Louanne Welcome to “Covering the Spread, Magazine Design for the Next Age,” a monthly discussion of all things related to our favorite medium, magazines.

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Scott Whether you're a seasoned designer, an aspiring creative, an editor or publisher, or just someone who appreciates the art of storytelling through visuals, this is the place for you.

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Louanne  I’m your host, Louanne Welgoss from LTD Creative, a graphic design firm located in Frederick, Maryland, and I've been working on publications for thirty-two years. You can see our work at LTDCreative.com.

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Scott  And I'm Scott Oldham from Quarto Creative, who's been making magazines for twenty-five years. You can see my work at QuartoCreative.com. And on this podcast, we'll chat with industry experts, designers, editors, and production pros to uncover the secrets of all things magazine.

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Louanne  It's time to turn the page and what you thought you knew and reimagine the future of publishing.

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Scott Welcome to Covering the Spread. Today we’re joined with our special guest, Erin Peterson of Capstone Communications. Erin, could you please introduce yourself for our listeners?

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Erin Well, Scott, first of all, thanks for having me. My name is Erin Peterson. I own Capstone Communications and we do consulting. We offer courses and we do strategic writing for print alumni magazines.

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Scott So, let’s talk a little bit about print alumni magazines and what seems to be a growing but very, very specific niche. Can you talk to us a little bit about how you got involved in that and what the nature of the business is today?

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Erin I started in print magazines while I was still a student in college. I worked at my alma mater’s alumni magazine at Grinnell College. After that, I worked at a couple different alumni magazines. I just really loved the way they highlighted education and the way that they told really positive stories about the schools. So I worked for alumni magazines at Carleton and Macalester, and eventually, I went out on my own, because I saw that a lot of the alumni magazines that I was seeing were experiencing a lot of the same kinds of problems and did very similar kinds of storytelling. I loved the work that they were doing, and I thought, “Well, maybe I could do this for a lot of different institutions,” and I’ve been doing that for more than twenty years.

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Scott So what’s the process? What is it that you’re doing when you come in for a consultation with an alumni magazine?

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Erin Right. So, I do a lot of different work for alumni magazines. The main consulting thing that I do is called a Magazine Action Plan. The way that started is that when you work in higher ed on a magazine, they tend to have really small communications teams and really small magazine teams. And often, the magazine is one of many different communications projects that folks are doing. I come in with really deep magazine experience and a love for different magazines. Folks are often coming in because they’re like, “Our magazine isn’t quite working the way that we want it to. We feel like we’re spending a lot of money on this. How can we make it more impactful?” There’s a million ways to think about how to improve an alumni magazine. But my team and I are laser focused on: What are the areas that their in-house team — not working with outside folks — can go in, the changes they can make themselves, and that can have the biggest possible impact on… whether it’s like readership or philanthropy or engagement… things like that. So, that’s the way that I think about that action.

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Louanne I think it’s important for our listeners to know that these are not design changes. You are an editorial advisor, so to speak. And so all of these recommendations that you’re making are more content and big-picture based.

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Erin That’s the specific expertise that I come in with. When we do the action plans, we always work with a designer who can recommend granular changes, whether it’s creating a better grid or improving the photography or changing the way that things are laid out. But the way that we kind of see it is: All of these things really need to work together. A magazine is really one of those places where you have to have design and writing and photography and illustration all working together. And that’s how you create something that’s as effective as it can possibly be.

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Louanne So, one of the things that we’ve been talking about in all of our podcasts is about how, when designers work on redesigns, it oftentimes focuses on just the design, but there’s so much more to it. And designers will often take on that role that you are taking on. And so, you’re really completing the big picture for us and talking specifically about that component, which is essential in any magazine, not just higher ed magazines. This is essential in association or trade, or business, or consumer — you name it. And so this is really exciting because we’re diving into something more than just design.

