 Today we have Mr. Mike Whirly joining us. Mike is the VP for University Advancement and the ED Executive Director of the Lander Foundation. And he is going to share with us all about engaging alumni as advocates. So Mike, I'm excited to learn more from you. But before we dive into this conversation, we of course want to thank our presenting sponsors. These organizations have been with us many since March of last year. They continue to lean in and support you to help you do more good in your community. So please do go online, find them, see how they might be able to help you. Again, just continue your great work in your communities. And of course, thanks to Julia Patrick for creating this wonderful opportunity and allowing me to serve alongside you for these shows. It's been a lot of fun as we continue to navigate this roller coaster of life. So back to our guest. Again, we have Mike Whirly. Mike, welcome and thank you for joining us. Great to be here today. And thank you all for having me. And as we talked about in the earlier session, glad to have my second appearance. Yes. Well, and I want everyone to know that I am also donning one of my favorite t-shirts which is a Lander University t-shirt. I don't know how much of that you can see. So I put that on under my very professional blazer because I am a proud alum of Lander University and Mike has come on the show previously and he's on again. And today I'm just really excited to hear and learn more from you, Mike, because you are sharing with us really, how might we engage our alumni as advocates? And you have done such a phenomenal job. I was just sharing, I have luggage tags, thanks to you that are now on my few cases. Yes, I have this beautiful journal because I'm gonna ask you to say it, but you are celebrating soon coming up your sesquantennial. Sesquantennial. Sesquantennial, one of the hardest words to say and spell. Yes, and so my closet has become much more filled with Lander, I don't know, as has my sons, which I love, love, love because that to me, not only like continues the pride to my child, but it also ignites the possibility of university for him. And I think that's really cool. That is very cool. And we'll have to talk about it another time, but we actually have a fairly good pipeline to Phoenix, Arizona, to Greenwood, South Carolina. That's right, yes, that's right. So we've able to blend kind of these communities and so you've done a fabulous job. So I'm excited for all of us to learn more from you. Go ahead. Let's have you start by telling us where Lander is. I mean, to have any organization in this nation from the 1800s is remarkable. Sure. So if you can give us just a really quick introduction before we really get into the meat and potatoes, that might help some perspective for some of our. And for the trivia buffs that are on today, Lander University is the only university that was run by the county for a period of time. So Greenwood County actually ran the university for a stint. So to our knowledge, it's the only university in the country that was run by a county. But that being said, we were formed as a private institution originally in Williamston, South Carolina. And then in 1904, well, in 1872. And in 1904, we moved to Greenwood and that's been our home ever since. And we were founded by the Reverend Samuel Lander. But we went public in 1972. So I think 73 was our first public class. So we have a lot of things to celebrate because if you're doing your math, that's 50 years ago as well, in addition to our sesquicentennial. And we also became a university from a college exactly 30 years ago. So we have about 3,500 students. We're growing, we've opened up a center in Greenville, South Carolina, about 45 miles up the road. And we have about 19,000 alumni, most of which are in South Carolina, but they're all over the world. So I know I just looked up London the other day and we have 35 in London. Wow, wow. And I remember meeting an alum that attended Lander when it was an all girls college. And that was super cool. Like the stories that she had and could share was really fascinating. And she actually lives in our community, Julia. So there is a lot of tie back to Arizona, which we're a national show, but really having these ties and to see how alumni for any organization really does span the globe and how we might be able to engage with them to continue their advocacy for their college or their program, because I think it's very transferable. Sure. So I've got to ask, let's start by, how long have you been doing this work for Lander? I am just about ready to celebrate my third anniversary coming up this fall. So very new. And I'm assuming you created a whole new process. You didn't just inherit. Sure. I'll start off by saying one quick thing. You know, I'm a long time viewer of the show and a lot of the guests that you have on are from the nonprofit sector and hospitals and museums, et cetera. So we have this blessing in academia and higher ed that all of our alumni are constituents for life. So that's the good news. And the bad news is all of our alumni are constituents for life. So, but we do have this, I'm teasing, but we do have this building base that makes it much nicer to start or to engage and continue with the fundraising and engagement efforts. So, and Lander is a good example of that because the foundation is actually very young and in terms