Your Morning Boost - Honoring Diverse Voices and Measuring Archival ROI

Welcome back to your morning Boost, where headed into the final stretch of our week with Kristin Gwinnbecker of History, It and Today is all about measurable impact, social impact, academic impact, and financial impact. This is where we show the concrete value of archival work. We'll be discussing in what ways have you seen archives used to honor diverse voices of underrepresented parts of a school's history? And then we'll tackle a question all leaders must ask, how should leaders think about the return on investment when funding digital preservation or archival work. These insights will give you the language you need to champion this work and your board and faculty. All right, Kristen, let's start today with a crucial values driven topic. What ways have you seen archives use to honor diverse voices or maybe underrepresented parts of the school's history. Your archives are only going to tell the story that you have, but when you invest in a comprehensive digital preservation project, all of those voices are going to be accessible. Right, So the voices that may not have been prominent in the nineteen fifties, nineteen sixtiesineteen seventies, but are you know are people are looking for those voices now understanding that you know that those stories are there but haven't been prominent. It's really just about having the accessibility to them in order to celebrate them. So teachers they obviously use I mean, as you're talking there, I'm sitting here thinking about, oh, what some what are some great opportunities that you would have there to incorporate this into your instruction. I mean, how can teachers use archive materials as part of the curriculum or just in student learning in general? So, I mean, a digital archive is a repository of evidence, right, so primary source digital evidence that can be used in the classroom to teach research, methodology, certainly history, but I think one of the exciting benefits of it is that it's teaching history or the methodology or whatever the subject matter is in a way that is going to resonate with the students in a different way because it is personal to them, right, So they're able to to use, you know, a digital archive, go explore this this topic to understand how exploring evidence leads you to make your own conclusions. And when you're able to do that in the context of something you're really familiar with, then you see yourself in that story and it is going to be a more effective tool for those teachers. So unfortunately, money is an object for just about anybody that's in education. I don't care what level you're in. As a leader. If I'm starting to think about the return on investment for a project like this, if we're going to fund a digital preservation or archival process, how should we think about that return on investment when we're talking about this work. So instead of thinking about building a digital archive as this nice to have silo project, you know, we want to be good stewards of our history, so we should do this that rarely is going to move the needle when these budgets are as tight as they as they are. So really all we need to position this is do I want to invest in a tool that is going to bolster our marketing efforts, our alumni engagement efforts, and our fundraising efforts. The return on that investment of being able to, you know, in a blink, put together a curated presentation or you know, curated content in a way that is going to resonate with alumni. So we have one school that uses their digital archive to pump out their happy Birthday emails to alumni and they include their class photo in it, and that's all automated and seamless. Now are you going to open an email that's even if it's a happy birthday, but like especially a solicitation or something from your school, are you more likely to connect with it if it Hey, look, this is a photo of you twenty years ago. So just having that content, So seeing what the data looks like in terms of engagement and what those dollars look like in return. So if you ask any fundraiser within or lumni engagement officer really within the school, you know what kind of ROI would you see from having a tool like this. Look at it as that level of investment with the side benefit of doing the right thing by preserving your history. Doctor Gwen Becker, this is wonderful stuff. What I hear is that the power of archives lies in that accessibility for all, and really the funding conversation must shift to accommodate for this. Leaders key takeaways here, archives honor diverse voices, becomes a powerful tool for curriculum and student learning when we can offer some primary source evidence and really maybe even more critically, that this return on investment is very clear for us in this, in this world of education we live in right now, when we can boost fundraising and alumni engagement through personalized, data driven content, this is this is just a central world that we can all benefit from. Thanks again, christin another great piece of advice for all of us out there. Thank you again, Boosters, Thank you for listening today. I'll be back again Friday to wrap this up, but once again, thank you for listening. We will talk with you again tomorrow. That concludes another episode of your Morning Boost. We hope today's daily dose of professional development helps you amplify knowledge, wide in reach and broad in impact. Your Morning Boost is an AWB Education production brought to you with the generous support of Grundmeier Leader Services. Join us again tomorrow for more. Until then, keep boosting your impact.