There’s no question that times are tough for higher ed these days. Some colleges are closing their doors for good. Others are mapping out layoffs, furloughs, and other drastic cuts. What happens this fall? It’s anybody’s guess.

In the midst of these big changes, your magazine might be on the chopping block. At the very least, you might be going all digital for one issue — and maybe more.

Yet I’d argue that your print magazine is your flagship communications tool for alumni. It’s likely getting into more hands than your digital communications. And certainly alumni are more likely to see your magazine than go to an event (at least for the moment) or get a visit from a development officer.

Right now, there’s no question that all of us will have to thoughtfully consider whether our print publications are worth the price — and if they’re not yet, how we can develop a plan to make their cost a no-brainer.

Your institution’s calculus will look different from others, but here are three ways your magazine might consider showing its unique value:

1. Double down on class notes.

CASE surveys have routinely shown that class notes, across all institutions, are the most-read sections of any alumni magazine. (As many of you already know, they’re also fertile ground for profiles and feature story ideas.)

Yes, people can keep up with their closest pals on Facebook or other social media. But with class notes, they don’t also have to put up with crackpot political theories, pyramid scheme sales pitches, or trolls. They don’t have to worry that some new algorithm is making it harder for them to see new information from people they care about.

There’s a reason Harvard Business School’s Director of Communications, Bill Weber, who oversees a magazine with 450 pages of class notes per issue (!!!!), says that if they ditched class notes for their institution’s magazine, it “would be World War III.“

In a recent informal survey for my own alma mater, a full 84 percent of respondents said they wanted to see more class notes. (11 percent said the number was fine, 5 percent said they didn’t read class notes, and 0 percent said they wanted to see fewer class notes.)

And you know how many alumni want to see class notes behind a password-protected wall? NONE. ZERO. ZIP. ZILCH. NADA.

Class notes are something that are uniquely and dramatically better in a print publication.

Your people are what make your institution. A big part of your job is to help them continue to feel like a part of that community so that they continue to benefit from it, value it, and contribute to it.

Class notes are an essential part of that equation.

2. Measure what matters. (Then improve it.)

What really matters for your magazine? Is it encouraging alumni engagement? Is it featuring a lot of talented researchers? Connecting with parents? Making the case for your value to state legislators? Supporting your philanthropic priorities?

Every school has a mix of goals for their publication, and it might even be spelled out explicitly in the mission statement.

If you had to, how would you think about measuring whether or not you were succeeding?

Would you start counting the number of individual class notes, letters to the editor, responses to prompts and nostalgia questions? Would you count the number of stories featuring donors or researchers or specific institutional priorities?

As you think about where you are right now, would those numbers be where you want them to be?

What would you do if you had to double those numbers in the next four issues? What changes would you make?

Let’s be clear: in many ways, these numbers will be imperfect proxies for the larger goals you’re aiming at. But they are a starting point. And they can be a conversation starter with higher ups if you’re committed to showing your magazine’s value.

3. Add a giving envelope.

I get a lot of alumni magazines, and I’m surprised by the number that don’tinclude a giving envelope.

Years ago, I worked at a school that was consistently among the top five in the percentage of alumni who gave. This school had an enormous endowment, but alumni happily continued to give.

Yes, there is a lot that goes into that! But I will also say that the magazine had a giving envelope that went into every issue. No one was worried that it was overkill or that they were hammering alumni with too many requests. That envelope was paired with a note that made it clear that people could submit a gift, a class note, or both. And the school got a lot of both.

If people crack the cover of your magazine, it means they’re at least a little bit interested in your institution. If you are able to tell a story that moves them, that reminds them of a person they appreciated at your school, that helps them remember why they said “yes” to your school in the first place, why wouldn’t you give them the easiest possible way to help support the place that made that possible?

I have asked dozens of clients and non-clients if they include a giving envelope, and literally no one has said “Well, we tried it and it turned out that we didn’t even cover the costs.”

Now’s the time!