of our colleagues and peers across the United States. So it's a little less than 50 years old. And I would say even just in terms of processes, it's much less than that. So we were able to start from scratch in terms of our foundation boards and some of the other boards that we're starting to start in the college units to engage our alumni. And, you know, I think as probably most people know that watching the show, volunteerism is critical for fundraising. I remember, I just read not too long ago from Fidelity that 84% of their DAFs, their donor advice funds, those folks volunteer. That number caught me by surprise because when you think about, I don't know what the threshold to get into Fidelity for a donor advice fund, but, you know, I'm guessing it's probably 50,000. And that's a little counterintuitive to what I would think in terms of volunteer volunteering, but they said 84%. So, you know, in terms of engagement, it's critical. It's critical to engage, in my case, alumni in the life of the university. And we have a lot of terrific friends as well who are giving at significant levels. But if I look across the board at all the universities and that I've worked at, not that many, but the universities that I've worked at and the hospital that I worked at, you know, anecdotally, I go right back to, our biggest volunteers were engaged at some level, or sorry, our biggest donors were engaged at some level in the life of the institution, whether that was on the foundation board, whether it was one of the friends committees or at the hospital, one of the auxiliary committees. You know, it's very seldom that you have a large donor who's just a donor. Right. But let me ask you this, are these, when you say that engagement, were they, do you have any measurements that show what their engagement was while they were a student? Like were they in student council? Did they, you know- That's what I'm stating. I don't have exact numbers with me, but I think anybody in academia and higher ed will tell you that their best donors were students that were involved in student organizations as a student. You know, just, you know, across the board, whether it was Greek live, whether it was student government and other organizations, student athletes to a degree, but certainly the largest donors are that way. It's very seldom that you have some kid who later becomes an alumnus who decides to write a $100,000 check that wasn't involved in anything. Right. Well, and for me, again, as an alum of the university, Landry University, I myself, Julia, like I was a resident assistant. So I worked on campus. I also was the girls or women's club, like, gosh, I don't know. Person, you know, like at that time, we didn't have a collegiate soccer team. They actually started it my senior year. So I was in charge of the club because if I wanted to do it, or if I wanted it to be done, like I had to do it, right? So that, those are fascinating statistics. And I know like, I've always kind of followed Landry, but I've never really, you know, guilty. And this is what I said to Mike. I hadn't donated to Landry. You know, one, it was my career trajectory. Did I have the capacity to give? And then once I hit that capacity, and Mike really worked with me to engage me, you know, back to here's what Landry's doing. And for me as a MassCom, you know, degree major, it was like, let me tell you a little bit about the MassCom studies and where they're moving. And now, I mean, I really have to say, because I was talking to my dad the other day and I shared with you, Julia, finally my Mass Communication and Journalism degree is really taking off, you know, as the co-host of this national broadcast, but I have used that throughout my career in many other ways when it came to, you know, website development or public relations and communications at large. So all of this ties back to this very small, you know, public school and university are in South Carolina. So it's been fascinating. It is. And one of the things, I mean, what you just said is what I'm really interested in, Jared, because you're like, you're in an environment where you're not driving down the street, passing, you know, school waving. Right, I'm 2,000 miles away. So Mike, how do you build relationships when you don't have that physicality where, you know, your community sees or the alum see things going on? I take it you're having to travel. We did. We did. We did. And again, as mentioned earlier, Phoenix is a little bit of a pipeline for us. So we have a large alumni base there comparatively for other Western or even Midwestern cities. So it did take us there a fair amount. So I did meet Jared. Actually, my first trip, our visit got canceled, but, you know, met her on the second and third trips to Arizona to engage her. And then subsequently she came back. I mean, it's textbook fundraising, right, Jared? And then she came back to Greenwood and we had her for a day on campus. And so, you know, just in terms of individual fundraising. Now, what I would say too, and I can't remember, probably shouldn't quote a statistic, I can't remember the source, but I know that, you know, and most people know volunteers have a much better batting average at opening doors for gift officers. So, you know, and Jared's been very helpful for us in Phoenix in terms of getting appointments for me and hosting events for us in Phoenix. Again, you