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Erin Yeah. And one of the things I would say is a lot of the magazines that I’m working with — that our team is working with — one of the challenges that they often face is that they’re not putting design quite where it needs to be in a hierarchy. I think a lot of the times, editors come in — they often have that writing background — and they don’t know what to do with designers. They’re just like, “Do what you want,” but then the whole thing doesn’t feel quite as cohesive. And when I think about what process looks like for a lot of magazines, it often starts with the editor and then goes through this very linear process: to the writing, to the designer. But really, it just needs to be more collaborative, I think. And that’s one of the things that we’re often encouraging our clients to think about and integrate into their own work: to collaborate more closely with designers from the outset to make sure that you’re doing stories that are beautifully written and beautifully packaged and beautifully designed.

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Scott How do you tailor your best results for people who may either not have the time or the chops to really handle more advanced content ideas?

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Erin When we get all of the intake materials, we try to tailor our recommendations to the level that folks are at. You can try to offer like the best possible recommendations to help a publication look like The Atlantic or New York Magazine. But if they have an in-house team of two people and they’re both working on seven other projects, it’s never going to happen. So, we try to be really thoughtful about how to provide recommendations that can make a difference to them, but also that they can do over the course — issue after issue, year after year. It’s not something where you implement it once and then see it fall apart in issue two, three, four, etc.

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Louanne So, every time you are approached by a new or a potential client, it’s not a … pick from a canned-… We can offer a B or C. It’s very uniquely tailored to each particular magazine so that it best works for them.

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Erin It’s funny that you mentioned the templates. One of the things that we do sometimes recommend for folks who are overwhelmed — every single publication feels like they’re starting from scratch and reinventing the wheel — for these smaller teams. Yes, sometimes you are actually literally recommending templates for their publication. There’s no point in trying to build some super robust structure that you can’t carry through for years. You want this to be something that they can feel excited about and enthusiastic about, and that they can make changes over time. Maybe we can implement one thing in this issue. Maybe we can add another thing in the next issue. So, trying to think of it more as an evolution of a publication rather than like a revolution.

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Scott What do you find are the common elements in alumni publications? You’ve worked with a lot of different schools. What are the things that they all seem to have in common, either in terms of their content areas or the challenges in reaching their audiences?

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Erin There are a few different things. One of the things you’ll find in almost every alumni magazine is class notes. It’s this huge bear of an issue because there’s tons of copy and people read it with a fine toothed comb. They’ll get so mad if a single word is out of place, if a single name is misspelled. And so they want to move that online; they don’t want it in their publication. But the fact is: It’s the number one thing that people read. So instead of figuring out how to get rid of it, we try to encourage people to think about how they can make it more inviting, more interesting for them, and better for all alumni, no matter what their class year is, to read through pretty much the whole thing. Another thing that we find with alumni magazine content is it’s often not as structured as we would like to see. They have a random assortment of stories in every issue, and we might encourage them to create, for example, content buckets. Maybe in every issue you have a feature about alumni. In every issue you have a feature about campus. In every issue you have a feature about higher education. And so that can help direct some of the kinds of storytelling ideas, help them think in a more structured way to get a magazine that feels like it is a cohesive piece of work.

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Scott I wonder if we could unpack the class notes a little bit here, because I’ve worked at alumni publications, too, and I sympathize. We’ve had the exact same conversation that you just described where we hate the class notes, because, first of all, it’s all supplied. You are absolutely at the mercy of your readership. And then it varies so much from issue to issue. You might get one hundred listings in one issue and then barely ten for a subsequent issue. So let’s talk about some of the ideas for anyone listening who may be facing a challenge like that. What can they do to help make this less painful for themselves?

