Evolution or revolution?

Let me tell you a secret about redesigns.

Years ago, when I was just getting started in alumni magazines, I got to play a role in the Carleton Voice’s ambitious redesign.

The design was beautiful. The photography was stunning. The writing got a big upgrade (if I do say so myself).

OH, AND THE MAGAZINE WON A DANG SIBLEY.

But do you know what alumni, our target audience, had to say about it?

Here, I’ll pull some excerpts from the letters page after that first issue dropped:

• “A bit hard to take.”

• “Do you really think Carleton grads had difficulty ‘navigating’ the old Voice?”

• “When we graduate, do our minds deteriorate to such an extent that only by assaulting our eyes can a publication arouse our interest?”

And those were the publishable ones!

You guys, I’m still really, really proud of the work I did on that magazine. And to be fair, there were some nice compliments from alums.

But I also didn’t forget the sting of disappointment I felt from the cutting reactions.

Because as nice as it was to get that external validation from our peers, the feedback that actually mattered was from the readers who would see the magazine issue after issue.

I’d like to say that it was an isolated incident.

But when I went out on my own to work with alumni magazines around the country, I discovered something surprising: this reaction happened ALL THE TIME after alumni magazines underwent a redesign.

That reality made me rethink everything about what it takes for an alumni magazine to succeed.

The problem with redesigns

So let’s unpack this a little bit.

It’s very, very common, when you’re frustrated with your print alumni magazine, to assume a redesign (or a refresh or reimagining or re-whatever) will solve your problems.

Ditch that stale nameplate, that tired grid, that played-out section.

Modernize! Improve the photography! Come up with some fun new departments and feature formats!

It’s time for a revolution.

There’s no question that these kinds of before-and-after transformations often earn the admiration of judges and peers. And honestly, I’m one of the first to recognize them in this newsletter.

I spend all of my day thinking about print magazines, so of course I love the innovation and creativity and care that goes into this work.

But that doesn’t always mean that your actual audience will love it.

Alumni are often extremely conservative when it comes to their alumni magazine.

They like getting something that feels familiar, even if a redesign offers an objectively better magazine experience.

That’s true even if you conduct broad surveys and focus groups and write an editor’s letter at the beginning of the brand new issue telling them exactly what you’ve done and why.

Even worse: the cool before-and-afters we all love often obscure a messy middle that many of us would prefer not to talk about.

• Cost: Before you begin that redesign, you’ll have to make the very politically — and sometimes financially — expensive argument that it’s time for an overhaul.

• Time: One rule of thumb? You can expect a redesign to take as much time and money as a regular issue — ON TOP of your other work. And often, that rule of thumb is an optimistic estimate.

• Emotional roller coaster: It is awesome to see mockups and to imagine what is possible going forward. And it is devastating to hear from your audience when they tell you that your magazine is  — wait, let me check my notes — “assaulting their eyes.”

• Ongoing challenges: If you’ve hired an external team to support the redesign, you may have funding for their support only for an issue or two, then realize you’ll have to figure out how to maintain the ambition, voice, and visual strength of the magazine beyond that contract with fewer dollars and less support. Did you…actually just create MORE work for yourself?

To be clear, I don’t want to discount the power of a redesign. For some magazines, it truly can be transformative!

It’s also risky.

An alternative: evolution, not revolution

For years, I thought the “revolution” approach was the only one that was possible for print alumni magazines.

You did the hard work of a redesign, you took your lumps from readers and collected praise from peers, you waited a few issues until folks got acclimated to the new look, and then you did it all over again when the publication started to feel stale.

But after I started studying the best magazines — really studying them, for years and years — I began to understand that there was another option beyond this somewhat masochistic revolutionary approach.

And it’s used by some of the most successful magazines ever published, including:

• The Economist

• The New Yorker

• Vanity Fair

Here’s what they did: they used an evolutionary approach.

They changed slowly, issue by issue. A new column here. A subtle visual enhancement there. A new section that appeared and, if it didn’t gain traction, vanished without fanfare.

I love evolution, because it still allows for meaningful growth and improvement.

But it rarely inspires internal overwhelm or external fury.

