As a former class notes editor, I couldn’t possibly be more excited to share this interview and some incredible resources with you.

Here’s the scoop: Many years ago, I served as the class notes editor for an alumni magazine.

It was grueling, thankless work. I carefully transcribed cursive notes from alumni who were 3,000 years old. My eyes crossed while I captioned wedding photos with dozens of alumni faces. And the only time I heard a word was when alumni called to tell me I’d misspelled the name of their baby.

Trust me: I understand, at a cellular level, why editors want to put their class notes online to free up print real estate. I understand why they want to cut those sections in half or ditch them entirely.

But that might just be the wrong move.

It’s not just that alumni routinely rank it as the number one thing they turn to when they get their magazines. It’s that it’s one of the best ways to truly engage a huge number of your alumni — which is probably a big reason for your magazine’s existence in the first place.

But you don’t have to take my word for it.

You can take the word of Bill Weber, the Director of Alumni Communications for Harvard Business School.

Bill Weber

HBS Alumni Bulletin, the quarterly alumni magazine for the school, enlists the help of nearly 1,000 (!) volunteers to produce their Class Notes, which stretches to 450 (!!!) pages for each quarterly issue. (Alumni are split into 3 different categories, and get the 150 most relevant pages for them, but still.)

In a year, that’s 1,800 pages — TWO copies of Infinite Jest stacked on top of each other.

We had a wide-ranging conversation about class notes, and below, you’ll find an edited version of our discussion.

Weber shared:

• What it takes to do this kind of work for the magazine
• Why Harvard values it so much
• Specific benefits he sees for the institution as a result

He also shares an incredibly valuable PDF of prompts and ideas that I think you’ll love — no matter what your class notes are like.

So…without further ado:

You have, by far, the most robust class notes section of any school I’ve seen. Why does Harvard value this section so much?

Class Notes is the single most-popular piece of communication that comes from the school on a regular basis. We have done reader surveys for years. Consistently, 98 percent of the respondents say, “Well, the first thing I do is I turn to my page in the Class Notes in the Bulletin. Then if I have time, I’ll look at the front part.”

The most recent issue of HBS’s magazine

Is its popularity what makes it valuable? Is there an explicit return on investment?

People want to know what other people are up to. So you have to feed that interest one way or another. The whole point of feeding that is to remind people of their connection to the school and to strengthen the bonds among them as a group. Then, when other communications come from the school or it’s time to do an annual gift or we’re in a fundraising campaign, those alumni are positively inclined towards the school and supporting it. That’s what it’s all about.

I just don’t think, in the near-term future, we would consider getting rid of Class Notes. I think it would be World War III, frankly.

Let’s break down that ONE THOUSAND VOLUNTEERS number.

We have two kinds of class secretaries. For older classes, there is one secretary per class. (Our oldest class with an active secretary is 1950.) But the way the student body is structured, each class is divided into 10 sections of 90 or so people. At some point, we opened it up so there would be a class-wide secretary for each class and there would be a section secretary for each 90-person cohort. So there’s 11 secretaries for any one class, after some point.

They report to us through an online tool. It’s a content submission form, basically, where they can upload their columns and upload photographs. That’s the system that we use to edit all the notes. It has various editing tools built into it — like automatically shortening vice president to VP, or bold-facing names — to help.

How do you manage that many people?

We have a variety of guides and documents. We have a style guide that is sent to each of the secretaries. Then we remind them on a regular basis of certain things. For instance, there’s a length limit (1,800 words) and a photos limit (two, except for reunion classes) — which they push back on all the time, naturally!

The goal is to have them use the online submission tool, but we have certain older, longstanding secretaries who just can’t cope with the online form. So for those, they’ll have someone like their granddaughter email us the column.

There’s one elderly alum who cuts and pastes the letters and emails he gets from classmates into a document. It’s almost like a ransom note. Then he mails it in, so we receive it in its pasted, taped-together form. Then there’s another one who hand writes his 1,800 words. We serve them as best as we possibly can.

The majority play by the rules and use the online tool.

