It’s Time to Ditch Your Alumni Magazine Website
It’s Less Effective Than Print—and Your Alumni Don’t Want It
By Erin Peterson
Last March, the Council for Advancement and Support of Education shared some findings about alumni magazines it had collected from nearly 200 institutions. Among the numbers that caught my attention: 87 percent of alumni magazines have an online version of the magazine as well as a print magazine.
I think that number is way, way too high.
Let’s get a few things out of the way first. Yes, many schools have beautiful magazine websites, and a few alumni probably insist that they will only read your magazine online. And yes, there’s a sustainability argument to be made about an online publication.
I still don’t think it’s enough to merit the time, brainpower, and expense you’re devoting to it.
Why? It’s because you’ve already got the most powerful tool in your arsenal for reaching alumni: a print alumni magazine.
Why print magazines are uniquely valuable
Over the years, I’ve written a lot about why print magazines are so valuable as communications tools compared to their online counterparts. Among other things, research has shown that readers find print publications more memorable and more valuable than online ones.
But beyond the value of the print magazine as an object itself, it’s important to understand the value of the way your print magazine is distributed—and what that means about who’s reading it, compared to who might be reading it online.
As much as your alumni may love your school, they probably aren’t seeking out official communications from your institution like prospective students are. They’re not visiting your school’s primary website unprompted—let alone an alumni magazine website.
Sure, you can send an email blast to get them there, but if their email inboxes are like mine, that message is going straight to a (rarely reviewed) inbox. You can direct them there from your social media feeds, but good luck competing for clicks with multibillion-dollar media companies. These “pull communications” must persuade readers to click a link or visit a website. That’s tough work! And it’s why it’s so hard to grab your readers’ attention with online publications.
Your print magazine, however, is a “push communication” that goes directly into their mailbox and into their hands. Your alumni will at least give it a few seconds of their time—even if it’s just on the 15-second walk from the mailbox to the recycling bin.
Plus, you get to determine exactly what your readers see on any given page or spread, without worrying if they’re on a phone, an iPad, or a desktop computer.
This push communication, with so many details that you control, is the power of a print alumni magazine. An online publication just can’t compete with that.
Still, you might reasonably ask: why not both? It couldn’t hurt, right? Actually, it could.
The endless demand of online media
People expect websites to get updated with new stuff all the time. In other words, that quarterly content dump for your alumni magazine website ain’t gonna cut it.
For many, the solution to this problem—initially, at least—is to try to do more to attract eyeballs to the magazine website: More updates, more videos, more interactive components, more promotion.
As you map it all out, it can feel pretty exciting. But actually executing on the new strategy is an entirely different story. That’s where the constraints of staff time and energy become clear.
New priorities pop up, or your staff—already stretched thin—can’t handle the relentless requirement to generate new material.
And this approach doesn’t even work! Even editors with beautiful websites and ambitious promotion strategies often acknowledge to me that they’re not getting much traffic to their site. Visit the comments section of nearly any alumni magazine website to see for yourself: it’s a ghost town.
I heard versions of this concern again and again when I surveyed 900+ of you for a report I published last year, “6 Insights on the COVID-19 Shift from Print to Digital Magazines.”
Many institutions went digital-only with their alumni magazines for part or all of 2020. In theory, it was a great idea. We were all stuck at home and on our screens for what seemed like every moment of the day. Yet for the vast majority of respondents, the switch proved disappointing.
Many survey respondents noted a dramatic decrease in reader engagement with their publications. One told me that she typically heard from about 20 readers in a given print issue. Her online-only issue generated just two messages. In fact, nearly 60 percent of respondents said they got “minimal or no feedback and engagement” from their digital offerings; fewer than 5 percent said their digital magazines got lots of feedback and engagement.
That’s both deflating and ineffective.
As one respondent summed up:
“Our magazine staff probably felt more let down than any reader, you tend to feel ‘all that work for only online,’ and maybe we shouldn’t feel that way.”
This type of emotional disconnection from an online publication isn’t the most important factor to consider when you’re looking at the value of an online magazine, but it’s not nothing, either.
Now what?
The reality is there is probably no amount of creative storytelling, beautiful design, or promotion that will make your online alumni publication as effective and valuable as your print one, for one simple reason: online magazines are just not what your alumni actually want or need.
So don’t try to do more with your online magazine. Do less. Do it not at all. And do print better.
Make your print magazine—the thing that a larger percentage of your readers are actually likely to see—as good as it could possibly be. Focus on incredible storytelling, beautiful art and design, and unique ways to engage your readers.
Pouring more of your energy into print doesn’t preclude you from sharing some of your stories online, but that approach might not require the same type of commitment in time and resources as an online alumni magazine. It might free you up to think more ambitiously about what is possible in print.
And in the end, your communications team, your institution, and—most important—your alumni will benefit.
Erin Peterson owns Capstone Communications (getcapstone.com), a company that specializes in stories and strategy for print alumni magazines. To get the research and reports referenced in this article, please email erin@getcapstone.com.