Town Hall FAQs

1. What are successful fundraising best practices?

Five effective ways Clubs and SIGs have raised funds to support the goals and objectives of their organizations include charging dues; raising revenue through events; asking for donations, including targeted solicitations; corporate sponsorship; and revenue sharing. 
 

Collecting dues

Different tiers of membership

If your organization is charging dues you want to make sure that when you sent that fee you have a sense of what your administrative overhead is going to be and how you were going to fund the programs and activities of your club/SIG. Members should clearly know what dues are going for, and what benefits are – discounts, insider access, etc.
 

Generating revenue through event fees

Many of our clubs and SIGs that do not charge dues raise funds to underwrite their programs and activities by adding a small fee onto the break even costs for their events.
 

Asking for donations, including targeted solicitations

Another effective strategy that Clubs and SIGs have employed is targeted asks to underwrite specific projects or initiatives of the Club or SIG.  Instead for a general appeal for dues, these asks are to specific people that have capacity or aim to connect alumni to a particular passion they have and asking their support to fund that passion.
 

Corporate sponsorship

In order to move the mission forward and in order to attract funders you need to be thoughtful about building alliances that make sense.  Three main reasons people or organizations give is because they are connected to mission of your organization, it provides connections to a desired demographic, or you are leveraging personal connections.

One thing we want to be very clear on is that no corporate sponsor is eligible to receive any contact information of any Harvard alumnus unless he or she has specifically indicated that he or she is willing to share their personal information with the sponsor. In this case it must be an opt in scenario and not an opt out option. If you are obtaining sponsorship, either from your company or that of another, we ask that you make certain in any language to say that the event is sponsored by X company rather than the Club being sponsored by that organization, as we need to be very sensitive to the use of the Harvard name in conjunction with the Harvard Trademark Office. The specifics regarding the use of the Harvard name can be found here: http://www.trademark.harvard.edu/policy/index.php . You need to be very thoughtful about how you put the name and image of Harvard in relation to that of the sponsors.
 

Revenue sharing

Amazon Smile or other organization that gives a share of profit of purchased items to Cub/SIG
 

2. What resources are available for new presidents?

We have a lot of resources available to help support new club and SIG presidents. 

When the HAA is informed of any new president we send them a welcome email which includes a lot of valuable information including a link to our club or SIG officer’s manual, the best practices guide, the staff support and services document so you know who to call for what, the contact information for the relevant director for a regional Group of clubs or thematic group of SIGs, and a link to the officers’ lounge which is a repository of resources that all club and SIG leaders can access.

We also host a call every September for new club and SIG leaders to walk them through all of our programs and services so that they know how to best take advantage of the resources available here at the HAA. And in February, prior to the start of the ALC, we host a new leaders seminar to really help club and SIG leaders think about what they want to achieve over the course of their term and how they can be thinking about strategies regarding governing, operations, event programming, community impact, and outreach to help them meet their goals.

And this year for the first time, coming out of our newly revised annual report, we also sent to all Club and SIG presidents a list of curated strategies to help them move the dial in the areas of the indicated they wanted to focus on this year, along with that we sent a list of clubs and SIG leaders who had had a success in an area where that clever sake of had a challenge  they could reach out for help, along with an A document called ideas with impact that were generated from what people reported in their annual report. 
 

3. What can I do with the Harvard logo vis-à-vis trademark and merchandise?

By being an approved Harvard club or shared interest group, you have the right to use the Harvard name and logo for marketing purposes for your club or SIG as long as you have signed the trademark licensing agreement which you can find a copy of it in your packet and we can let you know whether or not your club or SIG has completed it. 

Many of our clubs and SIGs want to create their own stationery, have merchandise with their club or SIG logo printed on it, and that is all fine as long as the logo does not manipulate the Harvard shield in any way - for example you couldn't change the books in the shield to say TEXAS instead of Veritas. 

As long as the sale of merchandise is to your members or other alumni in the area that's fine but if you wanted to produce something for the general public you would need to have that vetted by the trademark office and we can help you do that. Harvard has granted the right to certain purveyors for certain items of clothing or calendars so we just want to make sure that there's no infringement upon that. 
 

4. As an ethnicity-based SIG can you give me the names of everyone in our ethnicity from your database?

At this time the answer is no, but we hope for that answer to be different in the next few years. Right now Harvard is starting to aggregate race and ethnicity information from different places across the University.  The challenge is that different registrars across the University did not require this reporting in application or matriculation materials and/or have not been recording it in their database. 

So what we have now is mostly what has been self-reported either in the alumni communities or in the most recent years’ application materials. The information we have from the college for last 17 years is pretty good; going back further than that it's not very good.  Now in the HAA alumni community people can identify if they so choose and so we have to be able to pull that in time.

But as you can imagine we would want to handle this all very sensitively. We really want this to be factual data that's self-reported and that's taking a long time for us to put that together and to create policies around how we can share it. We know that this information could be immensely helpful to our shared interest groups and it is something that we've been working on for about a year and a half now.  It can take a little bit longer but we hope to be able to provide this in the future. 
 

5. What are some best practices for a club and SIG interaction? Does surveying alumni on their interests increase club membership?

We think there are benefits to both organizations when clubs and SIGs collaborate. SIG can raise their visibility in communities that might not know about their existence.  Clubs can offer new programming to their members.  Clubs and SIG can both offer expanded programming to their members and there's a membership recruitment opportunity that exists for both kinds of organizations. I think it also sends a message to the Harvard community that we are one Harvard community and there are lots of ways to engage based on your personal interests and what really resonates for you.

So in terms of best practices, I would encourage clubs and SIGs to reach out to each other.  It could also be Club to Club or SIG to SIG, in addition to Club/SIG.   Think about partnering on programming, and as part of that it's important to set clear expectations for what that partnership will look like.  For example who will take on the registration, how revenue will be distributed, do both organizations get access to the list of RSVPs and the contact details for those who responded so that they can do follow up marketing.  Those are all things you need to be thinking about when you're entering into any kind of collaboration but especially as you think about partnering with other Harvard clubs and SIGs.

To answer your second question, a lot of our organizations are starting to do surveys and that really gives them a sense of what their membership is looking for so they can do then deliver on that.  I do think it creates a sense of responsiveness – it communicates to alumni that you are really interested in hearing what people want and then figuring out how to deliver on that.

Whether or not that translates into membership we don't really have those results because all of you manage your own systems but what we've seen from the Harvard Alumni Engagement survey is that it certainly increases alumni engagement and a sense of connection to the Harvard community - whether or not that translates into formal membership is it something we can't really answer.
 

6. How can SIGs best recruit members? What methods of communication have been successful?

There are a few ways HAA can help SIGs raise their visibility and recruit members. Every month in the Harvard Alumni Gazette we feature a different SIG and that's a great way for alumni to learn the existence of the SIG and some of the programs or mission that drives the SIG.

Also through partnering on welcome to your city and global networking night people can learn about the existence of the SIG and indicate that they are interested in learning more about becoming a member.

Some of our SIGs have also done data mining via linked in where they might type in Harvard and a keyword that relates to their SIG and see what comes up.  And partnering with other SIGs and with Clubs is also helpful recruitment opportunity.

In terms of best communication methods, ask members.  Do they want email, text, paper, and then segment communications.  Think about age demographics and which social media platform might work best to target different age demographics.