At the recent CASE XV conference I co-presented what was billed as an "alumni relations master class." The title was Online Communities, Social Networks, Blogs and Podcasts. [PDF 4.1MB] Oregon State's Ben Danley and Fresno State's Peter Robertson joined me. There was little time to delve in much depth into the various topics we wanted to cover. But attendees participated fully, the discussions were wide-ranging, and we even ended on time.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the Alumni Relations Track. Before the session, we looked at the registration list for the session, and noticed that of the 44 people who pre-registered, only 15 were alumni relations professionals. The rest were primarily from Marketing-Communications and from Development, plus about eight individuals whose titles were less easily classifiable.*
The overall breakdown is shown in the pie chart. [Click the image to enlarge it.]
That 2/3 of the attendees (who all paid an extra fee above conference registration to attend) were from outside of the intended field says something about the effectiveness of labeling sessions by track. This practice made sense back when we worked in relative isolation from each other. Alumni staff claimed to be "friendraisers, not fundraisers," fundraisers thought that the alumni staff "filled fruitcups," and the PR staff did all the writing, editing, design, and production of written materials other than typed invitations.
But now there is a lot of crossover, as shown by the interest from all areas in our session. This is a by-product, in part, of the drive toward "integrated marketing and communication" which most alumni and development staff assume (wrongly) is something that only "the PR people" need to worry about. [Rob Westervelt gave a good summary of integrated marketing on his UBrander blog in 2006.]
In a prior posting, I expressed hope that CASE would organize its Commissions in a more cross-disciplinary way, to reflect their overlapping interests and needs. CASE has indeed adapted the format of the meetings and the ways agendas are handled, to be more interdisciplinary. Now it's time for conference planners, whether on the CASE staff or on volunteer committees (or at non-CASE conferences, for that matter) to worry less about which "track" a topic can be squeezed into. This will free up planners to focus more on the content, and finding the right people to present it. I liked the fact that our session was divided up among presenters with very different professional roles.
The bottom line is that conference organizers do not need to channel attendees into neatly labeled silos called "tracks." Describe content accurately, and outline the level of expertise required to get the most from the session. Then let the attendees make up their own minds about how best to adapt the information to their needs.
* The eight attendees not solely in one of the three traditional disciplines are represented in the green pie slice in the chart above. They included a research strategist, two managers of student recruitment, two external relations executives, a web developer, a database manager, and an assistant head of school.
