Today is Alumni Futures' 5th birthday. Although I haven't been writing as often recently, I certainly plan to continue blogging, and I'm using this anniversary as an opportunity to shift gears.
In my first year of blogging (2007), I published about twice a week. Since then, I've maintained a weekly schedule, with more than 300 articles and upwards of 750 comments on the site to date. Here and across the internet, Alumni Futures reaches 2,160 subscribers, in addition to 1,625 Twitter followers and 488 "likes" on the Alumni Futures Facebook page.
I've tried to address "big" topics, issues, and trends, and to do so in depth. I have also tried to expand readers' ideas about what matters to advancement professionals, and how to evolve with changing influences.
Entering my sixth year of blogging, I plan to shift to shorter, more casual posts, some with a more personal tone. This might cost me a few readers, but as part of the site's evolution my choice is between loosening things up or hardly writing at all!
[I'm using this anniversary as an opportunity to shift gears]
My goal will be to touch on a slightly wider variety of topics in education, and to expand our idea of what is relevant to advancement.
Thank you to all the subscribers, readers, fans, commenters, followers, guest authors, clients, conference attendees, workshop members, and critics who have contributed to Alumni Futures during the last five years. I am truly grateful.
Some additional facts and stats
Since I started tracking visits to the website in January, 2008, more than 88,300 unique visitors have stopped by, for almost a quarter of a million page views. The top countries sending people here are (in order) the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, India, Germany, Singapore, France and the Netherlands. And most astonishing to me is the number of countries represented by visitors to the site: about 175 (depending on how you count them, there are about 196 countries in the world). I think I'm blocked in North Korea...and I'm still waiting for the first visit from Bolivia.
Thank you all....!
Photo of confetti by Andy Shaindlin