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Erin The reality is: Class notes are always going to be challenging, but you can do a lot of different things to make them feel more inviting. Some of the things that we recommend to clients are, first of all, having some sort of prompt in an issue to ask questions — not just about a promotion or a new baby or a wedding, but to say, “Tell us about your favorite professor. Tell us about your favorite class,” to just get these short little snippets of fifty words that you can integrate into those class notes to fill in extra chunks of space that you might have. Or you could do something like, “Hey, we’re going to pull something from the archives. We’re going to pull this bowling ball from 1972, from our national championship bowling team, and we’re going to tell a little story about that, and we’re just going to give 75 words on that along with this cool picture.” Or they might say, “Let’s go into the archives and pull up a mystery photo or something where we don’t really know where it’s come from, get some identifying details, and then ask alumni, ‘Hey, do you know the people in this photo? Can you identify this event?’” and make it a more collaborative sort of section to get people engaged, even if they don’t have news to report, even if they don’t see their friends in that section.

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Scott I think a lot of people would assume that the performance metrics for alumni magazine is going to be contributions or fundraising. Is that true? And if not, what is the actual measure of a successful alumni magazine?

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Erin Right. So, it is very common to assume that an alumni magazine should just be the stealth direct mail appeal. And there should be a blow-in envelope, and they should be able to count the dollars that they get in those envelopes or through a QR code, or something. I don’t think that is typically the best metric for an alumni magazine, in the same way that I don’t think that the best metric for the success of a development officer is whether or not they’re helping the admissions numbers for an institution. So, the way that I think about alumni magazines for most institutions is: Does it build a meaningful connection with its readers over time? Alumni are going to be with their institution until they die. They are going to have that connection forever. A print magazine can do amazing work in having this light touch with the alums, a couple times a year, in ways that look different from social media, in ways that look different from email, in ways that look different from events. Are you connecting with them, engaging with them? Are they seeing themselves in that magazine?

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Scott How is that measured? Through response or surveys?

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Erin I think that’s a great question. There are a lot of different ways to think about that. I’ll just give a few examples. But it really depends on the institution. The first one is to do surveys. In my field, the big one is called the CASE Magazine Readership Survey. Hundreds of magazines have used this and you can benchmark against it with your own institution. You can also do very light touch surveys. After every issue, you can just send out a few hundred or a couple thousand surveys to alums and see how they are responding to it. You can do little things like, “We’re going to put a little hidden mascot somewhere in the pages of our magazine. If you see it, send a note to us and we’ll send ten people a bumper sticker.” So, you can just get a sense of who’s reading the publication. Maybe you can put something on the back page, like a one sentence or a one question quiz and say, “Send us a note with the answer to this quiz and we’ll send you some phone wallpaper or something.” So, that’s just another way to see if people are really engaging with your magazine.

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Scott That’s a great idea and it’s so low cost and anybody can do this, too.

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Louanne It doesn’t have to be an alumni magazine. Yeah, absolutely. When I get my alumni magazine, you’re going to make me want to actually read the whole thing, because now I’m curious.

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Erin Now, hopefully it won’t be a burden. Hopefully you’ll be really excited. But yeah, some people do this for the first time and they’ll get hundreds of responses, depending on what kind of thing they’re doing. Sometimes they’ll do little coloring pages. And then then you get parents with kids who are drawing in the magazine with their kid and saying, “Okay, we’ll submit this for the contest.” So, lots of different ways to think about that.

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Scott We talk a lot on this podcast about the overall health of print publishing, which seems to go up and down. How do you characterize the health of the alumni magazine industry?

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Erin It’s a weird moment for higher education right now. I’ll just say that up front. I will also say that it’s been challenging since the pandemic. A lot of alumni magazines went digital-only during the pandemic, because of paper shortages, because of the uncertainty. But what many of them found — and I’ve shared case studies on this on my website — is that alumni really hated it, when they went online. I would say, overall, that print frequency has diminished. It used to be that most publications were quarterly. Now, they might be three times a year, they might be two times a year. But they have found that people still want print. If you look at any sort of metrics, when they have the choice of getting it print, or print and online, or online only, something like less than 15% typically want online only publications. They want the object in their hands. They want to put it on their coffee table. This is a premium thing that they’re getting in their life. And if you can make it beautiful, they want it. They want to show off that they went to whatever institution it is. And they want something that feels divorced from the chaos of anything that they’re seeing online.