The evolutionary approach is particularly well-suited for alumni magazines:

Trust-building over time. Alumni develop deep emotional connections to their publications. They want to feel like you understand and respect that relationship. When you change things slowly, you demonstrate that you’re listening and being thoughtful about their experiences and needs.

Room for experimentation. With smaller, incremental changes, you can test new ideas without betting the farm. Add some mini profiles to class notes and see how readers like them. Remove that stale dean’s letter and see if anyone protests. If readers love it, expand your ambition. If they don’t, you can quietly return to the status quo.

Sustainable for small teams. Most alumni magazine teams are lean. A complete redesign can consume months of work and derail your regular publishing schedule. Evolutionary changes let you keep improving while maintaining your workflow.

Reasonable for slow-cadence magazines. Many magazines now just publish twice a year (and sometimes even just once). Do I love it? No. But it’s the budgetary reality! If you need to skip an issue, it’s a big gap for readers, who might assume that they’ve been dropped from the mailing list or want to know if that wedding photo they sent will, you know, ever appear in your pages? An evolutionary approach allows you to keep the cadence and continue the upgrades.

Builds momentum. Each successful small change creates confidence—both for your team and your readers. Before you know it, your magazine looks and feels significantly different, but the transformation happened so naturally that readers embraced it along the way.

While revolutions can have their place (and some print magazines truly need one!), an evolution lets you keep earning trust while making the magazine better every issue.

Implement an evolutionary approach

A key to successful magazine evolution is being intentional about it.

You’re not just making random changes! You’re following a larger vision.

Maybe it’s aiming at more engagement, maybe it’s connecting with an expanded audience, maybe it’s telling your institution’s story in a more genuine way.

And you’re implementing this vision gradually through art, design, and editorial choices.

There are a lot of ways to begin this work:

• You can talk to your magazine peers

• You get on the mailing lists of award winning magazines (like these) to get ideas.

• You can get a ton of great info from the annual Editors Forum and regional CASE conferences. (I speak regularly at CASE conferences, jamming as many actionable ideas as possible into every session.)

• You can binge this newsletter! I’ve shared my very best advice here — across 200+ newsletters over more than 10 years — for free.

And yes, you can hire Capstone.

Capstone can help you develop your action plan

If you want to shortcut the learning process and get customized advice for YOUR magazine — and want to benefit from the surprising insider knowledge I’ve gained over the years but can’t share publicly — you can do that, too.

That’s exactly why Capstone offers the Magazine Action Plan.

Over the years, dozens and dozens of magazines have worked with us to get a perfect roadmap that allows them to take this evolutionary approach.

It’s an approach that uses my 20+ years of alumni magazine experience to help you pinpoint the best opportunities, avoid the biggest pitfalls, and get armed with the most relevant peer benchmarking as you make changes to your publication.

It builds in advice from some of the very best designers in the field.

We’ll tell you what you’re doing right — things that you might not know are already great about your publication. And we’ll help you make changes that actually matter.

The Magazine Action Plan is designed to support a careful cultivation of your publication, not a scorched-earth overhaul.

You build on your strengths, clear space for new ideas, and help your magazine flourish over time.

• It’s designed to highlight quick wins that you can make in your very next issue

• It also includes bigger changes that you can implement over the course of several issues

• It includes TONS of examples that can help you see and feel what change can look like.

• It takes into account your team’s strengths, resources, and constraints. We want you to aim high — but we also want the plan to be achievable and realistic for your school and your team.

• It even includes an implementation call to help you take the very best next steps for your publication.

Here’s just a small sampling of what past action plan clients have said about our work, just in past few months:

• “The action plan was a huge help in making some big changes, and more are coming in future issues. We have received some nice compliments about the magazine…a win!”

• “Thank you so much for this. It’s relevant, it’s clear, it’s practical and it’s going to be hugely valuable as we move forward.”

• “We have found this super valuable. We are very happy with everything that we’ve seen here.”

You also read some of our in-depth Magazine Action Plan case studies to learn what the experience is for clients.

Here’s one for Bonaventure (St. Bonaventure University, enrollment 2,100).

And another for State magazine (Illinois State, enrollment 20,000).

These are very different publications, and they got very different advice! But it was all focused on helping their teams serve their audience in the most meaningful, effective ways.