University of Maryland provides Screensavers

Value-added tool for alumni and students

How do you keep your Alumni Association in the front of your alumni 24 hours a day? A screensaver might be a good start. The University of Maryland decided to provide alumni not one but SIX different versions, from conservative, collegiate looks to high tech graphic images.

While they decided to offer it to all alumni, you may consider sending a screensaver on a CD as a thank you for a contribution to annual giving, or you may consider doing the same for alumni who have paid their membership dues.

The hardest part for you will be to create the designs. Once that is done, commercial software is available to transform the designs into screensavers. Oh, one thing you'll have to keep in mind is not all of your alumni will be Windows based. That means you will have to create a screensaver for the Mac too. It shouldn't be that much harder really. It's even easier for end users. All they have to do is click on the image they want and save it to their computer. The program automatically extracts itself and positions it as your screensaver. That is, until they load in another screensaver.

The only thing better than this technique would be to include RSS technology into the screen saver so it would automatically download news to the screen saver and which would alert you that new news arrived from the campus.

Visit the University of Maryland's site and see how you need to do this for your alumni association and students.

http://www.free4all.umd.edu/savers/