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Louanne Boy, I wish we could make that our headline. Scream it for everybody to hear: “We want print. We want print.”

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Erin I don’t want to share specific names, but institutions will make it go away. They’ll say, “Hey, we’re going to do a more sustainable option. We’re going to do something that has more robust storytelling — creative options.” But people still really love print.

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Louanne Yeah. We’re finding that that goes along with all the industries, but nobody’s really listening to us. It just becomes a number to a lot of people. They look at the cost, and they look at their budget, and they see that cost item and they just go whoop! And they eliminate it and tell everybody to find a better way to interact with their readers. And I really think it diminishes the product. It’s a shame, really.

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Erin I think that’s a really important point. So, the print and mailing is a super easy line item to cut, but I often encourage folks to look at different ways to think about it. Sometimes, that means adjusting their mailing list. Maybe they’re not sending to quite as many people. Maybe they have a slightly shorter magazine or diminish the frequency somewhat. Or they can think about: What are the different ways that they can expand their print publications to have a bigger impact or to make it more valuable? That means printing more so they can bring it to donor events, or so they can send it once a year to prospective students. So, there are a lot of different ways of thinking about not just cutting the costs, but to increasing the value of the print publication in meaningful ways.

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Disclaimer The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any organization, employer or company they may be affiliated with. Covering the Spread is intended for informational and educational purposes only. While we explore topics such as design trends, industry practices, and future predictions, the content shared should not be interpreted as professional advice or a definitive guide. Listeners are encouraged to conduct their own research and consult relevant professionals before making decisions related to magazine design, publishing or business strategy. We may reference or discuss third party content technologies or companies. These mentions are for context and commentary purposes and do not imply endorsement or affiliation unless explicitly stated. Additionally, given the ever-evolving nature of media and technology, some discussions may become outdated. We strive for accuracy, but we make no representations or warranties about the completeness or reliability of any information shared. Thanks for tuning in and enjoy the spread.

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Scott This is a weird, weird question, but have you ever encountered an alumni magazine that’s sold advertising?

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Erin Yes. So, it’s usually in very restricted ways. I think a lot of the Ivies have banded together and do sell advertising that way. And then sometimes folks sell advertising almost as a donor tool or a relationship-building tool where they have connections to the local area and maybe they’re selling ads to the real estate person, or something like that. It’s almost always quite, quite limited. And then there are a lot of restrictions in terms of how much advertising you can have to maintain certain mailing rates. I found that it’s almost never really worth it, but there are other specific reasons besides money that people decide to do this.

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Scott It’s funny, Louanne — we just did an episode on regional magazines and it’s very much like an alumni magazine because it’s speaking to a campus or community that may be a diaspora, scattered all over the country or even the world. But nevertheless, there are local entities that have a vested interest in the health and well-being of that institution.

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Erin One of the reasons that a lot of folks hire me is I’ve written a newsletter for more than a decade now that is specifically focused on alumni magazines, where I’m sharing very specific examples: spreads, and things like that, so people can really see what their peers are doing. Then, they can see what might be possible for them — how they can take specific examples that they see in other institutions and adapt it for their own work. Hopefully, I’m showing them what’s possible. In all of the action plans I provide, I have lots and lots of different examples. So, they can just find the one thing that resonates with them and then they can pursue.

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Louanne It’s like Pinterest for higher ed.

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Erin It totally is. It totally is.

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Scott I’m wondering if it’s easier or harder to work with smaller institutions, because on the one hand, they don’t have the myriad layers of bureaucracy that can prevent change from being implemented. But on the other hand, they have fewer resources than the big universities. Has that been your experience?

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Erin I would say that it really depends on the institution. Sometimes, folks are very aligned. Some of the biggest challenges come from very specialized colleges. College of Law. College of engineering, where they have very specific constraints on the kinds of storytelling that they can do. I would say that there’s not a clear line between what’s the most challenging and what’s the easiest. My own background is small liberal arts college, so I feel a strong affinity for those places, and I feel like I understand them a little better, but it really varies.