It sounds like you have guidelines, but you also let everyone use their own voice, within reason.

Right. We want to preserve the voice and the tone of however somebody writes. We know that particular kinds of people like to volunteer for this role. They’re networkers and social connectors. Their personality shines through in the way they communicate with people. So to keep it genuine, we want to keep their voice.

When we are doing the editing of the notes, the majority of the work involved in the editing is more like copy editing: making sure that punctuation is correct and that our automated abbreviation system didn’t turn something into gobbledygook. We’re looking for misspellings and that occasional “gone too far” political comment or swipe at a classmate.

The personality is part of what makes it appealing for the readers, because they remember Fred or Susan as speaking that way, and so it comes across. Having people who will put that bit of extra effort into reporting on their classes and things like that makes it hugely different.

There’s no institutional messaging or anything else like that in the Class Notes. It’s just building the bond among people who went to school together and having that then reflect on their personal relationships to each other or their personal loyalty to the school. (Want to see some of the tips and prompts class secretaries get? Get the 2-page PDF here.)

Folks get the most 150 relevant pages of notes for each quarterly issue. That’s still a lot of pages! How do you think about costs?

Yes, it’s a huge operation, and it’s expensive as all get-out. But it’s all worth it.

Every once in a while, we revisit the length limit for columns. I’ve been here 10 years. Just prior to when I came, they made a decision to get more strict about the length, because the notes were growing quite a bit. We’ve maintained that relative strictness, but we haven’t reduced it.

Then there’s the paper stock. It’s very thin but not terribly transparent, like newsprint. We choose that because it’s so much thinner than the paper in the front of the magazine and therefore weighs much less. From time to time, we have to make changes in that paper. It’s definitely worth it, in terms of keeping the cost of the notes down.

Everyone that we have a mailing address for is sent a copy of the magazine, all 84,000, regardless of where they live, including the two alums in Uzbekistan.

Let’s go through some of the other arguments against class notes sections. First, everybody’s already on social media, right?

That’s a challenge that we have in classes from the last five or six years in particular. They’re posting a picture of their breakfast on Instagram. Everyone in their group knows the minute they have a baby. So there we fight a little bit of an uphill battle of, “Why should I submit a report about my latest vacation when I posted 400 Instagram photographs of our trip to Nepal?”

But even for those classes, there are secretaries. They work to gather news as best they can. Not every class or section is perfect, but most of them do it. My feeling is that as those alumni age, as they get to their fifth or their tenth reunion, the classic nature of Class Notes will make much more sense. At some point, they’re going to lay off of Instagram.

Or get off certain platforms altogether. As people change social platforms, they might not bring all of their university classmates with them.

Platforms are changing. We’re present in all of that stuff, and we celebrate success and all the rest with classmates on those social platforms.

We monitor things. We keep a record of how many pages of notes were done by each class and section in each issue. We do it just to watch the up and down cycles. That’s where we noticed it was like five, six years out or so, is where the Class Notes are the thinnest. Then once you get past 10, it’s pretty consistent. Nearly every class and every section has a secretary, and they’re producing notes at least two or three times per year in the production cycle.

Another gripe: class notes aren’t particularly timely, at least compared to what most of us are used to.

Class Notes, in the form that we do it, runs completely counter to all other publishing trends because it’s on paper and it takes a long time to get the word out. The news, what’s going into Class Notes, is four to six months old by the time somebody receives it. But it has a sort of timeless quality that doesn’t bother the majority of the alumni.

That said, we post Class Notes online as soon as they’re ready in our production cycle. That’s usually three to as much as five weeks ahead of when the magazine arrives at people’s doors. We promote it in our e-newsletter and mobile app as soon as it’s available online. And people do read the notes online — especially international alumni, for whom it takes even longer to receive their magazine.

Are there other things that you think make the print version valuable?

The classic argument about why a print publication has benefits over a digital one is the browsing factor. We do run photographs. There are a couple photographs for everybody’s column. If you flip through the pages, you’re going to find interesting pictures that might pull you in. There’s the person riding the elephant or parasailing somewhere or on top of Mount Everest that gets your attention. It gets you to read the caption and maybe read a little bit of the item. That’s great if that happens, because those are reflections on the interesting lives that our alumni have.