Last December, before everything got terrible, I groused privately to some friends that 2020 was going to be a year of bad headlines. I was already seeing a slew of “2020 Vision” stories, and I was pretty sure I’d see a million more.

Obviously, that seems like a petty concern right now.  (Hindsight is ALSO 2020, amiright?)

But the reality is that my team and I are still writing lots of headlines, and you probably are, too.

And I bet you don’t have to guess what headline is in heavy rotation these days.

Here, let me give you a hint:

All together now.

Why am I telling you this?

If you’re writing stories that won’t come out until May or June or beyond, please don’t headline them “Alone Together.” Your readers will have seen that line so many times by then. It will feel exhausting.

Spend 15 minutes coming up with a list of possible headlines that do NOT include “Alone Together.”

Research shows that a good headline can get 8x more readers than a bad one. If you want your audience to read the stories you’ve put so much time and effort into creating, the easiest, most powerful change you can make is to your headlines.

Roundup of COVID-19 newsletters

Want to revisit any of my coronavirus-themed newsletters? Here they are:

Week #1: Consider this template for your magazine’s COVID-19 storytelling

Week #2: More COVID-19 advice, fix the worst page of your magazine, and a work from home tip

Week #3: COVID-19 Coverage: They won’t remember late. They will remember bad.

Week #4: Avoid a tone-deaf story. Here’s one to try.

Should you ditch print for your next magazine?

A lot of schools are trying to decide whether now’s the time to go online-only with their magazine.

Maybe you’re among them!

Certainly, there are compelling reasons to consider it.

Your school will save all of the printing and mailing costs required for a print magazine, which might directly or indirectly make it easier to support your students during a challenging time.

You’ll be able to change your stories if they become outdated.

In some cases, printing might not even be an option if your printer is not deemed an essential service

They’re all legitimate reasons!

But do I think you should print the next issue of your magazine?

Not necessarily!

Only print your magazine if you want your audience to read it.

Yes, that sounds flippant.  But the reality is that even though we’re all spending a lot more time on our screens right now (thanks for that reminder, Screen Time Weekly Report), your readers are unlikely to make your school’s or magazine’s website one of their top priorities.

A print magazine is a “push” communication. It arrives in your reader’s mailbox and they have to interact with it, even if it’s just to glance at the cover before slipping it in the recycling bin.

It’s likely, of course, that they’ll spend at least a few minutes flipping through the pages, skimming class notes, and perhaps reading a story or two beyond that.

The value of being able to “push” that publication into their hands is significant!

An online magazine, by contrast, is a “pull” communication.

Your audience has to have a reason to visit your magazine’s website. They don’t just happen across your magazine website the way a print magazine all but certainly finds its way into their hands.

Sure, there are ways to get people to your site.

Maybe they’re clicking on a link from an email with an intriguing story (if that email hasn’t already landed in their promotions tab or spam folder).

Maybe they see a post from a Facebook or Instagram page (if it occurred to them to follow your institution in the first place).

Maybe they’re…coming up with the idea on their own? (Maybe.)

You probably see the problem: you need to be doing all sorts of additional work to draw readers to your stories if you go online-only.

Switching from print to online doesn’t just change the medium — it makes it much harder for you to get your stories in front of your readers. Yes, you might cut a few costs. But at what price?

If it is at all reasonable for you, stick with print. If you can’t, I would actually encourage you to skip the issue entirely and print a summer/fall edition or something similar. Go big with that edition, rather than go online for one issue.

As you plan your institution’s COVID-19 coverage, here are some of the things we’re telling schools to think about for their upcoming issues.

1. You might miss your deadline. That’s okay.

This is painful for me to say, because I am an anxious deadline meet-er. But let’s just be clear about the situation we’re in: unprecedented. Unprecedented. UN.PRE.CE.DEN.TED.

That’s just the reality.

And yes: missing deadlines is disappointing. It can mess up the rest of your schedule. But I really, really believe this:

Your readers won’t remember late. They will remember bad.