know, fairly textbook fundraising activity in a city that's, you know, away or even far away from our campus. So, I mean, it's just, you know, for Jared to call, you know, Stan Smith down the road and say, hey, Mike's coming to town and the university's coming to town or would you want to come to this event? She's going to have a much more and, you know, the statistic that I know is four to one, batting average at opening that door for us than me just ran, you know, cold calling an alumnus or alumna in Phoenix to meet with me or to come to an event. So that peer to peer is really kind of what I'm hearing. And I did not take that role before, honestly, I didn't know it was necessary. I didn't know it was needed, you know, any of that. But it also helps as the nonprofit nerd, you know, I understand the return on relationships. And that's something that we have, you know, talked about a lot during these shows, but really, you know, Mike, I'm assuming you have someone like a Jared across the world, across, you know, really the nation. And I would think some of these larger cities really do, you know, I don't know, lend itself to finding those advocates for that batting average to stay the same. What have you done in your team? Because like it's a small but mighty team, right? Like talk to us about that and then about a little bit of the techniques that you also use, you know, just across the nation. Sure. Well, you know, one of the things that we've done, and you know, we've done some benchmarking studies and we certainly want to grow our staff, like everyone else. But you know, one of the things that we did is, you know, we measured where our alumni are in the state and in the nation and the world. And one of the things that we found is that, you know, a good portion of our alumni were up the road, as I mentioned earlier in Greenville. And as we're opening up this university center to have classes in Greenville, you know, the population there was actually higher than Greenwood and that fluency population was much higher. So when we had a staff where we created a new position, we put that person there, because they're on the ground there and they're engaging the alumni in life at the university and from a much easier standpoint than having to do it from Greenwood. But also, you know, in terms of industry and getting people together that are in the same industry that have business connections and that thing, that's really where the magic happens. And that person's able to facilitate that where if they were in Greenwood and traveling, they may be in Columbia one day, they may be in Charlotte the next day or Charleston. And so they're really focused to that area and this is a fairly new position and we're already seeing the results of that. Interesting. Let me ask you this question. In terms of organizing the alums for outreach, do you have like community chapters or groups like that in different parts of the country that are organized and trying to do their own things for you or how do you navigate that? But it's a great question, Julia, because having been in the business 25 plus years, we've seen the cycles of those come and go and what used to work doesn't work now and what worked even 10 years ago doesn't work now. So it's in landers and landers are fairly simple equation because 87% of our alumni live in South Carolina. So and we're predominantly three large cities, Greenville, Columbia and Charleston. And the preponderance of our grads are in two of those cities in Columbia and Greenville. So yes, we have constituent organizations that we call Tower Clubs in those, which are essentially chapters, in those cities and in Greenwood as well. We do have some in the other cities. They're much smaller and less activity than the others. And when I say other cities Atlanta and Charlotte. But the other institutions I worked at where there are critical masses of alumni in Washington DC and New York and so forth. Yes, those were great, the big casting net to bring people into the full of the university. But when you really have dynamic and meaningful programming that bring people into the fold, it's a much greater impact for those alumni to become more involved. And as I said earlier, when I was in New York City, when you could get industry people together and to meet each other. And it was amazing how many times you'd have people in the room and say, I didn't even know that you went to X University. We're not allowed to say the skills, right? And I didn't even know that you went here and they've known each other for 10 years. But it never came up that, hey, where did you go to school? And so seeing that happen. And I remember if you'd bear with me for say, I'll tell a quick story. Our alumni relations person in New York City wanted to get architect panel together. We had a school of architecture. But just by happenstance, we got all healthcare architects. So architects that work predominantly in hospitals and labs and so forth. It was amazing. And lo and behold, we found out there were five or six healthcare architects in the crowd. And I could tell you today, fast forward today, that all three of those people that served on that panel or major gift prospects or not prospects have been major gift donors. One of them was previously, but the other two were not. And one of them has become a million dollar donor. And so, and she'd only