Third Thursday Tiger Talk
The Nitty-Gritty
Tips & Tricks for Club Marketing & Operations
November 17, 2022
1:00 – 2:00 p.m. ET
Hosted by the Committee on Regional Associations (CORA)
Presented by Princeton Club of Austin
Tips & Tricks Discussion
1. Marketing: Princeton connections with regional flair
2. Operational: Time savers & engagement enhancers
3. Financial: Cost savings & revenue boosters
2
Hosted by the Committee on Regional Associations (CORA)
Presented by Princeton Club of Austin
MARKETING
4
Princeton shield variations
5
With regional flair…
Tip: Don’t have access to a graphic designer? Adobe Illustrator has a 14-day free trial
(but has a learning curve… YouTube videos help!)
6
Additional creative expressions…
Tip: Inkscape is a free open-source design tool (also has a learning curve… YouTube videos help!)
Princeton Official Fonts
• Princeton Monticello and Franklin
Gothic
• Princeton Monticello rooted in 18
th
century & was commissioned by
Princeton University Press in 1950’s
• Princeton Monticello digitized in
2003 & recommended for
Headers
and logo “signature lock-ups”
7
Princeton Monticello
Franklin
Gothic
8
Princeton Orange
• Pantone (PMS) 158 – closest ink match to the
swatch of cloth showing the orange adopted by the
trustees in 1959
• For the web (note backgrounds and font sizes)
Class of 1870 ribbon
From Princeton
University Archives
Tip: Benjamin Moore Startling Orange is the closest match among major paint brands
9
Learn more…
• Princeton’s Colors & Shields:
https://princetoniana.princeton.edu/things-princeton/colors-shields
• Princeton’s Logo & Graphic Identity:
https://communications.princeton.edu/guides-tools/logo-graphic-
identity
• Full graphic identity guide (aka ‘brand kit’): contact Alumni
Engagement Office
10
Princeton Colors & Fonts in Austin
Newsletter Excerpt
Tip: Most website design platforms allow you to upload custom fonts
11
Signage fun…
Tip: Upcycle a used
retractable banner (i.e.
from a tradeshow) and
replace the vinyl banner
12
Annual Mailers
Tips: designed with Canva; “Mandarin”
envelopes from Envelopes.com
Tip: Canva Pro subscription is
free
for non-profits!
This lightbulb graphic is from Canva and was changed to Princeton orange!
Marketing Channel Tips
1. Email via TigerNet – most effective for event awareness
2. Social Media – see best practices featured in February 2022 T-
Quad by Stephanie Bachas-Dauchert ‘10
3. Website – helps newcomers who haven’t updated TigerNet
4. Mailers – reaches every registered local address
5. Phone / Text – leverage demographic preferences (tools like
simpletexting.com help automate, but are not cheap)
13
OPERATIONS
15
Knowledge Continuity
• Upfront effort to organize team documentation and
create how-to playbooks saves time in the long run
• Leadership transitions can happen unexpectedly…
• Use a shared & secure location to store entity
documentation, financial reports, meeting minutes,
venue research, leadership team playbooks, etc.
Tip: Google Workspace is free for nonprofits
16
Google Workspace Examples
Leadership team email
accounts on custom domain
Standardized
signature blocks
(include phone #)
Individual vs.
Team Drive
Control access at the Team
Drive level or at folder level
Organized via
folders
Tip: Assign minimum 2 Google
Workspace admins for redundancy
17
Keeping the financials organized…
Basic
reports
by date
range
Log transactions as you go
Tips:
1. Zipbooks Starter package is
free
and hits the basics
2. Set income & expense top-level
categories to align with annual
financial report (see resource
slide at end for sample
categories)
Easy input to annual reports:
18
Treasurer Time-Savers
Tip: Create an expense report template
and store all submissions & receipts in
shared Team Drive
Tip: Create Gmail “templates” for quick
dues acknowledgements & receipts
19
Little Details for Big Impact
Regional swag & lapel pins
Edible table décor
Princetonian vineyard
wine for events (e.g.
Kingston, Marimar)
Send a welcome note to new
grads in your region!
20
More Little Details…
Regional or Tiger gifts as prizes
Sponsor dues appreciation
Make special custom name tags
for admitted students with the
class year at a Spring Admit Party
Tigers!
