It Is Leon

Data Strategy & Digital Innovation

Posts

  • Alumni relations & data principles – #1 Data quality

    If you work with alumni and their personal data, you are a data manager. It doesn’t matter what your job title says. The moment you’re responsible for records, you’re responsible for their quality, keeping it up to date and storing it safely and securely. The problem is that nobody hands you a manual on your…

  • Alumni Data Strategy: How to Get Started

    Every alumni relations strategy I’ve built started the same way: not with a campaign, but with a spreadsheet and a lot of metrics. Maybe you recently started your new role and are looking for some tips, tricks and guidance. Or you have been in the industry for quite some time already and on the hunt…

  • Your first 90 days in Alumni Relations

    Congratulations, you started working in Alumni relations. Maybe you’re a communications adviser, a relations officer, data manager or digital marketeer. Or maybe you’re doing all those roles as one single force of nature, who knows! Regardless, everyone can use a bit of help when starting out a new role. So, in this post I want…

  • Alumni Data management: Two Books That Shaped How I Think About it

    I have always approached alumni relations from a community building perspective, bot often it could feel like I was helping to build a market place. There is a type of ask, want or need from the alumni-side. That can be a need for help with career advice, a desire to meet lost friends and classmates…

  • Keeping Alumni Data Up to Date: 3 Practical Tips

    Keeping alumni data up to date is the biggest challenge for almost any relations team. Every so often I have colleagues come up and ask why we don’t have the latest job data available on our alumni records?. Fair question, because we “should” have it available right? Well, no, not always at least.  See, if you…

  • My job in Alumni Relations

    I have worked in my job in Alumni Relations for a bit over five years now, and I’ve never organised an alumni reunion or written a newsletter. Fascinating, right? That’s because I’m not working in one of those well-known front-facing roles. I’m in the background, making sure that my colleagues have all the data and…

  • Meet Plank: Flooring Surface Calculator

    After moving houses 10 times in the Netherlands, I got tired of the same old struggle: How much flooring do I actually need? Every time, I’d end up with either too much material (wasting money) or not enough (mid-project panic). So, I built Plank, a free, no-nonsense flooring calculator, with Lovable. My goal is to…

  • Using AI as YouTube Assistant

    I have been sharing a lot of insights on this site about how to use AI, or how to get started with a Youtube Channel. But talk is (sometimes) cheap. It’s better to show practical examples and use-cases. So here is one for you. My slide-deck on how I’ve been Using AI as YouTube Assistant.…

  • How I started my Faceless YouTube channel

    I’ts been almost two years now since I started my YouTube Channel. Granted, I’m not sitting at 1000’s of subscribers or anything, but that was not my goal anyways. I set out on my YouTube journey as a hobby. What I needed at that time was a distraction. Something to spark my creativity during my…

  • My Solopreneur Content Creation Tools & Workflow

    So, you might be looking into solopreneur content creation tools yourself at the moment. Chances are high that you are, since you ended up on this website. Well, I’m not an expert, so I do have to be honest to you about that from the start. But, that doesn’t mean you should click away right…

  • Selling Photos on Shutterstock: My Experience

    For a while already, I’ve been semi-active on the Shutterstock platform. Not because it’s a goldmine or anything, far from it. But because I am trying out more and more creative activities lately. Photography is just one outlet, alongside my YouTube channel and my personal blog. But it helps clear the mind and directs my…

  • Running a YouTube channel as a solopreneur

    For a bit more then 16 months I’ve been running my own little YouTube experiment. I started a channel in February 2025, without any experience in content creation or YouTube Channel management whatsoever. It was me, a niche game I picked and an AI Tool to help me navigate the murky depths of the (in)famous…

  • Prompt engineering done right

    Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with, nor paid by, Antrophic or any other AI company. For the past 16 months, I have been using Claude AI. I would not even know which model I am on, since Anthropic keeps updating it. I do have a Pro subscription, and if you ask me, it is the…