The other day, I was listening to an interview podcast on a run, and the guest said something that literally stopped me in my tracks. She was talking about her background, and she paused over her college education. Here’s what she said:

“I think I got a pretty nice education at [my university]. It wasn’t as good a school then as it is now, and I’m not sure I would’ve gotten into it now! I can see how competitive it is.”

The person who said this — the person who is not quite sure she would have the chops to get into her alma mater — was ELIZABETH GILBERT. You probably know her as the person who wrote Eat, Pray, Love, or maybe you know the movie of the same name starring Julia Roberts, or maybe you know her as one of Oprah’s BFFs.

I laughed when I heard it. It wasn’t because I thought that Elizabeth Gilbert was correct in her assessment. (I MEAN, COME ON.) I laughed because I’d heard a version of that comment from a million other alumni who had attended a million other schools. It was always some version of “I don’t know if I’d even get into [my alma mater] these days if I had to apply now.”

It’s easy to see why. In their alumni magazines, they’ve seen the announcements of their institution’s rise in the U.S. News rankings. They’ve seen the awards that the students are getting, the grants that faculty are landing, and the incredible work that everyone connected to the institution is doing.

If our jobs are to showcase our schools in the best possible light, it turns out that we might be doing those jobs a little TOO well.

Of course we want our alumni to feel proud of the work our schools our doing!

But we also want them to feel something else when they read about fellow alumni, current students, and even faculty. We want them to think to themselves: “These are my people.”

So how do we do that? To my mind, that doesn’t mean we scrap all the news about the incredible work our school’s people are doing. It just means that we should add in a few elements of humanity and humor into the mix.

Make your alumni superheroes lovable.

Here are three ways I think about doing that:

• Ask the people you’re profiling about the elements that humanize them. Yes, that CEO/nonprofit leader/successful research scientist may have rocketed to the top of their field in relatively short order. But one thing you can do in your interviewing (and even give them a heads up in advance, so they can think about it), is to ask them a version of this question: “What was a significant failure you faced, and how did you overcome it?” The question still allows them to be the hero of the story! But it also requires them to share something that has humbled them.

• Include a section devoted to non-braggy feedback. One of my favorite sections in my own alma mater’s alumni magazine is “Prompted” in which the editor asks a questions designed to get responses from…well, just about anyone.

  One example: “Write a memoir in six words, no more, no less.” Responses were funny, thoughtful, and humble. (Sample: “Resolved to make mistakes. Mostly successful.”) I could definitely see myself among this lovable pack of nerds and weirdos. Add a little section to your class notes if you can’t devote a whole page to something like this.

• Restructure your feature concepts. Some of my favorite stories to report and read are ones that are more human by design. For example, years ago, I did a story for Macalester called “The Thing that Changed My Mind.” The very premise demands that people start at a point in which they were wrong!” Plus, the trajectory of the story is really what an education is all about: expanding our mind to open ourselves up to new ideas, empathize with other points of view, and seeing new ways of understanding the world we live in.

If you’ve got a little more leeway with your publication, you might even consider a story explicitly about failure! (This is hard! But it can be done.)

Your publications for your alumni should showcase the very best of your school. But they should also make your alumni feel that your school is a place they can still recognize, even as it improves and evolves.

Reach out to tell me how you’ve tried to humanize your own publications — or the struggles you face while trying to do this.

Here are a few things my team and I have found lately that we think are worth your time.

Struggling with a roundup? Roundup stories are a great way to profile a series of alumni or faculty in a similar field, but how do you make that story reader-friendly? Here are a few suggestions.

Everyone can appreciate some dumb grammar jokes, right? Here’s the rest of the list from above.

And speaking of punctuation… Many of us spent our formative years learning to excise exclamation marks from our writing. But in some cases, we might want to use more, not fewer. If you spend a lot of time emailing — connecting with sources, writers, editors and others — read the argument for adding in a few more exclamation marks into your messages.

An intriguing oral history. I like just about any story about colleges that appears in mainstream magazines, so of course I loved this oral history about Bennington’s freshman class of 1982, which included literary heavyweights Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Letham, and Donna Tartt. I especially appreciated how they integrated meaningful ideas from Donna Tartt, even though she wasn’t interviewed for the story. If you’re considering doing an oral history of some part of your institution’s past but don’t have access to an important source, this is a worthwhile template to consider.

