Imagine asking an alum to avoid saying amazing things about your school? What? That’s totally counterintuitive, especially when you may have recruited this person to participate in a school-sponsored campaign.

 

Logic suggests that you’d want them to raise their hand and talk about how a teacher or experience on your campus prepared them for some form of success. It only makes sense to draw that line back to the school in order to evoke a sense of connection and pride.

 

Well, some might say that Babson College took a risk when they went down a different path with .

 

Babson’s looking to change the way people view and value entrepreneurship, and they’re doing it by highlighting alumni in all sorts of settings via short, 2-minute videos. This is all part of a bigger, multi-year campaign to crowdsource a new definition of “Entrepreneurship.”

 

Each alumni story makes the case (and provides some excellent teaching lessons) without ever mentioning the school. It’s quite a feat, and one that I think can serve as inspiration for private schools fundraisers and marketers.

 

Sarah Sykora, VP & Chief Marketing Officer at Babson College, joined me to talk about the campaign. She shares their goals, some of the early performance metrics, and how they pulled this campaign together in a compressed amount of time.

 

Our 20+ minute conversation is jammed with great takeaways that I hope you’ll enjoy!