Customer Spotlight: Oberlin College
Led by Emily Cole, Director of Alumni Engagement, Danielle Vath, Assistant Director of Alumni Engagement, and Kyle Youngblood, Assistant Director of Alumni Engagement, Oberlin is seeing great results!
The Alumni Engagement team at Oberlin has worked hard to provide new, engaging programming for their alumni when in-person events are off the table. Their newest community, Obiewood, has had over 160 active members join since launch in August, and is a critical piece in having over 57% of their site’s members actively consuming messages, joining communities, and viewing discussions.
We are proud to partner with the Oberlin team and are excited to see what new opportunities they can unlock for digital engagement.
How They're Doing It
Obiewood was established as a network of alumni, parents and friends of the college in the Los Angeles area involved in the entertainment industry. It provided the opportunity to gather and network with each other, relying on location and in-person experiences.
When COVID-19 hit, the Oberlin Alumni Engagement team was presented the opportunity to open the network to all alumni interested in the entertainment industry across the world. Shifting their previously in-person programming to digital gave the team an opportunity to create an Obiewood Community in Wisr.
A wide variety of events
All Obiewood events were moved to a virtual format allowing additional members of the Oberlin community to participate online. The Obiewood Community in Wisr serves as a place to post digital content for people to watch on their own timeline and engage with Obiewood for the first time. It also provides a place to continue conversation after virtual events and share good news - career moves, professional triumphs, etc.
The team communicates with Obiewood Community members frequently and uses Wisr as the primary platform for posting digital content. The Oberlin team relies on Wisr site-generated emails to serve as teasers and quick promotion of upcoming events and programming.
Engagement is a team effort
The Oberlin Alumni Engagement team, and the Career Development Center cooperatively play an active role in posting content and engaging with Obiewood members. They created a site member named “Obie Wood” to serve as a moderator in the community and as the office’s way to generate content so not all of the posts were coming from staff accounts.
The Alumni Engagement team has also recruited several young alumni to serve as community leaders who are responsible for connecting alumni to students within the community, as well as posting content, articles, and positive news about other alumni in the group.
Oberlin is laser-focused on finding opportunities during COVID. In the process of “digitizing” their programming, the team is using communities and content previously available to smaller groups of alumni and offering them to a much wider audience. We will be excited to see what other experiments yield great results for their team!