Hall Named VP for Alumni Relations
Seeks to double alum philanthropic support by 2017
Dropping the “associate” from his title, Steven Hall has been promoted to vice president for alumni relations, effective June 1.
As associate vice president for alumni relations for the past four years, Hall has been responsible for annual giving, development, and communications with BU’s 292,000 alums around the world. In that time, participation at alumni events has gone from a few thousand a year to nearly 40,000.
“From the first days of his administration, President Robert A. Brown made it a priority to build stronger and deeper ties between the University and its alumni and other friends,” says Scott Nichols, senior vice president for development and alumni relations at BU. “For the past four years, Steve has had principal responsibility for achieving this important goal, and he has done an outstanding job across an ever-expanding portfolio of responsibilities.”
Hall says that by 2017, he’d like to see twice as many alumni supporting the institution philanthropically. Currently, there are 26,000 annual donors. Hall hopes to grow that number to 50,000.
“We’d also like to have alumni coming together 1,000 times a year or more under the BU flag,” he adds, “and we’d like to have 8,000 alumni volunteering on behalf of BU on an annual basis.”
The old notions of alumni supporting their institution strictly out of loyalty aren’t enough anymore, Hall says.
“Obviously that will appeal to some,” he says, “but if you’re trying to have the aggressive growth that we’re talking about, the real challenge is getting as close to one-to-one marketing as we can.”
That’s where communication tools like Facebook and Twitter come in.
“Social media is an important way to tell the BU story, to communicate when good things happen at the University and get alumni to talk about it,” Hall says.
Before joining BU in 2007, Hall was CEO and president of the Houston Alumni Organization of the University of Houston. Previously, he was vice president for major gifts at the Washington State University Foundation, and he held numerous roles in development and alumni relations at the University of Houston.
Caleb Daniloff can be reached at cdanilof@bu.edu.
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