Let us help you build your print magazine roadmap.

Make your flagship communications tool more strategic, more effective, and more beautiful with our 25 years of expertise and proprietary research.

Your magazine is seen and trusted. Are you making the most of this powerful strategic tool?

Research consistently shows that print magazines are the most widely seen and trusted communications tools that alumni and donors receive from your institution — nearly always ranking above your website, social media, and emails.

Your magazine is the flagship communications vehicle for this audience, and it plays a key role in helping your alumni — volunteers, donors, advocates, and others — feel connected to the institution.

Your magazine can help readers get excited about the ambitions of your institution, the achievements in your community, and the ongoing meaning and value of a degree from your school.

Yet too often, institutions fail to maximize the true potential of this publication.

You’re ready to make some changes.

All things considered, you’re probably pretty proud of what you’ve been able to accomplish with your magazine — probably with a small staff, modest budget, and limited time.

Still.

You also know that your magazine could be better, if only you had time to take a breath and get the 30,000-foot view.

And you’ve probably tried!

  • You’ve read the messages on online forums
  • You’ve subscribed to email newsletters
  • You’ve gone to conferences and attended webinars

The general tips and tactics you get from these sources have their place, but they’re not enough to make a real difference in your magazine.

What you really need is a cover-to-cover evaluation and an under-the hood analysis. You need a step-by-step plan that will support the changes that will make your magazine worth every dollar you put into it — and then some.

You want a candid assessment from people who know the nuances of university publications and have excelled at creating them and improving them.

You want to know what you’re doing well, what you could do better, and the exact steps you can start taking today to make your magazine more beautiful, more readable, more relevant, and more loved by your audience.

Hi, I’m Erin Peterson, the founder of Capstone Communications.

Over the course of more than 25 years, I’ve worked with 100+ alumni and university publications across the country. I’ve won numerous national awards for my alumni magazine work — including the Sibley, the highest honor in the field.

My work has been recognized with a Brilliance award from InspirED School Marketers and a Gold award from CASE. I’m a regular speaker at national CASE conferences, and more than 1,300 higher ed communicators subscribe to my newsletter.

Your magazine is one of the most important connections between your school and its alumni and donors.

Even if they never visit your school’s website or follow your institution on social media, your alumni and donors are getting your magazine reliably delivered to their door a few times a year.

And that print magazine matters.

At its best, print is more effective, more desired, and more valued than the web — by alumni of all ages.

Shouldn’t you be doing the most to maximize the publication you’re sending to your audience?

Your institution spends tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce, print, and mail your magazine. You and your team invest hundreds of hours on every issue.

You deserve to have those hours pay off with a magazine that doesn’t just support your strategic goals, but is beloved by your readers — and gets robust engagement and support.

With the right changes, you can make sure your magazine benefits from all the time you spend on it.

We’re ready to help.

Introducing the Capstone Magazine Action Plan

Finally, a detailed roadmap to improve your publication, from mission statement to finished magazine.

The Capstone Magazine Action Plan is a complete playbook for improving your publication.

We closely analyze four issues of your magazine, learn about your publication through our carefully developed questionnaire, and do a comprehensive call with you and your team.

Then, over the course of 8 weeks, our team of editorial experts, designers, and researchers assembles a report and action plan that covers each component of your magazine:

  • Strategy

    We’ll help you make sure that your magazine supports your institution’s most important strategic goals with compelling storytelling. We’ll also help you develop a coherent content strategy designed to help you publish issue after issue that will consistently feel fresh to your readers.

  • Editorial

    Do your features delight your readers—and encourage your alumni to get more involved? Are your features told in the most compelling way possible? Are your front-of-the-book stories quick and delightful reads? Do your profiles showcase humans, not superheroes? Are your class notes — likely the top draw for your readers — as good as they can be?

  • Design

    What do your photos and illustrations say about your magazine? What about your paper and typefaces? Do your covers pop or fizzle?

