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

“I think that you would find that same dynamic at other universities as well — where they knew that you had to be online, but they did not know how to evolve the product,” Bellairs says. “And online, if you’re not constantly evolving, you’re out of business.

“I think some other universities are in a similar situation to what we were in, where they had something and then woke up one day and found out that it had been passed by,” he adds. “And consumers — their standard is not other university Web sites. Their standard is eBay, Amazon, MSN; so if we fell behind to people like that, as far as our alums were concerned, we were behind.”