There is no reader — beyond a few internal ones — carefully tracking your quarterly, bi- or tri-annual magazine publication schedule.

It’s okay to rip up your editorial roadmap and do more for your next issue. It’s okay to deliver two weeks late or four weeks late if it allows you to do a better job rethinking your magazine’s story lineup.

For example, years ago, I was part of an editorial team that delivered our “Fall” magazine on December 15.

(TECHNICALLY, we told ourselves, STILL FALL.)

It was ridiculously late! But it was a great magazine. Exactly zero readers complained about that delivery date, and I worked for a college in which every alum seemed to have an opinion about everything (and wanted to express it complainingly).

If you know that you could do better work if you just had a couple more weeks, do it. Make the case to your higher-ups. Make the case to yourself. Do the best possible work you can.

2. It’s better to over-report.

Over the years, I’ve learned to be systematic in my reporting. If I know I likely need eight interviews for a story, I’ll come up with my list of eight sources and two or three backups. I’ll start with the eight, then move to the backups only when my efforts to get the first eight are fully exhausted.

Let’s be honest: It’s political!

For alumni magazines, it’s tricky territory to ask for an interview and later rescind the offer because the source missed a deadline. I’ll do just about anything to make sure that everyone I interview gets a quote or at least a mention.

For COVID-19 reporting?

Different rules apply.

I’ve been contacting far more people than I can use for these stories. Who knows if the doctors or therapists or scientists I contact are too busy or exhausted to get back in touch? It’s certainly fine for them to respond on their own timelines or not at all.

I also know that I can’t guarantee that everyone’s going to have a good story!

I try to be as honest as I can with sources: I let them know that we’re still figuring out our plan for coverage. I tell them that I intend to use conversations we have, but if we can’t fit it all in, I’ll definitely compile the information and send it to the school’s archives or library, or consider it for a web story.

This is important material, even if it doesn’t ultimately make the print magazine.

I can’t exactly map out this story. No one can! So I try to do a lot of reporting and sift through the material to find the stories worth telling.

3. Nobody’s going to like everything.

In my first COVID-19 newsletter, I mentioned how proud I was of the work Carleton’s alumni magazine did in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

After basking in the glow of that good work, I decided to see how readers responded to what I saw as a thoughtful and human story.

They haaaaaaaated it.

The letters to the editor page confirmed it: lots were upset about the perceived political slant, about our lack of foresight, about our very existence. Many loved it, but the ones who didn’t? Well, they didn’t hold back.

There’s a lesson in there that I hope you’ll try to internalize before you experience it: no matter what you do, people are going to be angry. Almost all of us are stressed, scared, and uncertain about what’s ahead.

And some people will take that out on your publication.

That can be an upsetting experience, especially if you’ve mostly flown under the radar. If you’re used to getting a small handful of “Keep up the great work!” emails, people who are truly angry about what you’ve done — even if it’s genuinely good work — can knock you sideways.

Capstone is doing some consulting for a school that has already received an angry letter about COVID-19, and the issue covering the coronavirus hasn’t even come out yet!

Do your best work. Be okay with the occasional mad reader.

4. It’s time to build a plan — even if you never use it.

As the toll of COVID-19 grows higher, it’s likely that someone from your community will succumb to the virus.

It’s time to create your plan now to determine how you’ll handle it.

For example, after September 11, Carleton did extended obituaries on the two alumni that we learned had died in the attacks. We included quotes from fellow alumni and a handful of family members. You can see that approach here.

At the time, we debated exactly how to handle the situation before we made a decision. We had real concerns no matter what we chose! Was it disrespectful to others who had passed away to give extended coverage to alumni who had died in the attacks? Were we setting a precedent that we didn’t actually want to set?

In the end, we decided the extra coverage was merited. We were prepared if we got unpleasant feedback, although I don’t recall getting any.

COVID-19 is different, of course.

Depending on your school, you may have far more than a small handful of cases in your school’s community, and that may dictate what kind of coverage you can do.