  • Reader engagement

    Are your stories and departments designed for maximum engagement, whether that means they generate letters to the editor, gifts to the annual fund, or volunteers for an important initiative?

  • Financial Benchmarks (NEW!)

    We’ll benchmark your printing costs, contractor expenses, publication frequency, and mailing strategy against peer institutions so you know where you stand, where you can save, and where greater investments will yield outsized impact.

Our in-depth report doesn’t give generic advice. We zero in on specific parts of your magazine where you can make immediate improvements — and where you can focus your attention for long-term gains.

More important, we don’t just tell you where to train your attention. We show you specific techniques, successfully used in other alumni and consumer magazines, that you can use as templates.

The Capstone Magazine Action Plan includes:

  • A high-level executive report

    In addition to an in-depth report, the plan includes a focused, two-page executive summary for senior leaders. This report will help you understand not just where your magazine needs improvements, but where it currently shines and should stay the course.

  • A deep analysis

    We will review the four most important components of your magazine: strategy, editorial, design, and reader engagement.

  • A custom list of specific, targeted action steps

    You will be able to immediately improve your publication. We’ll share the exact changes that you can start making today that will help your magazine make a bigger — and more meaningful — impact on your readers.

  • Stretch goals

    We know that your budget isn’t infinite and that you can’t do everything at once. So we’ll pinpoint a few spots where an investment of additional resources can make the most meaningful impact.

  • Your "not to do" list

    There is often pressure to simply “do more” to improve your magazine. But we know you’ve got a small team that’s likely working at maximum capacity. That’s why our analysis includes a detailed list of the sections, processes and extras that you should stop doing because they’re unnecessary or even counterproductive. Stop doing what’s not working — so you can double down on what will.

  • Walk-Through Call

    After you receive your report, we want to make sure you feel 100 percent confident about your next steps. We’ll set up a walk-through call with your team and any stakeholders you request so you can ask any questions, or get further guidance on specific areas.

  • Bonus samples

    We’ll include plenty of examples from alumni and consumer magazines that you can use as templates for your own improvements: powerful mission statements, smart content strategies, successful packaging, and approaches to design and photography that have worked for other institutions’ magazines — and will also work for yours. This collection of resources alone — some of the best ideas we’ve collected over the course of years, all in one place — is often worth the price of the service.

PLUS:

  • Access to our design and editorial team

    Want help executing on any element of the roadmap? While our plans are designed with every detail you need to execute with your own team, we’re happy to develop a custom quote to support you and your team on an issue-to-issue basis, from one-time consultations to magazine design to feature storytelling.

    Our expert team has deep experience in higher education and print alumni magazines, and we’ll help you make the most of our advice if you’ve need an expert on your team.

Why clients tell us they hire us

Want to know some reasons from Capstone clients themselves about why they’ve hired us to complete a Magazine Action Plan with their institution?

Here’s what they’ve told us:

“We think it will be very valuable to hear from you examples of how other publications have achieved success for their organizations and universities…that connection you have to working within the alumni publication world alone makes this worthwhile for us!”

“I really like your eblasts. Always really well done and informative. So when I thought about who could help us, you were the obvious choice!”

“We need an expert to confirm things we know aren’t working.”

“How can we redirect story ideas that work better in other outlets (i.e.,not everything is a magazine story, it could be social media, a news release, etc.)?”

“Evidence/feedback/confirmation that some of the things we suspect would be better for the magazine.”

“I would love to get more feedback from alumni, although I’m not sure how I would receive that. I don’t know what level of interaction with alumni/readers is normal, but I would love for them to be more engaged. Are there proven ways to get readers to interact? Also, I’d like to produce a magazine that includes interesting, meaningful and well-packaged content that people say they look forward to receiving. More interaction with constituents seems key, and an increase in donations also would be nice, although I’m not sure how we would measure that.”