Thanks for reading!

Erin

Let’s set the scene: you’re planning out the next issue of your magazine, and you have that story to do.

And you don’t want to deal with it.

That story looks different for everyone.

• Maybe it’s an annual update of the story you did last year. And the year before that. And the year before that.
• Maybe it’s that strategic priority story that doesn’t seem to have a lot of “there” there.
• Maybe it’s that series of VIP donor profiles your president has been nagging you to write. But you can’t imagine writing more than 10 words about any of them.
• Maybe it’s a really cool story — a topic you’ve been dying to cover — but now that it’s official, you’re panicking that you can’t make it as good as you imagined.

I’ve been there with you: the retiring faculty feature package, the campaign story, the roundup of alumni in XYZ field.

So how do you tackle it? How do you make it something that your audience actually wants to read?

This is an issue I struggled with for years. I’d procrastinate. I’d complain about it to friends. I’d do a cursory search of the web or post a message on one of the writers’ groups I belonged to in search of a brilliant idea.

And then I mostly just did what I’d done before.

But this started to change a few years ago — and now I rarely feel stuck.

It’s not magic! I’m sharing my exact process below.

Build your “good idea database”

A few years ago, I was having lunch with an editor who always seemed to have creative story ideas and knew just how to package them. Surely, I asked him, he had some sort of go-to list or editor encyclopedia that he could consult to figure out the best way to tell any story?
He said he didn’t have any specific resource that he consulted — but if I was so curious about it, maybe I should just build my own “good idea database.”

So I did! It took some real trial and error. But I consider it one of the most powerful tools in the Capstone arsenal. My team and I add to the database every single month. Here’s just a tiny slice of that database:

A snapshot of the database Capstone uses weekly—if not daily—for client projects.

We use this database to develop and refine story ideas, to serve as a launching pad for talks we give to higher ed communicators across the country, and to write this newsletter. It’s hugely important to us.

Here’s exactly how we did it:

1. Start with as much “data” as possible. Get as many magazines as your budget will allow. I subscribe to more than 20. My current favorites are The Hollywood Reporter, Fast Company, Bon Appetit, and New York. (Not a magazine editor? Do the same for the media you work in most frequently, and adjust the instructions that follow accordingly!)

2. Separate the wheat from the chaff. Spend a few minutes flipping through the magazines each week, and when you find something that looks interesting — especially if it’s a story that you wouldn’t normally be interested in, but something about the approach drew you in — snap an image of it with your phone.

3. Enter the story into your database. Use a tool like Airtable to store your images.

4. Categorize wisely. Make sure you categorize it in a few different ways so you can find when you need it. I often remember things by the headline and the publication it appeared in, but I also try to note various categories I think I might use it for in the future — a roundup, a story likely to lead to reader feedback, a story that focuses on pairings.

5. Keep it simple. One of the things I tried to do initially was to include a million different categorizations – bylines, dates, notes. But over time, I found that this was more of an annoying obstacle than a useful tool. I wanted to be able to add things to my database quickly, and if I had to spend 10 minutes laboring over each entry, I simply wouldn’t do it. In the words famously attributed to Einstein, “Make it as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

6. Use it! Yes, it sounds ridiculous. But make sure you’re carving out time at each part of your story process to review what you’ve collected. Sometimes, a single entry at the right moment can help unlock a story in a useful way. It’s easy to start building these resources and then let them collect dust. Don’t let that be you.
We use our database constantly. While the published story might only look a bit like the template that launched it, you can almost always see its DNA.

For example, when Purdue Alumnus wanted to do a big feature on its “Take Giant Leaps” 150th anniversary, Capstone used this New York magazine story from our idea database to create the Giant Leaps Academy feature package.

We used this Creative People feature as the launching point for Kenyon Alumni Bulletin’s How I Got Into Politics.

Yes, it takes time to build this database, and you have to be consistent. But the long-term payoff is huge.

Do you use any tools like this? Let me know.