given $1,000 at that point. Wow. Maybe for smaller gifts, but- But had the capacity of more. Right, right. But just, and it was the people in that room. And I would say the ancillary effects from the other people that were in that room and had made a huge difference today. You know, you don't know what they're, as advocates, you don't know what they're saying on a day-to-day basis. Right, right. I mean, just spreading the information and the camaraderie back to your organization. It's gotta be pretty substantial. It was scary that was a long time ago. But the other thing that we quickly learned from that was why not do the other industries? And in New York City, there's obviously plenty of industries you have marketing and you have investment banking and other types of things, a lot of law. But for us in Cincinnati, it was all engineering with Proctor and Gamble and GE at the time. And so we put those people together. And so just working with each geographic area. And that's one of the unique things about this business. If you kind of go through the cities, you know, unless it's a super large metropolitan area, there is kind of a dynamic in that certain, in a lot of the geographic areas. Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that I like to bring up about Lander and you had mentioned, Mike, you know, one of the ways to engage your alumni as advocates is really going back to see how were they engaged during their university years, right? So maybe they were a collegiate athlete. Lander does not have a football team. So this is not something that you are seeing on ESPN and you have that camaraderie for that, you know, the football season. So this really, like you've really had to go even further and deeper to connect to the alumni because, you know, that main, I would say, you know, that main kind of like American staple that does connect alumni doesn't exist at Lander. Especially in the South. Right, especially in the South. Especially in the South. That's a true religion. There's Southern Baptist and there's football. Yeah, that's such a good comment. Yes. So we, you know, again, we have to be very intentional and cognizant about how we engage our alumni different than our brethren up the road at Clemson and down the road at USFC. Yeah, so USFC. So the, since we're on the West Coast. Right, that's right. But, you know, and again, it's really thinking about those meaningful and dynamic ways and using your alumni as a sounding board to figure out how we can connect to these different people, you know, in terms of where we're doing an event, what kind of event we should do and then more subsequent to board work, you know, and friends organizations of who are the right people to have involved. And, you know, as we're, as we're, you know, it's no secret that we're going to embark on a campaign in the very near future, but putting those campaign committees together, you know, especially me only being there three years, I can't go to Columbia and find the best people. So I'm relying on our board members that are currently there to find new people to join that campaign committee. Okay, now we don't have a lot of time left, but this is one of the questions that we ask a lot of our guests. And that is, as you were doing your outreach, what percentage or what sort of influence are you giving to digital outreach versus snail mail versus phone calls? Like, what does your mix look like? That's a good question that I don't know. Well, I mean, you don't have to- Well, you know- I think the exact statistics- Now, we need to charge a fundraiser, and it's, you know, I get away from that a little bit, but so we started at e-newsletter. I mean, again, our organization is fairly new to the business. So, you know, during COVID, we, I mean, we had some e-publications, but we put a schedule to it, and we put, again, we were trying to be intentional to who we were sending to and when we were sending it. And at that point during COVID, we did it every other week, or sorry, every week, and now we've backed off to every week, or sorry, every other week, now that we're, you know, back to more functioning lifestyle. So we're, we are still probably, you know, in terms of fundraising and annual fund, we're still predominantly male, U.S. male, and it's funny. And, you know, in terms of, in terms of electronic outreach, I would say that our brethren and the nonprofit sector probably certainly trump us in that, in terms of social media and things like that. We're still, you know, we don't, I only have two people in that area. So we have to, as one boss told me, and I don't know if this is politically correct anymore, but, you know, we have to focus on the elephants. So we still have to focus on, on, you know, from a fundraising perspective, for that, for us, that's individuals. And from an engagement perspective, from the alumni base, we have to make sure that we're focusing on areas that are gonna be impactful. So us sending, you know, a lot of social media at this point is still not that impactful for us. Three years from now, two years from now, social media didn't change and stay the same it was today. That would be, that would be a bigger push for us. But, you know, certainly at other schools, I would say, you know, even me going back a few years ago to other institutions that's much more, I mean, you have a person that's full-time in charge of