Ways to Help Southwestern College, Even on a Low Budget: A Call for Action
Many students, alumni, and friends of Southwestern College would be happy to donate to the school financially, but are not currently in a great position to do so. If this is true for you, let me give you some thoughts on how to help the College in a different and perhaps more do-able way.
I have become an ardent fan of Social Media of late, and have learned a lot of stuff with which I will not bore you to absolute tears, which, believe me, I could. (No, REALLY….)
So, briefly, here are some things for you to know:
1. Google is an enormously powerful tool for recruitment at Southwestern College, and almost 90% of the College’s income derives from student tuition (not unusual for small schools). So to be empowered on Google, on the web, is one of our best “development” strategies ever.
2. More prospective students finding us will mean more students at the College, which will mean stronger finances, which will mean better resources for our students, better pay for our faculty, more new buildings, and so on. Good stuff.
3. One of the ways we get stronger and higher ratings from Google is by people like you doing any or all of the following:
- Clicking and reading our blogs
- Visiting our web pages often
- “Liking” us on Facebook
- “Following” us on Twitter
- When you read a blog post of a wall post in Facebook, “Like” them, or better, “Comment” on them, or better yet, “Share” them on your own wall, or with your own emailing list.
- Re-Tweet SWC Tweets
- Consider writing a blog post for SWC
- Tell all of YOUR Facebook Friends to consider “Liking” us and “Subscribing” to our blog pages
4. Some of the above might sound foreign to you if you are not part of the Social Media world (yes, there are 6 or 7 of you left on the planet…..) I hope you will trust me when I say that Social Media is the largest and fastest growing consumer and communications phenomenon in the history of the world. Facebook has 800 million plus regular users, and if Facebook were a country, it would be the 3rd largest on earth, and the fastest growing. Let that sink in.
5. Maybe you are not familiar with this stuff, or you think you do not like it, or whatever. I do not want to argue that one way or the other. What I want you to know for purposes of this conversation is that Social Media Is (are?) Huge beyond imagination, and getting huger. Fortune 500 companies are all onboard, every university in the country is too, and the MIT’s Harvards and Stanfords are among the most active. No kidding.
6. Social Media is changing the world fast, and Southwestern College is fully onboard (as are Ram Das, Ammaji, Eckhart Tolle, Deepak Chopra, Naropa and on and on…My point here is that whether Social Media is your cup of tea or not, it can be used, and is being used, to promote the “Transformation of Consciousness” by a lot of us.
And the greater point is, you can help tremendously by supporting the Southwestern efforts online, and it costs you nothing but a little bit of enjoyable time. What can you do, exactly? Well, all of what is outlined above. When you read, Like, Comment, Share and Subscribe to our wall posts or blogs, Google’s Spiders read that as “This College must be really interesting and compelling and dynamic, so we should move them up our Visibility Charts.” (I am making up the language here, but you get the point—though I am NOT making up “Spider”) Your activity in support of our Social Media is thus extremely valuable. Even many people at the College are not yet quite “getting” this, and we are working to get everybody onboard—at least educated about how this stuff works.
It looks simple, it is simple. And powerful.
I look forward to seeing a marked increase in our subscribers, readers, Likers, Comments, Shares, and all those great metrics that tell us how we are doing online.
See you in the Google Analytics Funny Papers….
President Nolan
About the Moderator
Jim Nolan is in his 6th year as president of Southwestern College. He has worked for a dozen universities or colleges, both online and on the ground. He holds a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology, and attended graduate school in English/Irish Literature. He reads a lot of books, takes a lot of photos, plays guitar, got married in India in 2010, and has a wire haired fox terrier named Barney. He is the opposite of a guru, whatever that is called.