Have a plan. Be willing to adapt as circumstances change.

To say our lives have been upended over the past couple weeks is an understatement.

As I write this, my kids — who have at least the next 20 days without school — are acting roughly like this:

Lots of us are trying to figure out how to think about coronavirus storytelling for our magazines, and I’m definitely helping clients think through this issue!

The news is changing nearly hourly, yet many of us will need to put the finishing touches on stories that won’t land in readers’ mailboxes for weeks.

While it’s true that nobody’s completely figured this out yet, I’ll share one look to the past that may help you chart a path forward. (Read to the end! I’d love if it you’d be willing to participate in a larger effort to share smart approaches to covering the current pandemic.)

How to tell a story about a quickly evolving, world-changing event

In 2001, I was working at Carleton College, and the alumni magazine was firing on all cylinders. Our tiny publications crew was fresh off of a Sibley win.

I don’t have to tell you what happened on September 11.

Within our team, we debated whether or not to cover the event in our alumni magazine at all. Was there anything that our magazine could say that newspapers wouldn’t say sooner? That wouldn’t already be covered by well-resourced consumer magazines? That wouldn’t just seem downright exhausting by the time it landed in alumni mailboxes in October or maybe even November?

I argued that we shouldn’t cover 9/11 in the alumni magazine.

My boss insisted that we cover it.

As the boss, of course, she won that argument! I’m glad she did. And here’s the story that we created as a result.

Obviously, a story about 9/11 is different than any story you might write about COVID-19.

But there are a few parallels worth considering:

• We were writing it before we knew how everything would turn out.

• Even as we were writing it in a state of flux, we knew we had to have the mindset of the people who would be receiving the magazine more than a month later.

• We wanted to write something that would hold up over time. Alumni magazines are important materials in your school’s history.

Honestly, I think we did a pretty good job.

Three things to consider including in your coronavirus coverage

Here are a handful of things I notice about that story now that I think we did correctly:

1. We captured the moment. You’ll notice that on the bottom margins of pages 3-6, we included snippets of emails from alumni in the days following the attacks, dated to show how people were feeling at specific moments after September 11.

   Sometimes, we think we’ll remember how we felt at a specific moment in time forever! But it fades. Having these tiny, authentic snapshots makes a difference.

   QUESTION TO ASK YOURSELF: How you can show the emotions of this moment authentically?

2. We also looked beyond the current moment. We asked writers and thinkers of all sorts to weigh in with their expertise that could provide needed context. We talked to historians and political scientists, students and alumni. This was an opportunity to showcase Carleton leaders and thinkers bringing real insight into an important moment.

   But it was also more than that. A college education should help us consider many different perspectives, and it should help us think more creatively and critically. This was part of what Carleton wanted to instill in its students, and we wanted that to be present in the story as well.
   
   QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF: Who can you talk to who will provide deeper insight in this moment? Public health officials or doctors? A historian or an older alum who lived through the polio epidemic? An ethicist? Think about how the people you choose and the stories they tell represent the strengths of your school and the alumni it produces.

3. We didn’t reinvent the wheel! Not long after the attacks, we discovered that a New York photographer was coming to campus as a visiting speaker. As part of his talk, he shared some of his personal photos from September 11. They were incredible and affecting, and for a modest fee, we were able to arrange to run more than four pages of them. We also scoured newspapers and blogs to find insightful articles and op-eds from alumni, faculty, and staff that we could re-run in our pages.

   You don’t have to have 100 percent original content. Find the material that will resonate with your audience and include it.
   
   QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF: Where can you look to find material that already exists that is worth including in your coverage? How can you excerpt or license it appropriately?

***

You guys, I know I don’t have all the answers! These are just a few things to be thinking about, but of course the contours of the coronavirus will lead our work to new and unexpected places.

How are you planning to cover COVID-19 in your magazine? Share your plan, and if I get enough responses, I’ll share them in a future blog post so that we can all learn from each other.