it happen. Without having to save the date in a traditional sense. That's a really good point about attention. And how. Why are we, yeah, why are we sending save the dates? Why are we doing early interest lists? Why not just when we have it ready, send it to people? Because people are busy. I'm not saving dates. And actually, when I see a save the date, unless it's a wedding, because weddings are a whole thing. But if I see a save the date for something, I honestly just assume I'm going to get more reminders and then I probably don't save it, right? And I forget about it. So unless it's something that's an incredibly important family event, my attention will just go immediately away. And if it is something I want to register for, I want to register for it. Like I want to sign up, I want to put it on my calendar. I want to get all of the reminders that say I'm going and I'm ready to make the decision, like when I see that email. But I think that's such an important point about realizing that people are so busy and have such scarce attention. And when you have their attention, you've got to use it and you've got to leverage it. Absolutely. Focusing when they have that 30 seconds to give me is so key, no matter when it is. And if it's an event that you have to pay for, if you can afford it now, but maybe not, you know, two weeks before the event, then why should I not give you the opportunity to be able to join in with what we need? Not every event that we do, you know, cost dollars. Reunion is one of them that does, but it's just so much easier when we can open it in January. We don't have to tell them to save the date. We can just tell them to register and tell them about early bird pricing right at that point in time. Giving them extra time to register allows us to give them a discount ahead of when we really need to have that crunch time to be able to register. I love that tip. I think it's really helpful. So what are some other tips? What's some other advice that you might give to organizations that are struggling to not even just get alumni or parents engaged, but to get community members engaged? What are some tips that you've used that have worked? Tips that I've worked with that seemingly have been productive is to be able to get in front of people to have meaningful conversations. So if I need our, say, faculty to buy in to help with something, I'm going to their meeting I'm not just sending them an email. We all get emails. So getting above that noise, how do we get in front of them? The way we get in front of them is to actually stand in front of them and be sort of in their face in some regards, to be like, I need your help. But also being keen to explain the why I need your help. I don't just need a body in a room. I need you to be able to do this while you are helping us at x. And then all of a sudden now they feel valued. And when they start to feel valued, things change and shift. And the next time that I need help, it's not so hard to find some people that want to do it. I think, again, using your technology is extremely key. Meeting people where they are, even if it happens to be necessary. On Zoom, that's how I get our international parents,

is because I'm okay with them when I'm zooming at 07: 43:25

00

p.m. at night. At 07: 43:29

00 a.m. for them. And if somebody requests, can you move the meeting a half an hour? Because it just makes a difference. Then we move our meetings to 730 and doesn't affect our domestic people, and it allows extra people to join at that point in time. You know, there's a cultural shift that takes place because they're feeling heard. And when they feel heard, then maybe we get above that noise and they're actually listening to us. This is amazing. And being inclusive, listening to different perspectives, making sure everyone feels like they've been heard and that they're involved. I mean, all these are such, such really great strategies for community engagement. So, Candy, where can people learn more about you, what you do? Can they connect with you on LinkedIn? Yeah, LinkedIn is probably the easiest way to connect with me. So look me up, Candy. Frederic. We have Kent School is our school website, and you can find out about Kent from there and also connect with me that way as well. Thank you so much. This is so helpful, and there are just so many takeaways for such a wide variety of organizations. I just really want to thank you for taking time out of your busy day, but for sharing all of this wisdom with us. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. It's been an honor, and I hope that I've offered some piece of information that somebody can take away and turn it into a successful piece of their business as they move forward. We definitely have. Thanks again. Well, hey there. I wanted to say thank you for tuning into my show and for listening all the way to the end. If you really enjoyed today's conversation, make sure to subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast app, and you'll get new episodes downloaded as soon as they come out. I would love if you left me a rating or a review, because this tells other people that my podcast is worth listening to, and then me and my guests can reach even more earbuds and create even more impact. So that's pretty much it. I'll be back soon with a brand new episode, but until then, you can find me on Instagram. Uliacampbell 77 keep changing the world, you nonprofit unicorn.