Jen Doak (@jpdoak) is the online communications specialist at CASE.
It’s Valentine’s Day, and there have been some great examples of institutions showing their love for students, alumni and their broader communities this Feb. 14. Here are just a few:
- The University of Kansas Endowment Fund has a Flickr set of students showing their love for the university.
- The University of Connecticut, Michigan State University, MIT
and Brown University are among those offering branded valentines for people to share. - Dickinson College is asking students and alumni to share their Dickinsonian love stories on Facebook.
- A few schools are experimenting with Vine, including the University of California-Irvine and Penn Law School.
- Prince George’s Community College is having a Valentine’s Day flash mob in honor of the One Billion Rising movement:
- An a cappella group at Hamilton College is selling Buffergrams, in which they will sing a valentine to a person of your choice. A group of musicians at Marshall University is holding a similar fundraiser, Tuba Valentines.
- So many couples meet at Miami University Ohio that the institution has a name for it: Miami Mergers. The institution is having a haiku contest (prize: trip for two to Alumni Weekend), the winners of which will be featured on coasters.
- And of course, there are some great photo valentines, such as those shared by Villanova and Bucknell University.
What did your institution plan for Valentine’s Day? Share in the comments.
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At Reed College, Switchboard sponsored flower delivery. Students sent other students flowers. Staff sent flowers to one another. Alumni sent flowers to their favorite professors and staff members. And then a lovely and unexpected thing happened. Which was that alumni sent flowers to students they’d never met with the same major with words of advice, encouragement and support. It was so heartwarming to see the community come together in this way! Here’s a little video of Leah ’15 assembling the goods https://vine.co/v/brOtjDAIJx5
Ben, Rob, Drew–these are all really great. I’m continually amazed at how creative higher ed folks are. Thanks for sharing!
Hi from the University of Sydney in Australia, where our grounds staff got creative with their lawnmowing to inscribe love hearts on the Quadrangle’s lawns:
http://sydney.edu.au/news/84.html?newscategoryid=10&newsstoryid=10978
The story played really well in our social media channels, where we felt the love with more than 2000 likes: http://www.facebook.com/sydneyuni
At Ithaca College, we’ve had people tweeting why they love us with #IHeartIC all day (http://www.bit.ly/WLFPph). Then we’ve taken the avatars of those using the hashtag and used them to fill a heart graphic we’ve also been sharing (http://www.bit.ly/12GFiDV). We also shared the story of an alumni couple that has been married for over 80 years (http://www.bit.ly/Ws2hlz).
Great to see all of these Jen!
At UT Austin, we went with a simple Valentine’s Day greeting and “Will you BEVO mine?” tag. (Bevo is the name of our mascot.)
Getting great traction on FB (http://ow.ly/hJiAj) and Twitter (http://ow.ly/hJiwl).
Wow, these are terrific. I’ve seen a few other institutions do singing valentines and alumni couples too–great way to engage the community and get some great stories. And using the LOVE statue–man, if you have something like that in your neighborhood it’d be criminal not to use it for Valentine’s Day.
At Penn, we have a copy of Robert Indian’s LOVE statue. The campus community is encouraged to take photos of the statue with the hashtag #LovePenn in their tweets.
Also there was a flash mob in the center of campus at 11:50 am in support of One Billion Rising – see @PennOBR for photos. A promotional YouTube video was made to encourage everyone to participate: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uucYWqZxl4
While that may not sound like a lot, but its our third most engaged Facebook post this year. (behind announcing this year’s commencement speaker, Ed Helms and Obama saying his speech at Knox is the speech he looks back at the most).
Since almost 1 in 6 alumni meet their significant other here at Knox College (IL) we set out to find many of them and resulted in 70+ connections in a few hours on Facebook. http://www.facebook.com/KnoxCollege/posts/10151332343388731
The Drake University Choir delivered singing valentines in the Des Moines metro area to raise money for international tours and to bring cheer to the community: http://news.drake.edu/2013/01/30/drake-choir-offers-musical-messages-for-valentines-day/