Bonnie Blumer will tell you she's an operations person. She's on the leadership team at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's RPI at Work, where she built the enrollment operation from scratch: the marketing, the CRM, admissions. Then she hired a team to run it so she could focus on corporate partnerships. Extremely private, she was never an early adopter of social media, with a bare minimum presence on Facebook and LinkedIn.
"I just kind of wanted to be behind the scenes, at the operational level," she says. Even when outreach became her job, her plan was to stay out of sight. "They want to talk to the dean and connect with the dean, and I'll just facilitate that conversation."
That was eight years ago. Today she has more than 12,000 LinkedIn connections, thousands of them directors, VPs, presidents, and C-suite leaders, and she's had thousands of conversations with them. Conversations that start on LinkedIn and end up in real life: Lunch & Learns, campus events, interviews, job referrals. "I'm not just collecting connections," she says. "They're engaged."
If you run marketing, enrollment, or strategic relations at a university, the number isn't what matters. The interesting part is that those 12,000 relationships are something almost no marketing budget in higher education ever produces: an asset the institution owns.
You know this starting point
Eight years ago, RPI at Work had an old database of organization contacts and past prospects. Bonnie's team emailed them, called them, and asked employers to sponsor a lunch and learn with the dean. Meanwhile, in pre-COVID 2018, her programs were going fully online and needed a national audience.
"It was a trickle," she says. They tried expanding through LinkedIn, hunting for organization leaders one at a time, but it was one person searching and messaging with no way to record or build on any of it.
The rest of the higher-ed playbook has the same problem. The ads, the lead gen, the cold lists, the one-off events. You're renting an audience. The campaign ends, the audience goes back to whoever sold it to you, and next year you start from zero again. It's better to own a relationship than to rent an audience.
Angles calls the alternative Defined Audience Marketing. Start with a list, the actual named people whose decisions matter to your institution, and market to that one list simultaneously across LinkedIn, email, and display advertising, with a real human working the relationships. The list doesn't expire when the campaign does, and the relationships deliver an ROI for years.
What Angles brought to the partnership was the operating system behind those relationships, seeing early that the opportunity wasn't simply to generate leads or run another digital campaign. It was to identify the people RPI wanted relationships with, build a disciplined process for reaching them across channels, capture what was learned along the way, and keep that network active over time.
That combination of strategy and execution is unusual. Angles works across audience development, LinkedIn outreach, CRM and HubSpot, email, digital advertising, and campaign strategy, but the technology was ultimately in service of relationship building. The result is infrastructure an organization can continue to learn from and build upon rather than a series of campaigns that disappear when the marketing spend ends.
For RPI at Work, Angles became both the strategist and the practitioner, helping to refine who to reach, testing what generated engagement, connecting channels, and continually adjusting the approach based on what the market was telling us. Over eight years, that work helped turn what began as outreach into a repeatable business-development capability.
Even the targeting gets smarter when the audience is defined. Bonnie's team started where everyone starts, with C-suite, HR, learning and development. Working through the list, person by person, taught them something else. The one who leans in is usually a director, the middle manager who feels it directly when someone on their team is ready for more.
The reluctant face
The partnership with Angles Inc. began where Bonnie was most at home: behind the scenes. For years, the outreach ran under the dean's name while she facilitated. And the messages didn't pitch aggressively. Instead, they fostered relationships by asking alumni and industry leaders to talk about themselves, then listening to and responding to their answers. "Tell me about the impact your education has had on your life and your career" was a game changer.
"People were so grateful for the opportunity to go back and reflect and share their story and know that somebody is on the other end responding," she says. "We could have written a book."
Then the outreach moved under her own name, and something unexpected happened. People engaged with her more at the director level than they had with the dean, a response that still surprises her. Her theory is that people are careful around leadership. A little intimidated. "Maybe my messaging was a little softer and more welcoming."
Either way, the person who wanted to stay backstage turned out to be the best voice the operation had. "Still to this day, I have big corporate leadership responding to my connection requests, thanking me for reaching out and telling me how pleased they are to connect," she says. "And I'm like, me?"
What owning looks like
The numbers: RPI at Work has quadrupled its Lunch & Learns, its best enrollment pipeline, year over year. Enrollment is growing 25 to 35 percent a year, stretching over nearly a decade. When the team added coordinated email on top of the LinkedIn work, asking warm contacts to sponsor Lunch & Learns, even Bonnie was surprised at the response. Some people live in their inbox, some in their feed. A defined audience gets reached in both.
The relationships keep turning into rooms full of people. A recent regional event drew several hundred attendees from industry, government, alumni ranks, and university leadership. Someone from institutional advancement pulled Bonnie aside and told her, "We don't ever see events this big." Some attendees came specifically to meet her, a person they knew only through years of correspondence. "There's already a sense of connection," she says. "People know me because I'm showing up for them."
Her favorite story, though, is smaller. She once messaged a hiring VP at a leading insurance company, a man she had never spoken with in her life, to mention a graduating student interested in a role his office was filling. The VP replied from vacation and handed over his cell number for the student. The student got the job.
"We call it money in the bank," she says. "It's one of, if not the best investment we've made. Establishing authentic relationships that give us the bridges to cross over to accomplish important things."
A campaign can't do that. Infrastructure and process can. And that's the distinction Angles has built its work around: helping organizations create the systems, audience strategy, and sustained engagement required to turn marketing activity into long-term relationship capital.
Ask her what would happen if she stopped, and she brings up the story of two climbers roped together on a cliff face: "It would be literally like cutting the cord. Something extremely important would die on the vine. I can't imagine that."
The catch
None of it is automatic, and Bonnie is blunt about this. She spends an hour, sometimes two, every day engaging what comes in. She compares it to gardening. Seeds, weeding, water, sun, "otherwise it's just going to be this weedy, outgrown mess."
"There's no set it and forget it. It's a relationship. You have to take care of the relationships that are born out of the platform."
And some operations shouldn't try. "You've got to have your heart in it. You have to be able to nurture, take interest, be curious about how people are showing up. If you've got an operation that can't do that, then don't."
Who has more network capital than a university?
A university's network of alumni, industry partners, parents, and recruiters might be its single greatest asset. And at most institutions, the only message an alum ever gets is a donation ask.
When Bonnie's team contacts alumni about their careers instead of their checkbooks, the reaction is astonishment. Then those same alumni become speakers, show up for classrooms, sit for interviews, and open doors for graduating students.
"Can you imagine where RPI would be if the entire university were using this platform?" she asks. Mentorship, internships, corporate partnerships, alumni engagement. The network is already there. Most schools are out renting audiences while it sits dormant.
"Who will be that first university that sees the opportunity to engage enterprise-wide?" Bonnie says. "That will be the university that sees the full advantage of tapping into that network."
Eight years in, the network continues to grow and so does its value. What began as an outreach strategy has become an institutional asset, creating connections and opportunities that no single campaign could replicate.
"Like any good investment, it just keeps getting bigger and better."