Do you get story ideas from this section?

Class Notes are a gold mine for story ideas. Those ideas are both business-related (people starting new companies or second careers, writing books, supporting nonprofit work around the world, etc.) and personal experiences and adventures. One of my favorites from mining Class Notes was an alum who holds the Guinness World Record for having climbed the Seven Peaks AND sailed all Seven Seas. And he sailed some of them with his wife and their severely disabled daughter. Now he uses the experience as a motivational speaker on leadership and mission focus. (You can read the story here.)

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What do you think? How is your own class notes section working — or not working? Shoot me an email and let me know!

Today, I’m excited to share an interview I did with the editor of George Washington University’s alumni magazine, Danny Freedman. He talked about what went into the planning for GW Magazine, how he and his team approach their stories differently than those at other alumni and university magazines, and what advice he has for others plotting out their own theme issues.

If you’re interested in reading more about theme issues, you can read the interview I did with the former and current editors of Stanford Business Magazine, Michael Freedman and Deborah Petersen.

Tell me about the genesis of the issue.

We’d taken on our first theme issue last summer; it revolved around adventure and it was just a lot of fun to put together.

That one took shape as four features: We had a round-up with 10 or so vignettes, from the doctor who founded a clinic at Mt. Everest’s Base Camp to the first person to circumnavigate the globe in a submarine to a dentist-turned-part-time-racer who helped establish the Corvette as a muscle car. We talked with an acrobat and we talked with a space shuttle commander.

We also had a feature on the visual effects supervisor for that summer’s blockbuster, Wonder Woman. We did a feature on a paleontologist in South Africa who was working on one of the largest dinosaurs of the early Jurassic period (now called the “Highland Giant,” but its first nickname, decades ago, was the “Holy S*** Dinosaur”). And we commissioned a first-person feature from a 2013 alumna who’d been working as a foreign correspondent, covering conflict in Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere.

That issue was a lot of fun — it was different, and the confines of a theme gave us a new challenge to puzzle our way through. It was well received, and so we started thinking about other themes.

We knew we didn’t want to do topics like “food” or “water,” which so many have done so ably. We were kicking around ideas, and Matt Stoss, our associate editor, suggested “power.” The more we thought about it, the deeper it resonated. There was nowhere that a “power” issue couldn’t go.

The one thing we knew for sure at the outset was: We didn’t want this in any way to resemble a typical D.C. “powerful people” list, either in form or function. We wanted stories that went beneath the surface to something genuine — what it really feels like to encounter power, to wield it, to have it wielded against you.

We started a list of types of power that seemed ripe for exploration — electrical, political, familial, muscular, etc. — and we got busy searching.

How much more effort did it take to do a theme issue compared to a regular issue?

For us, these took quite a bit of doing, maybe in part because we were new to it.

It’s tough to quantify how much more effort. Here’s one measure, though: I’d say for the two theme issues we’ve done, we began working — brainstorming, searching, winnowing the list — a full year out, where ordinarily we might just be planning six months or fewer in advance.

Finding good stories that fit inside a single topic and offer an array of angles required extra time. For the “power issue,” we ended up with 10 features across 50 pages of the magazine.

Did you consider other themes before choosing this one?

A bunch. And it became clear pretty quickly which ones had the right constellation of potential breadth, tone and intrigue.

“Power” is something everyone can relate to, and we were sure there were good stories within our alumni body.

We had set aside ideas like “wood” and “meat” that we hadn’t seen done before; they might be really rich subjects for another alumni body, but ultimately for us seemed to increase the odds we’d come up short.

Tell me more about why you decided to create subcategories of power (natural power, manmade power, and the power of identity) in the table of contents. Did it limit you? Did it open up different types of possibilities?

Actually we came up with this later in the process. With 10 features, we realized the magazine would feel unruly, and some of the smaller stories would get buried.

