FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 21, 2005 (Los Angeles, CA) - Cornell Alumni Team Unveils The Magnet for its Alumni Portal
Cornell grads now have access to a multitude of features and benefits, via a simple, streamlined, and value-oriented communication and interaction web hub.
At its core, The Magnet's technology delivers to the administrative staff a high degree of control over all types of maintenance tasks. In particular, the processes of content creation, membership tracking, event management, and other tedious day-to-day tasks are now mostly automated and/or distributed among the team. Before adopting The Magnet, the cornellclubla.com website required the Webmaster's time and intervention for most tasks. Now the Webmaster job is divided among several of the chapter's staff and volunteers, none of whom have--or need--more than minimal background in web design.
"[Event management] used to require substantial amounts of manual work setting them up on a website and then organizing and reconciling the registrations. And let's not even talk about how difficult it was to offer a member discount on event pricing. An alumni club's focus should be on planning great events and fostering networking, not on managing the back office processes. With our new site, our alumni can now sign up for events and if they aren't current members, they are prompted to join then. We see a substantial percentage of our membership signups and renewals happen at the point when an alum is purchasing an event ticket," said Andy Traum, the Club's administrator.
From its inception, the The Magnet platform was designed with the alumni chapter and its participants in mind. The result, is a suite of tools that covers exactly what alumni chapters need with no "unnecessary extras" according to Kelly Messner, The Magnet's Product Manager.
"This focused approach yielded a solution that allows alumni chapters to do a lot without added complication. In turn, you see folks with no web-development background changing article images, modifying membership-based event access, and generating name-tags from automatically-generated events' RSVP lists within a few hours of working on the system. And the best part for me is, they actually enjoy it!" adds Messner.
Traum also noted that "before notifying alumni about our new site, we had 200+ people register on the site and update their profiles. Our target is to double our paid membership by the end of Q2 2005, and we expect to do this without any trouble. We recently sold 180+ tickets for a single event through our site with no glitches. The system allows for tiered pricing, allocation, and ticket availability dates for members and non- members. This really helps us create value for our paid members."
