Higher education isn't usually the place to look for CRM inspiration - too much focus on collecting data, not enough on building relationships. But the Miami Ad School Creative Network is a genuine exception. It feels more like Adidas than a university, and that's a compliment: like Adiclub, M.AD leads with reward, not forms. Sign up with just your email, and you're straight into a global creative community of 60,000, with no ambiguity about what you've joined.

The payoff lands every Monday. The Monday M.ADness newsletter is a genuinely useful digest of creative inspiration, written by staff, students and an unusually engaged alumni network - career tips, industry insight, case studies, job news, all without feeling like a sales pitch.

We've tracked this since 2016, and it remains a go-to case study for us. The alumni integration is the standout: weekly Zoom calls through the Insighter Series, plus meet-ups and workshops in creative hubs worldwide. A masterclass in doing it right.