Special cane for the
oldest event attendee
Tip: make
handmade
club sponsor gifts
with donated labor
to keep costs within
the $11.30 IRS
insubstantial
premium threshold,
maintaining full tax-
deductibility of
sponsor dues >
$56.50
21
Personalization & Segmentation
Some ways to boost open rates &
engagement:
1. Leverage TigerNet to send personalized
emails and/or by segment (i.e. decade)
2. Email greeting by name - %{First_Name}
3. Use “senders” representing the segment
4. Customize subject and content
22
How to Segment in TigerNet 2.0
1. Go to Recipients tab & click Show Filters button
2. Paste desired list of emails (requires pre-filtering in an
offline spreadsheet roster)
OR just ask TigerNet Help Desk for assistance!!
$$$
24
Tips to Save $$
Buy event food & drinks at warehouse
stores (e.g. Costco, Sam’s Club, etc.)
Shop post-Halloween sales for
orange & black décor & supplies
Leverage non-profit status for
sales tax exemptions
Costco sells orange gerbera
daisies online in bulk
Discover awesome finds at thrift
shops or upcycling stores
Example deals:
• $2 easel for signs
• $20 retractable banner
equipment (retail price
$900+)
Examples:
• Restaurants
• Service providers
• Grocery stores
• Postage (requires
application with USPS)
Buy multi-year quantities
(lapel pins, envelopes, etc.)
25
Money-Saving Events & Venues
• Informal events - hikes, trivia nights, dog romps, hobby hours, etc.
• Local author talks / guided discussions
• Group community service events
• Gather at outdoor art exhibits, concerts in a park, or festivals
• Princeton sponsored events – e.g. Princeton Entrepreneurship
Council TigerTalks on the Road
• Retirement communities (low-cost auditoriums, community rooms)
• Find local alumni serving on boards of local organizations & ask for
free hosted tours of museums, parks, etc.
26
Revenue Boosters
1. Grants – i.e. CORA, PWN, APGA
2. Event Sponsors
3. Annual Dues (note: never required for “membership”)
a) Consider discounts for recent alumni, parents, Old Guard
b) Consider sponsorship tiers
If you collect dues, 10% local alumni participation is a great target!
(may take a few years to get there)
Tips: periodic physical mailers can drive awareness and higher dues participation; regular activities &
multi-channel communication with event updates & photos demonstrate regional “value” and can
also boost dues contributions
POST-PRESENTATION
DISCUSSION SUMMARY
29
Question:
How much time does it take to do ALL of this? We have a small team.
• It is NOT necessary to do everything in this presentation simultaneously. Start small, go gradually –
pick one thing to focus on at a time, and you can build momentum over time.
• Start with hosting an event to bring people together and share that you a) want to reinvigorate your
club and b) that you need help (reboot donations, dues, volunteers, etc.)
• In-person events can be BYO/Potluck if you don’t have any cash reserves to pay for snacks – can
do a reinvigoration event any time, but a holiday party is a great idea!
• Virtual events are also easy, and you can partner with a neighboring bigger / more established
region for something joint
• Leverage TigerNet Help Desk to assist with email communications to your regional alumni
• Email alumnivolunteers@princeton.edu or call 855-249-1829
30
Question:
How much $$ do you need on hand per local alumni capita to reboot a club?
• You can reboot a club with $0 in the bank – by hosting free events, requiring donations or tickets at
the door to cover food & drink expenses, getting sponsors for events, or by holding BYO/Potluck events
• Ask Alumni Engagement for a “Party Pack” with Princeton tablecloths, balloons, etc.; and/or use
your Orange & Black Day party box swag
• Create FOMO by including event photos in future email communications and/or social media
• As a reboot investment example, PCA had $2,400 in cash reserves when embarking on a reboot in
Fall 2021, with ~700 local alumni. Decided as a Board to make the investment with eye-catching
mailer, new website & tasty food for a Fall event, assuming we could recover the $ and more with dues
• Spent ~$1,000 on a physical mailer in late September ‘21
• Spent ~$500 on snacks at an October park event - tacos, pizza, chips, kid & adult beverages
• Spent ~$200 on website hosting fees good for 12 months
• Collected ~$3,000 in dues by end of October ’21 covering those expenses and our big annual
holiday party expenses; collected another ~$2,000 by end of March ‘22 (with track record of 20+
events last year, PCA collected ~$5,000 in dues within 6 weeks of our mailer this year)
31
Question:
How much does a physical mailer cost?