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Scott Well, I’m going to put you on the spot. Without naming names, can you think of the biggest publication overhaul you were ever part of for an alumni magazine and what it involved?

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Erin When I started out in alumni magazines, one of my very first jobs was at Carleton College, and I entered just as they were doing an entire redesign. And one of the things I really loved about that is that I was getting to see this for the first time, and what excellence could really look like. They spent a lot more money on photography. We used a lot of different packaging elements, from a more traditional narrative storytelling to Q&A’s and infographics and things like that. And so I was inside that transformation, and it was incredible because we went from being a so-so amazing to winning the Sibley Award, which was the highest honor that alumni magazines can earn. It really taught me a lot about the ambitions that you can have for an institutional magazine and what you can do if you are really committed to making it the very best.

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Scott Do alumni magazines come to you with very specific requests along those lines? “We want our magazine to look like Oprah or Real Simple,” or something?

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Erin The kinds of requests that I might get are, “We want our alumni magazine to win awards.” People know that they’re going to have to implement any design changes or editorial changes. Oftentimes, when they’re coming to me, they just feel like we are stuck in a rut. “I have worked on this magazine for years. I’m telling the same stories over and over and over. I don’t have any more ideas. So can you help us rethink what we’re doing in ways that ensure that we’re not bored doing our storytelling, that our readers are not bored with the storytelling that we’re producing, and that our magazine doesn’t feel like they’re just getting the same thing over and over?”

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Scott That is a really important point, and I think it applies to all magazine redesigns, to the extent that you don’t have to junk your entire platform, even if it’s old or it’s not working. There are ways to change the brand promise or the point of an individual department to make it easier to fulfill — to change the audience’s expectations about it — so that it is something new and different, even if it is the same content that you’ve been working with for years and years and years.

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Erin Yeah, I think that can be a little bit easier for the readers to swallow, too. I often give examples in the consumer magazine world of The Economist, The New Yorker magazine. These are publications that have been around for many, many years. They are always evolving, but they’re doing something a little bit different in issue after issue, and it still feels fresh every time you read it. And I will say that alumni, as a whole, are very conservative when it comes to their institution and what they want from their magazine. They can have any sort of political interests, but like what they want from their institution is for it never to change at all. Alumni get uncomfortable when things are dramatically changed with their magazine.

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Louanne So, I’m going to introduce a word that we’ve all heard called A.I. People reach out to you to help come up with some new ideas and the first thing that popped into my head was, “But doesn’t A.I. do that?” How do you address that? And do you feel like A.I. is cutting into your real estate? I think it’s happening to everybody. We just can’t deny that it’s out there. It’s cutting into our jobs. But do you feel like they could ask A.I. these questions and AI could ultimately get this information for them?

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Erin The short answer is no, and I’ll say a few different things. One of the things that people really want is examples. They just want to see stuff. They want to see concrete examples. So, in my own work, I keep a database that has more than a thousand different examples of things that alumni magazines have done or consumer magazines have done, where I can just be like, “Here’s a link to this. This is what they’re doing. You can adapt it in this way.” I don’t think that A.I. can. Maybe A.I. can pull that. I have no idea.

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Louanne Somebody might argue with us and tell us that A.I. can. I’m not convinced.

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Erin The other thing I’ll say is not everything is public. One of the things that folks also come to me for is: They know that I’m seeing things, and I’m hearing from editors who are telling me things that they don’t want to share publicly. They’re happy to talk in smaller groups about some of these challenges that they’re facing. And I can just say, “Look, this isn’t working for a lot of folks. You shouldn’t do this. You don’t need to figure out on your own that this isn’t working.” So, I do have information that a lot of folks would like access to that they’re never going to find publicly.

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Louanne I love this answer. Thank you. We all need to hear more of why we are so valuable and what we do well

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Scott That being said, have you found a way to integrate A.I. into your processes? Is it a work-saving tool at all for anything you do?

