Harris Connect

“Partnering with Harris Connect was a logical extension of the existing successful partnership between Harris Connect and the UNC General Alumni Association. It's a great opportunity for Kenan-Flagler Business School to take advantage of the data sharing and automatic updates that the smart site technology offers, while maintaining a distinct online presence. The real key for us is that all data updates come through the Alumni Association and integrate seamlessly to the business school site, which eliminates the data management burden.”

“When we launched our community in April 2005, we had the immediate benefit of starting off with a base of users who had already registered through the General Alumni Association. Since then, registration for the online community has reached 10,600, representing more than 30% of our entire database. A key to this success is the fact that we make our Online Community available to new students as soon as they hit the door at orientation. Our marketing strategies for students and alumni highlight different features of the community each month, which has kept our registration list growing at a steady pace.”

Jeff Terry, Executive Director, Alumni Affairs, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School

“Membership Dues paying is a much bigger hit than we imagined it would be. We're impressed at the amount of payments we've gotten, and our membership revenue has already increased since we started. It's very easy-to-use, captures and sorts all the data we need, is much more accurate than a manual process, and it doesn't create any new work for us. All big pluses for us — and alumni like it much more than filling out and mailing forms. Honestly, it's a great feature.”

Brent Richardson, The Citadel Alumni Association

“The numbers for this fiscal year indicate that since 2002-03, we’ve experienced a 206% increase in the number of online gifts and a 292% increase in total online giving dollars raised. We raised $259,408 in online gifts in fiscal 2004-05 compared to $44,398 in 02-03. Obviously the big thing is the overall numbers, but we’ve also seen a huge growth in the average gift amounts. Another area of significant growth is matching gifts, where this year we've seen a 50% increase and raised the largest amount in matching gifts in University history.”

Francine Cronin, Associate Vice President for Annual Giving, Emory University

“Events Management is a fantastic tool with a multitude of possibilities. We tweak the module to handle anything from pure event registration to reunion surveys, homecomings, 5K runs and volleyball tournaments. It's interesting what you can do with it.”

“The tool saves us event budgets and makes us look like we are cutting edge to our constituents at the same time. It’s great that Harris Connect continues to innovate, with features like radio buttons and drop down boxes. These enhancements not only make registration easier for users, they give the URI Alumni Association site a sharp, clean and more professional look.”

“For our recent annual ‘Pride in URI Night,’ we sent a blast email to our entire 23,000 constituent list and did the whole registration and notification process online. We saved $1500 on postage, we reached a larger universe than what we typically mail to, and the number of attendees increased by more than 55%. It's a testimony to the fact that we did not send out one piece of mail – it was completely online – and it passed the test with flying colors. Plus we saved staff time by eliminating the mailing and labeling process, as well as the back-end manual work of inputting.”

“One of the things we like most is that you don’t need to know any HTML coding to use the tool – you just enter what you want to enter and it becomes second nature. Another key is the online training and support, which has been extremely helpful. Harris Connect is very responsive to user feedback, by adjusting the program to better serve our needs. We are very pleased.”

Dave Nicolato, Assistant Director, University of Rhode Island (URI) Alumni Relations