PARTNERSHIP UPDATE

2007-08 Annual Report

Partnership Plans for 2008-2009

We carry the responsibility for raising the annual funding necessary to enable our teams to compete successfully in an increasingly competitive league, and in the face of significant cost increases in a number of essential areas (our travel and recruiting expenses have been impacted by rising energy costs far beyond any normal rate of increase and these are not “optional” expenditures for any competitive program!).

Raising more money ultimately requires expanding our connections and communications with an increased number of alumni and friends.  Interestingly, if 100% of our alumni and friends, that have made an Athletics Partnership gift in any of the past three years, all made gifts EVERY year, our Partnership totals would rise by more than $1 million!!!

Here are some fundamental goals that we have for the future:

1. To behave more and more like family…..
   • To communicate better
   • To congregate and celebrate
   • To help our programs and one another
2. To organize more effectively, enrolling the support of our alumni body
3. To provide tools to our former student-athletes that will enable them to stay in touch with us and each other
4. To leverage other resources on campus to conduct our work and achieve our objectives
   • Alumni Association
   • Development Office
   • University Communications
   • University Events
5. To become more efficient in our daily activities, utilizing available technologies

Partnership Staff Support

Through various experiences with the Athletics Partnership and other alumni groups, we have determined that we must organize the Athletics Partnership a bit differently.  For reference, we ask you to consider the ‘Regional Clubs’ model that our Alumni Association maintains.  One of the primary reasons our alumni body is so ‘connected, engaged, and involved’, is that the Regional Clubs machine is so mature, vibrant, and active.  We have approximately 60 regional alumni clubs actively involved in Lehigh alumni gatherings and activities.  And while this vast organization is supported by the Alumni Association staff in Bethlehem (with just two people no less!), it is driven largely by our alumni in the field who have committed to leadership roles within their respective geographies.  It is through their efforts that a vast number of gatherings are held, activities are conducted, and connections are made.  We are convinced that creating and maintaining this very large, warm and loyal alumni community is at the foundation of our #18 position in alumni giving participation nationally.

When we consider the potential parallels to the Athletics Partnership, we believe that we can do better in terms of engaging our Athletics alumni in leadership roles and in generating more and better connections among and between our Athletics family members.  However, rather than organizing by geography (like our Alumni Association), we must organize by sport.  It’s what our former athletes relate to, at least primarily!  Soccer players relate to soccer players, football players to football players, lacrosse players to lacrosse players, and so on.  If we want to say we are family, we must behave like family.  But who’s going to take the lead to keep everyone connected, to get our family members together, to ask family members for help?  Like the Alumni Association, which has a President for each Alumni Club, we need to have an ‘Alumni Champion’ for each of our sports.  And that Alumni Champion must help us to build an alumni organization for their sport, with a Chairperson perhaps for Communications, a Chairperson perhaps for Events & Gatherings, etc.  And we need to replicate this about 20 times; once for each sport.

Our Dean of Athletics, Joe Sterrett, supports this direction and has committed incremental resources within the Athletics Department to help us on our way.

• Greg Strobel – our former Wrestling coach has joined our team and will assume numerous responsibilities. One primary responsibility will be to conduct all of our formal Athletics alumni events:
  • Athletics Partnership Golf Classic
  • New facility dedications
  • 100th Anniversary celebration of Lehigh Wrestling
  • All of our team banquets
  • Hall of Fame dinner and induction ceremony
• Travis Spencer – Travis will continue in his Corporate Relations role but will be expanding his role to help us build our Athletics alumni organization.  Travis’ initial focus will be on our men’s sports.
• Roseann Corsi – Roseann will be helping us to build our Athletics alumni organization and her initial focus will be on our women’s sports. She will continue in her Public Relations role and providing leadership to our COACH program.

Our Next Steps

Our next step is to select a couple of sports to ‘pilot’, one men’s sport and one women’s sport.  Some of the criteria for selection will be:

• Coach’s longevity
• Program’s tradition of success
• Player/Coach relationships
• Great alumni leaders

Once we have our ‘pilots’ identified, we will meet with those coaches to get them on board and to identify the very best alumni leaders within their sport.  After that, we will begin recruiting and, hopefully, we will gain the commitment (two-year term) of an Alumni Champion for the sports we are piloting.

With an Alumni Champion in place, we will begin to plan and organize, and we will build out the organization further as appropriate. 

As we get our ‘pilots’ up and running, we will select the next sport(s) to target and will repeat the building process.  We are not sure how many sport-specific alumni families that we can build in the coming year, but we can assure you that we will move swiftly.  Of course, speed is not the #1 objective.  Most important is that the organizations we give birth to, live, mature and grow.  WE must establish strong leadership, solid plans, and firm footing.

Tools to Help

As we build our organization and develop our plans, we must also put tools in place to enable our effectiveness.  There are a number of exciting, new technology-based developments underway that we believe will add fuel to our efforts.

1. Video on the Web -
   We are organizing internally to build a team of students who can capture, edit, and deliver significantly more video than we have been able to produce in the past.  We have confidence that we will be able to accomplish our objectives within a reasonable period of time and that, over the course of the next year or two, our alumni and fans will be able to see more and more video content of our sports teams in action. We trust that this new, exciting capability will attract more and more Lehigh athletics alumni and fans to our website and enable them to remain connected to our programs.
2. Profile Update mechanism – Our Alumni Association has a ‘profile update’ mechanism on www.Lehigh.edu that allows Lehigh alumni to update their contact information within the Lehigh database.  We will be porting this over to www.LehighSports.com, in order to provide our Athletics alumni (who probably visit LehighSports.com more often than Lehigh.edu) with an easy and convenient mechanism to keep their contact information up to date.  We hope this will help us to remain ‘connected’ to our former student-athletes so we can include them in Athletics alumni activities.
3. Event Management System (EMS) – Over the past few years, our Alumni Association has migrated to a rather comprehensive electronic system for conducting alumni events.  The system, called EMS, handles invitations, registrations, and payments in a thorough and efficient manner.  Throughout the fall semester, we will be implementing this system within the Athletics Partnership.  Once in place, we believe the EMS system will allow us to conduct many more alumni gatherings without increasing our staff (and associated costs). 
4. On-Line Community – The Lehigh Alumni Association is in the midst of constructing an ‘On-Line Community’ for Lehigh alumni.  One of the neat features will be the ability to set up ‘affinity groups’ within the system.  This means that we can have an electronic ‘sandbox’ for each of our sports teams, with each ‘community’ having connectivity to the larger Lehigh Athletics community and the Lehigh alumni community as desired.  This new system has extraordinary potential and the Athletics Partnership intends to be a leader in the roll-out when the system becomes available later this year.