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Erin Not that much on consulting. Sometimes it can help me find things that I’ve written about in the past, and that can direct people to them. One of the biggest challenges that I have in the writing that I do is headlines. I wish more people had spent time on their headlines, because I think cool headlines are something that designers can do really creative, beautiful work with. I’ve often tried to use A.I. to get better headlines, and it really does kind of a so-so job. There are other like smaller areas with writing that I find it useful: when I’m just looking for a word. I surveyed my audience, which is about sixteen hundred people on my newsletter list. And I said, “Hey, what do you want to learn more about? What do you want to hear on my in my newsletter?” And one of the things was how to integrate A.I. into the magazine work that I’m doing, among about a dozen different examples. It was, by far, the lowest thing that people were interested in. I thought it would be like one of the top three things. Absolutely no one cared.

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Louanne Interesting.

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Erin I can’t explain it. I don’t know.

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Louanne I’m not going to disagree. I don’t like it, but that’s my two cents.

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Erin I think magazines, at least for now, are falling into a slightly different category that feels there’s something very human about these objects, and there’s this sense of care that is implicit in just the creation of a product like this that takes so long. I do think people assume that we want more humanity in the magazine than maybe the things we see online.

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Louanne If I were an alumni magazine and I were to give you a call, how much work do we do, collaborating and talking, before I hear any of your ideas?

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Erin My guess is that the process that we use is not substantially different from that of any other consulting process where we’re collecting a lot of information and back issues and the publication brand guidelines and reader surveys and institutional priorities and things like that. I would say that the full action plan that we do with clients typically takes six to eight weeks total — a couple of weeks to get all the information together and to have the calls, a few weeks for us to put together recommendations. Then we do an implementation call where we walk through what we’ve found and they ask questions. So, it’s a very similar process to everything else.

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Louanne Yeah. Our role is our role is very different, I think. I mean, not very different. But I mean, we’re hired to make the design, the overall magazine look different. But in the process of doing that, we take on your role too, and dig deeper, because I don’t think any magazine can be redesigned without looking into what are the elements of a redesign to begin with. And if somebody wants to do that, fine. We can do that. But it’s really important to really figure out: Why are you redesigning? Because you’re just tired of looking at it or redo the visuals?

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Scott If you’re just redoing the typography and the color palette, you’re wasting your money in a redesign. It really is a golden opportunity to look at why you’re doing what you’re doing and reexamine it and reposition it.

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Louanne So, every good designer will be able to maybe to do what you do, but maybe, perhaps not quite at your level. Since you are an expert in it, I would hope that we can all learn something from what you do. And even if that means designers should be subscribing to your newsletter, because it’s just good information to have, everything that you do falls back on us somehow.

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Erin It’s my dream to have designers subscribing to my newsletter. I love talking with designers the way that they think about the world visually, and their work visually is very different than the way that I’m tackling things. And so I find it very helpful to hear from designers to understand what’s possible and what’s not possible, if designers are looking at the things that I’m sharing — spreads and stories and things like that.

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Scott Well, another thing about alumni magazines that makes them different is that everybody who’s listening right now is waiting to hear whether their school gets mentioned in this. I don’t know why people have this. No matter how you feel about your alma mater, whether it was good, bad or indifferent — your experience there — everyone wants to hear their school name somehow. So Erin, who are the schools that are doing it right, whether they were your clients or not? The best alumni in magazines out there right now that you know of?

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Louanne Say my school, say my school!

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Erin There’s so many great publications and I will say some names, but what I will say is, honestly, the most important thing is: Does it connect with you, the alum of the college? You can have a beautiful magazine. You can have beautiful storytelling. But if you don’t feel connected to it, it doesn’t matter. So all of this to say, here are some beautiful alumni magazines that I love, but there are so many. The ones that get routinely called out because they are doing such incredible, ambitious work are: HBS — Harvard Business School has a beautiful magazine. Nebraska Quarterly. They have an incredible magazine. Carleton Voice — still, many years after I left it, they have a beautiful magazine. Tippie, the School of Business at Iowa, and Iowa magazine. They have a whole suite of magazines that are incredible. University of Maryland School of Engineering — for a very specific audience. They do incredible work. Those are just a few of the magazines I love. I’m happy to keep going on; I could go for hours, but those are just a few that I love.

