The University of Notre Dame Alumni Association recently unveiled an online engagement center with social-networking capabilities fit to engage — and elicit gifts from — even the feistiest of the Fighting Irish alums.

By Abny Santicola

“If you choose to play in the online world, you have to accept that, in that environment, everyone else in the world is out there,” Bellairs says. “If there is an alum out there who only wants to know about the tennis team, the English department and the band, I need to find a way to customize my message so that that alum is getting information from me and from the university from those three areas, because that’s when they start to pay attention to your message — when they can recognize that message is for them.”