Comments on: Guest post: marketing translation services to your alumni network

By: Corinne McKay

Corinne McKay — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:34:44 +0000

@Judy, thanks for your comment (this is Corinne, not Marianne!); I agree with you about UNLV! My only gripe about alumni directories is that we already, um, paid large amounts of money to go to these universities? But I think that Marianne’s marketing idea is a really brilliant one, now I need to order a Boston College directory for myself!

@Kevin, great suggestions! I hadn’t even thought of working the angle of your fellow alums in the corporate ranks, thanks for the tip.

By: Kevin Lossner

Kevin Lossner — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 07:14:40 +0000

Please follow up with the results of this effort in a few weeks or months. It would interest me to see whether the success rate is better than a targeted approach to non-alumni in the same fields. (Maybe “control contacts” would be useful here.)

Our own informal network of alumni in Germany from a small liberal arts college in Los Angeles (Occidental) has been a steady source of business for many years as various alums have risen in the corporate ranks and sought to avoid getting stuck with in-house translation requests by sending these out to fellow alumni they could trust not to screw up. So you may be on the right track; I expect the success rate of such an effort may be even higher if you contact alumni living in countries where your source language(s) is/are the dominant language.

By: Judy Jenner

Judy Jenner — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 04:39:46 +0000

Great idea, thanks for sharing. As a proud lifetime member of the University of Nevada Las Vegas, perhaps I could even talk them into giving me a free directory!