social media that's only doing alumni. Yeah. And now I'm gonna ask, do something different. I'm gonna ask Jared Ransom, the same question, because you are engaged in this process. I mean, obviously you're the co-host of the nonprofit show, but today you are coming to us as somebody who is intimately, you know, a part of this world and this journey. What response do you have to snail mail versus digital communication, social media? What, what do you respond to? You know, that's interesting. And I think, I think Mike and his team has done really a fabulous job because I have never before felt as connected to the university, honestly, as I have in the last almost now three years, Mike, since you've been in place and I've really, you know, been working your team to develop these relationships. So I think the blend, you know, and I watch it as an industry person as well. I really watch this. Direct mail is great and it doesn't, it doesn't really hit me as much as the relationship, right? So like when I get a text or call or something from Mike or his team, because I'm also getting that as well, this has like, hey, we're doing this COVID recovery campaign. We're really looking to support, you know, the students that are having to stay on campus. If there's anything you could do, the average gift is X amount, you know, like great. That personal touch really hits me. But you know, as I, as I share, you know, not only do I have the t-shirt on today, but like he sends me these great things that really make me feel connected. And so I'm gonna say, you know, beyond the US mail is also having these tangible items that while I am 2000 miles away, I still see and feel connected to what I consider, you know, my childhood and my hometown. So Mike even sent me a decal for my car, which, you know, for Landor and you can see his logo right there on the top of his screen. When you see the Palmetto tree on someone's car, I immediately think this person is from South Carolina, right? And so if I see any other Palmetto tree, because it's not a palm tree, it's a Palmetto tree. Okay. Okay, thank you. Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, it's the state tree of Palmetto tree. But to see a Palmetto tree, especially with that crescent moon, says to me, there is a South Carolina connection. And it could be Charleston, it could be Greenville, it could be Columbia, but that to me says 2000 miles away, hometown, childhood, fond memories. And so those are a lot of the ways that it really hit me from again, the university, you know, advancement team. Mike has also talked to me about doing a women in philanthropy program, you know, like how do we engage our women in philanthropy, in particular our alumni? And so I just think, I think it takes a blend. But again, each demographic matters, you know, like I'm receiving some things, which I always love seeing, but that's not necessarily the motivation that I'm going to have or need to make that donation. It's typically that relationship, which, you know, goes back to, this is why you need to engage your alumni as advocates. Amazing. Well, Mike, this has been great because it's wonderful to have a guest on at the same time to have somebody that's actually in the process with you. Feedback. Yeah, it's very, very interesting. Well, I think that it's like hard to believe that our time is almost up because I have, it always seems like I have a million questions more when we get down to these last few minutes. I think one of the things that, and Jared, you probably agree with me on this, I would love to have you come back on at some point and discuss major, major significant milestone marketing. I mean, to have an organization traveling through this journey of time, which is so unique to philanthropy in our country would be a really interesting lesson for so many of our organizations, even if they're looking at the 25 or 50 year mark or whatever, still to learn from you would be really powerful. Here's Mike's informationlander.edu. Great website, really interesting programming and the history of educating our students and how they are championing the different types of education and at the same time drawing a link between those alums to I would say future alums and how do you start cultivating that? So make sure you check that out because it's just really interesting information. Again, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy, been joined by the nonprofit nerd herself and Lander University alum. That's right. We're in the T-shirt. Right. Yeah. I'm glad it was clean. Right, right too. Right, right. Yeah, I'm impressed. Well, we have really enjoyed sharing this episode with you. And again, we always like to say without our sponsors, we would not be here. So we want to express our gratitude for that. Okay, Mike, I want to go back to school. All right, I love it. I love it. Maybe we need a tower club here, you know? I mean, we can certainly talk about that. But yeah, it's been fascinating. Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. Well, thanks for joining us and thanks to all of you for joining us for this national live broadcast. We are so grateful that you continue to tune in either live or on our archives. Hope that you'll join us again tomorrow. And as we end every episode, please stay well so you can do well. Thanks, Mike, and we'll see you tomorrow. Take care. Thanks, everyone.