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Scott Do you find there’s any correlation between the schools that have really good alumni magazines and schools that have really good journalism programs? Because Iowa stuck out to me when you mentioned it.

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Erin I don’t necessarily think so, but you’re right. Iowa has an incredible magazine. I’m not sure that they pull from the writers school there, but they do punch above their weight consistently. I will say that.

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Louanne Well, you didn’t say my school. Did she say-

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Erin What’s your school? We can pull this off. What is your school?

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Louanne It’s fine, it’s fine.

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Erin I gotta know what your school is.

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Louanne Ohio University.

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Erin Oh, that’s right. I don’t think I get their alumni magazine, so I don’t know, I would have to take a look.

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Louanne Content-wise, it’s got some pretty interesting stories, so I’ll send it to you.

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Erin Okay.

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Louanne Scott, where did you go to school?

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Scott Well, my undergraduate magazine, about ten or twelve years ago, underwent a huge redesign. It had been called RISD Views for as long as I can remember. And then, all of a sudden, they changed. They went through a real top-to-bottom overhaul. They tore it right down to the studs and they renamed it RISD XYZ. And for about — I don’t know — six or seven years, it was top of the line. It was some of the most beautiful design in a publication, alumni or otherwise, that I was receiving at the time.

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Louanne I’m going to say that the first thing that I do when I get it is go to the class notes. Our class notes are divided up by year and there’s usually about two or three within my year. But also, there’s a professor section and also a death section. So, yeah, weirdly enough, the first thing I look at is the deaths. And then I go to my own alumni and see who’s doing what and in what field.

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Scott As we get older, we all look for the obituaries.

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Louanne Well, yeah. Sad. Luckily, I haven’t known anybody yet, but one of the things I have seen them do more recently is include photos of babies born from a husband and wife who both graduated.

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Erin Yeah, the chips off the old block. I love it.

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Scott Those are legacy applicants someday.

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Erin Right. Yeah. Class of 2040 or whatever it is at this point. 2040. I don’t even want to think about it. But I think you’re making a really good point, because: Would you ever think to go online to look at your class notes or obituaries? You never would.

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Louanne I never go to the website, period, unless I’m trying to order a shirt or check the football score or whatever. So yeah, there you go. I mean, why would you go to your alumni website unless you’re looking for something specific?

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Erin The research shows that emails and print alumni magazines are tied for the channels that alumni want to hear from their institution. So, if you if you want people to pay attention to what’s happening at your school, you have to send them print. And even if they even if they’re like, “I don’t care that much,” you still get that fifteen seconds when they’re walking to their recycling bin. You’ve got the front cover, you’ve got the back cover. Make those two things beautiful and maybe you can grab them for one more story.

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Louanne So, I’m going to say the exact same thing for associations. If you want people to know what’s going on in your association and your industry, besides in your own little bubble, a printed magazine would make all the difference.

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Erin Please, sell it! Yes!

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Louanne You heard it here. I said it.

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Erin I love it.

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Louanne Okay, so I think we’re going to wrap up. This has been an awesome conversation, and I hope that we can get a really big audience to listen to this, because this is such important information for every single magazine out there. I don’t care what kind you are. This is good information. And, Erin, would you tell us where we can find you and how to subscribe to your newsletter?

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Erin You can go to my website. It’s getcapstone.com. You can subscribe to my newsletter there. I’m at erin@getcapstone.com. If you are in alumni magazines or you just want some more stuff, I have a little “57 Rules for Alumni Magazines.” It’s got design stuff. It’s got editorial stuff. It’s got research on magazines more generally, if that’s interesting to you.

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Louanne Thank you so much, Erin. We really do appreciate your time.

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Erin Thank you. It was a delight and hopefully people get a lot out of this. Thank you so much. I really appreciate doing this with you guys.