Texas A&M University

Home
Texas A&M University

“Emma is so elegant, and the drag-and-drop features are so intuitive.”

scot walker

DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS AT THE ASSOCIATION OF FORMER STUDENTS

Industry: university

About Texas A&M Foundation

Texas A&M Foundation and The Association of Former Students are two of Texas A&M University’s largest fundraising organizations.

VISIT THEIR SITE

Texas A&M combats pushy alumni perception.

If you’re familiar with the university space, you know that development offices tend to get a bad rap for being overly pushy with alumni. But two of Texas A&M University’s largest fundraising organizations – The Association of Former Students and the Texas A&M Foundation – are doing everything they can to counteract that perception.

“There’s so much we do that has absolutely nothing to do with donations. We want to be a valuable resource for alumni, share what’s happening on campus, and help strengthen the Aggie Network,” said Scot Walker, Director of Communications at The Association of Former Students.

Two organizations working in harmony

Though they work toward many of the same goals, The Association of Former Students and the Texas A&M Foundation operate as separate entities.

“We’re two independent, private nonprofits,” said Diana Tomlin, Marketing Manager at the Texas A&M Foundation. “The Association is focused on generating a higher volume of small gifts from alumni, whereas the Foundation is focused on major gifts. Together and with other organizations in the Texas A&M network, we are in a university-wide comprehensive campaign called Lead by Example. Since the launch of the campaign in 2015, more than $2.6 billion has been raised to support students, faculty, colleges, academics and athletic programs. ”

The two offices also share a contact database and a tiered Emma account.

“We split the cost of Emma and make sub-accounts available to the different schools and colleges across campus. It helps keep things centralized, and it gives them access to our database of donors and alumni for outreach purposes and to assist with the $4 billion campaign.”

Email marketing as a key stewardship tool.

Email sits at the center of both organizations’ communication strategies.

“We send email invitations to events – happy hours, football watch parties, etc. We market our Traveling Aggies program through email. We also communicate with our leadership council through Emma and produce a monthly newsletter that we send to all former students,” said Walker.

Sounds like a lot, right? But that’s just the beginning.

“Email also works as a stewardship tool for our organizations: We share how people have given, what they’re supporting, and what’s the highest priority based on current campaigns. A lot of it is about awareness. We want to continually build awareness for grads who maybe can’t give now, but might want to in 15 or 20 years”, said Landon Harrell, Digital Communications Specialist at the Texas A&M Foundation.

Screen_Shot_2020-07-28_at_4.21.21_PM_374_522

Segmentation for a one-to-one connection.

Because they want to ensure the right contacts get the right messages, smart segmentation is absolutely crucial.

For instance, The Association of Former Students runs a call center. Whenever a student speaks to someone on the phone and the person declines to give, they segment their list by reason and send some of those alumni a heartfelt follow-up email tailored to their situation.

Moving? The recipient gets an invitation to their new local alumni chapter.

Between jobs? The recipient receives a link to some career services that might help.

Having a baby? The Association sends them a congratulatory note and mails them an Aggie bib!

It’s a fantastic way to showcase their services, support alumni, and make those former students feel valued even if they aren’t able to donate.

Big results for an annual fundraising campaign.

For both The Association of Former Students and the Texas A&M Foundation, email works as just a single element of their larger marketing ecosystem. Someone may get a few emails, then a call, then check out a landing page on their website… THEN decide to give. It all works together to create the best possible donor experience. But one success they can tie specifically to email is a fundraising campaign they launched last year.

In 2016, The Association of Former Students held their first-ever “Pass It Back Day,” a holiday similar to Giving Tuesday. Through a combination of email marketing and social promotion, they were able to significantly exceed their goal of 1,000 gifts and $100,000, generating 1,800 gifts and $260,710 in just 24 hours!

Why Emma?

Scot, Landon, and Diana all named different reasons for choosing Emma as their email marketing platform.

1. Ease of Use
“Emma is so elegant, and the drag-and-drop features are so intuitive,” said Scot. “I can teach someone how to create an email in Emma in 20 minutes…and if they’re young, I can teach them in 10!”
Reporting Tools
“One of the things we use on day-to-day basis is the reporting functionality: seeing who’s opening, who’s clicking, which links they’re engaging with, and how can we serve our constituents better, more relevant content,” said Landon.
Tiered Account Structure
“When I was at Marketing United and talking to other universities, one thing I found we all struggle with is how big and sporadic and complex our systems are. The Emma sub-account system has helped us bring so many departments across campus on board,” said Diana.

Interested in taking our University Edition for a test drive? Just give us a shout!

If you’d like to learn more about The Association of Former Students or The Texas A&M Foundation, check out their websites.

By The Numbers

$260K

raised in 24 hours

TOOLKIT

Test up to 3 subject lines and we’ll fire off the one that performs best with your audience.

Power highly targeted campaigns using segmentation to organize and manage your subscriber data.

Our Case Studies

We love our customers & they love us, too!

See what they are saying

Not only did using Emma help us improve our emails – it also helped us tailor programs to better meet the needs and interests of our students.

Angie & Collin

Assistant Director of Student Activities, Student Affairs

Emma is a solid email marketing management platform that provided campaign performance insights, tracking, and a fair amount of customization. Additionally, building out an API so that it spoke to our personnel database made updating contact information and managing unsubscribes considerably easier.

Ben E.

Director of Communication, Higher Education

The fact that our store managers are able to log into Emma and feel comfortable creating emails really means a lot. That, plus the approvals process have saved us a ton of time and keep the brand on point—which is crucial.

Carl Dickerson

Digital Content Strategist

Emma has been a helpful tool for our organization. We recognize that students get inundated with emails so using Emma allows us to be more strategic and create messages that are more engaging to students.

Christian B.

Director of Housing, Higher Education

The best thing about Emma is that it is one of the most influential platforms for marketing and comes with great features. You cannot resist its impeccable ability to boost sales through the best email transactions.

James C.

Digital Marketing Manager

Emma allows you to send blast emails to different audiences. Emma’s “Segments” allow you to slice your contact list into different segments based on different criteria. Creating emails is fairly easy and it’s not too hard to make something look good. We use Emma to send ~ 300K emails at a time, which it does well.

Jeremy A.

Project Coordinator

The approvals dashboard has really knocked it out of the park: It saves us so much time and makes it seamless to manage over 1,000 studio newsletters each month.

Meredith Parks

Marketing Strategist

Emma enables us to design email campaigns that consistently reflect our organization’s brand, while also making it simple to switch between different templates tailored to various audiences. The insight dashboards provide valuable analytics, and the builder itself is both intuitive and user-friendly.

Katie M.

Marketing Manager

We are much happier with it in comparison to our formal software Constant Contact – the customer service is just more responsive, and the interface is so easy to use that we are able to have interns use with little direction.

Monica S.

Marketing, Marketing and Advertising

I really like the email editors and ability to create segments based on your data. The Emma team is great about helping set up external APIs in order for your data to get automatically added into their system.

Nikki R.