We hoped the categories would give it structure, and they allowed us to create three visual pauses (and mini-TOCs) (page 26, page 46, page 64) to break up the content.

What were you proudest of pulling off in the issue — was there anything that worked even better than you imagined it would? Anything that didn’t quite meet your expectations?

I’m really proud of the cumulative slate of stories we told here: they’re fresh perspectives, they’re weighty — these are all pretty high-profile people sharing very intense, personal things.

I’m proud of the designers for building an aesthetic throughline that could tie together so many stories and so many pages. That’s tough.

Lastly — and I offer this under my own free will, honest — this is all possible because we have bosses who trust us and give us the latitude to pull off things like this. And I’m proud that, over the years, we’ve won that trust.

Were there things you really wanted to do in this issue but couldn’t, for whatever reason?

Not much. There were of course a few stories we didn’t get to tell, just due to time, but we’ll get to those eventually. And it might’ve been nice if we could have arranged for the front-of-book to be part of the theme, too — just “power” stories, cover to cover. Maybe next time.

One of the things I love about GW’s work is that you seem to really care about getting the details right. Are there specific things that you did that you’re really proud of — but that also might be easy to overlook?

Wow, thanks. I’m glad that comes through.

One thing that comes to mind is the use of outside sources. For us, it’s one of the easiest things we can do as an alumni magazine to show readers that we’re serious.

It doesn’t always pan out: In our profile of an alumna who was struck by lightning, part of the story revolves around a private audience she had with the Dalai Lama during her recovery. The writer, Matt Stoss, reached out to the Dalai Lama’s press people to see if he might want to talk for the story. We never heard back, but it was worth a try. [Erin adds: !!!!!!!!]

Matt did get other sources, including the alumna’s 14- and 10-year-old kids, who added this wonderful comic relief to the storytelling (they told Matt that electronics and WiFi seem to go on the fritz when their mom’s around), but also a new perspective — we hear from the kids how their mom broached with them that incident and what she passed along to them about lightning.

Similarly, in the story about the Vietnam veteran who is the second-longest-held American POW  in U.S. history, our colleague Rachel Muir sought and received reflections from the now late-U.S. Sen John McCain, who spent five and a half years jailed in the “Hanoi Hilton” with our alumnus. That added a new dimension to the portrait she was sketching.

Did you do any promotion or story sharing in other channels, like social media, web, etc? What did that look like?

We promoted the stories on our Twitter feed (@TheGWMagazine), and got some good boosts from interviewees sharing the stories themselves on social media.

Plus, for each issue we send a table-of-contents like email to all alumni, students, faculty and staff. But we didn’t have a chance to do as much promotion as we would’ve liked. It’s an area we’re working on.

We’re a full-time staff of two, so we really need a strategy in place in order for that promotional legwork to not get lost in the shuffle.

It seems like the issue was well received, based on the letters in the subsequent issue. Were there any other metrics or anecdotes that indicated that the issue made an impact?

The letters are probably the most meaningful indicator. Any time people are moved to take a moment out of what they’re doing to send us a note — a nice note, at that — really makes me feel that we struck a chord.

It also helps us demonstrate here the magazine’s role in connecting the alumni body and that, as with all things, when we put out good work and authenticity, people respond to that.

What did you learn from the experience that you would do differently for a theme issue in the future?

When building the story list we (the editors) were focused on story, story, story, because narrative is our comfort zone.

But it would’ve been nice to find a way to present even just one feature visually. The University of Alberta’s New Trail magazine did a “future of everything” issue a couple years ago and did a fantastic job of mixing narrative and more visual storytelling.

I also think about something I saw in Stanford Business a few years ago. All of their issues are theme-based; they did one around the idea of “risk,” and there in the bottom corner of every right-hand page, almost imperceptibly, was a flipbook illustration of a stick figure jumping out of an airplane, free falling and then opening a parachute.