• PCA’s most recent brochure on slide # 12 cost $1,015 for 755 mailed pieces via a full-service local
print shop (printing, folding, stuffing, envelope addressing, postage). Design done entirely in Canva.
• Cost savers:
• Leveraged non-profit bulk mail postage rates by completing USPS nonprofit application
• PCA did an initial address clean-up to combine mailers for alumni spouses (saved ~$50-75)
• Print shop also ran addresses through their system for a clean-up - removed invalid addresses
and people who had moved away from Austin per USPS
• If PCA had done the folding & envelope stuffing and labeling ourselves, could have saved a few
hundred $ - but not sure we could have gotten the nonprofit bulk mail rates without the print shop
• Consider sending physical mailer every few years, or just to older demographics in alumni roster
• Use tax exempt status to avoid sales tax on print shop services
• Other points:
• NDA / strict privacy policy required for print shops using our mailing list to perform services
• Princeton Mail Services is also an option you can pay for – but need to plan for lead-time
• PC South Florida spent $300 mailing newsletter to 100 oldest alumni – recouped it & more!
32
Question:
To segment your mailings, you need to download your entire roster from the
University into an Excel sheet – how frequently are you doing this?
• PCA gets a roster 1-2 times a year, so some of our segmentation emails will inevitably miss some
people. We don’t segment our emails that often – but save for major events where the targeted
marketing will make a bigger impact (e.g. Speaker Dinner, Fall Kick Off)
• Suggestion: leverage TigerNet Help Desk for assistance with these emails. They should have the data
available and can help load the email segments into TigerNet 2.0 for you.
33
Question:
Does Zipbooks automatically connect with your bank account and create
categories?
• Believe Zipbooks has ability to automatically download transactions, but this *may* require one of
their paid subscriptions (not 100% sure).
• PCA created the accounting categories ourselves, but made sure to include parent-level categories
that easily map to the data required for Princeton’s annual club financial reports
• For reference, PCA accounting categories are on the next slide
34
Additional Reference (ZipBooks)
Sharing PCA’s accounting categories for reference. Note, the higher-level parent categories easily tie to
Princeton’s annual financial report. Some parent categories and all the sub-categories are optional – but PCA
uses them for internal tracking.
35
Question:
Do you do any analytics on your alumni to highlight who has come to a lot of
events, and do you target those people to pay dues and/or volunteer?
• PCA tracks attendance at every event as well as dues payment history in a master google spreadsheet
– Board has discussed leveraging our data to send targeted dues nudges to people who have been to
events but not contributed $, or people who paid dues historically but not recently
• Given the already strong dues collections this fall, we haven’t done this yet
• Note: all alumni are automatically a member of a regional association - dues are not mandatory;
we appreciate when people pay what they can, but we appreciate event attendance as well!
• Yes, definitely ask event attendees (either frequent attendees or at a reboot event) about volunteering!
• PCA gained 4 new leaders instrumental to our reboot from a May ’21 outdoor event
• Have recruited others and continue to recruit more from regular attendee pool
• Doesn’t need spreadsheet tracking – you’ll recognize the familiar faces/names!
36
Other Tips:
• Venmo works great for on-the-spot dues collection at events
• More people have this app on their phone than PayPal
• Venmo business kit comes with a placard for our welcome tables with a QR code
• Checks are more typically used by older alumni and arrive shortly after physical mailers are received
• Doodle polls are great to vote on potential days/times for leadership team meetings
• Target is a great store for post-Halloween orange & black décor sales
• The homemade PCA sponsor gifts & and prizes on slide # 20 were made with a Cricut machine – an
easy-to-use digital cutting machine with an intuitive design app for paper, vinyl and other materials
• Recruit a local alumni with a machine who would be willing to volunteer labor and make cute
Tiger & regional themed gifts for your club, or bring machines to a crafting event for multiple
volunteers to assist
37
PCA Templates to Share:
Feel free to contact PCA for any of these materials and customize for
your own club!
• Expense report template
• Gmail templates:
• Dues acknowledgment from Treasurer
• Formal receipt for $250+ donations from Treasurer
• Welcome message from Membership Chair
• Tactical playbooks for Treasurer & Communications Chairs (some things specific to PCA)
• Example template for formal authorization to change bank account signers / owners
• Blank template for tracking dues & event attendance over time
• Sample meeting agenda & minutes
• Links to Canva tri-fold brochure designs (will require a Canva account of your own to view
the designs)