If any of these situations sound familiar, YES, Capstone can help!

Is this right for me?

Every alumni magazine, every audience, and every institution is different. You might wonder if your specific institution can really benefit from the Capstone Magazine Action Plan.

And we’ll be honest: it isn’t right for everyone. But for the right schools, we believe it can make an extraordinary difference.

The Capstone Magazine Action Plan is right for you if…

  • You want your magazine to have a bigger impact on your audience, including the support of strategic goals, donor gifts, and reader engagement.
  • You want your magazine to cut through the mailbox clutter to become a publication worthy of your readers’ time — and a powerful social signal that earns a place on their coffee table.
  • You want targeted, step-by-step actions for your magazine, not general tips and tactics.
  • You want specific examples of the ways other publications have solved the problems you’re facing.
  • You’re ready to begin making real changes to your magazine.
  • You’re happy to make a real investment in your magazine.

The Capstone Magazine Action Plan is not right for you if…

  • You need immediate feedback. We devote dozens of hours to your publication, because we believe it’s worth it. It takes about 8 weeks to complete each action plan, from the moment of our first deep-dive call to the finished report.
  • You don’t have the authority to make meaningful changes to your magazine. We’ve designed this action plan for you to do exactly that: take action! If you don’t have the authority to make changes, we don’t recommend you invest in this service until you have your key stakeholders on board.
  • You have an online-only publication. Although we’ve done extensive work with online publications, this service is designed for print publications only.

Here’s what our clients say about our work

We know your institution, your publication, and your goals aren’t like others.

That’s why we launch your action plan with a carefully developed questionnaire and a wide-ranging phone call with you — so we can understand what you and your magazine need.

In our work with more than 100 university magazines — plus our two decades studying hundreds of other university and consumer publications — we’ve learned the universal principles that work, and we know how to adapt them to work with your audience.

Here’s what real Capstone Magazine Action Plan clients have said about our work:

“We will be addressing almost all of the critiqued areas, following a lot of the action items Capstone identified… we’re taking everything seriously as we do a deep dive into shaping the fresh look and content we’re aiming to achieve.”

“The Capstone Magazine Action Plan exceeded my expectations on all fronts. It verified the quality of our content and design, letting us know what we were getting right, but then presented a number of detailed action steps that we could easily make to improve the publication.”

“I am the editor of an alumni magazine at a small, private liberal arts institution. We publish twice a year and mail to about 32,000 alumni and friends. I am the editor, the art director, the graphic designer, the class notes assembler, the liaison with the printer, and the chief bottle washer! The editor position is one of many hats I wear at the university. In addition to no dedicated staff (other than me), the magazine also has no dedicated budget. An action plan enables me to be better poised to plan the editorial content in advance…and also, perhaps, to allow me to request additional collateral ($$$) for photography, illustrations, or writers.”

“I could not be happier with the feedback and recommendations in the action plan. I especially found the delineation of the Action Steps and Stretch Goals helpful. It was clear that you and your team understand our challenges, and you responded with a plan that is concise, creative and appropriate for our magazine staffing and budget. It was definitely worth the price.”

“It was really valuable to have an expert tell us what alumni value reading about and what increases engagement, and then to form an outline that we can be consistent with from issue to issue.”

“The most valuable pieces for me were the sections about building structure in the feature well and the magazine mission and goals. I also plan to try ideas with campus news and classnotes. Thank you!”

We know that even a few insights can make this service well worth the investment — and our report will include dozens of them.

Get Started

or email erin [at] getcapstone.com with the subject line “Magazine Action Plan”

Get started!

$7,500

Reserve My Spot

or email erin [at] getcapstone.com with the subject line “Magazine Action Plan”

Questions? Email me directly at erin@getcapstone.com. I’m happy to share more or set up a call so you can see if the action plan is right for you.

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Capstone helps schools create more effective print magazines through action plans, strategic storytelling, and online courses.

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