What a brilliant, light touch of levity. Next time we do this, I think I’d strive to find something like that—something that’s just for fun. [Erin adds: This is incredible. It’s also something that only a print magazine could pull off. I love it when folks find ways to maximize the medium they’re working in. If I had gotten that magazine as an alum, I would have kept it on my coffee table forever, and would have shown people that little delightful detail.]

Any advice for folks planning out their own theme issue?

• Look around you. What are things your community (or all of us) relate to?
• Go through your story idea files. You might already have the makings of a theme there for the taking. Much of our “adventure issue” was drawn from a list I’d been keeping for years, all these ideas that never quite seemed to fit in other issues.
• Make a list. For the “power issue” we started with types of power that we found interesting — like muscles, bombs, gatekeepers, the absence of power, electricity, parental authority — and then looked for stories within those areas. Once you have a list, then go through it critically. Show it to others. Think: Is this story really in-theme … or is it just one I’m wanting to tell, or one that’s already in the can?
• Listen. Listen to any or all of the hundreds of episodes of the theme-based radio show/podcast This American Life. Nobody does it better.

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Planning out your own theme issue?

Tell me what topics you’re considering, what’s proving toughest, and what your hopes are for the finished product.

Recently, Skidmore’s Mary Monigan weighed in on the pros and cons of ditching your printed alumni magazine based on her school’s experience — as well as a survey she conducted of more than 40+ institutions. If you missed it, you can read the full interview here.

Today, I’m excited to share a story from Lynette Lamb, who spent more than a decade as the editor of the quarterly alumni magazine published by Macalester College. She spoke at a CASE conference a few years ago in Minneapolis about the development of Macalester’s digital magazine and app.

Here she shares more details about the decision behind and the development of the app, what she and the institution learned during the process, and why the college ultimately ditched the custom magazine app they developed. Lamb has also edited Carleton’s Voice, Minnesota Monthly, and Utne Reader magazines, as well as taught journalism at several Twin Cities universities. She is currently a Minneapolis-based writer, editor, and editorial consultant. (Reach her here: lynettelamb2@gmail.com.)

Lynette Lamb

Tell me about the initial interest in creating a digital magazine. In 2012–13, there were a lot of people developing iPad-specific apps for their magazines. Several influential members of the Mac community, including some members on the Board of Trustees, thought it would be cool to have an app for Macalester Today magazine. We staffers caught the fever, too, and decided the app should have extra “assets” — photos, audio, and video. Plus, we had been spending a lot of money, perhaps $8,000 or $10,000 an issue, to send our magazine to international alumni and friends. We reasoned that if we could stop sending the magazine internationally, and encourage people to download the app, we could reduce those mailing costs.

That makes sense. But the costs to develop it weren’t zero, right? We had a freelance designer who did a separate design for the app, basically from scratch. So that doubled our design cost per issue, though even after that expense we still saved a bit on postage. And it was cool. We presented it at the CASE Editors Forum a few years ago in Minneapolis, and editors were really interested.

Tell me more. It was one of those techno-dream things. In our minds, we thought: maybe this is the direction things are going. Maybe this is how people will read magazines and books from now on. We thought that eventually we might stop printing and mailing the magazine entirely.

That’s pretty bold! Online is definitely seductive, and print is expensive. We were spending about $25,000 per issue on printing at the time, plus thousands more for postage. And those costs, of course, only continue to go up.

What was the reaction among the alumni community? We hoped that the app would be cool enough that everyone would download it and show it to folks on airplanes or to their friends. But fast forward a year, and when we looked into the numbers we found that only a few hundred people were downloading the app — out of a circulation of 32,000.

That seems low. Yes. We were surprised. We had done a good job publicizing it, and the app itself was great. But it turned out that people wanted a paper magazine. We started by adding a few international alumni back to our paper mailing list — not all, but some. After about a year and a half, we stopped producing the app.

Were there other lessons in this process? I don’t think people remember to seek out their alumni materials online. You really need to get in front of them purposefully, and to have a regular connection — and, I would argue, to make that connection at least quarterly. By publishing two or three magazines a year, you will save money, but at what cost? How much are you really saving per alum? And is that savings worth diluting your alumni relationships?