alumni futures

Is There Value in Your Alumni Network's Long Tail?

Back in March I discussed predictions for the future of alumni relations. Eventually, I said,

[o]nline communities won't exist. Electronic interaction will be so completely integrated into all our behavior that we won't think of it as a separate activity, any more than we think of people we talk to on the phone as a "telephone community."

But until then, alumni associations are going to find online community software appealing. And as I mentioned last week, two providers of community software have recently published some ideas about social networks. I could probably fill a month of Alumni Futures with comments and thoughts based on these two papers alone, but I'll focus instead on one aspect that connects the two papers: the age distribution of Facebook users (links to each paper are at the end of this posting).

In February Harris Connect distributed The Impact of Social Networks on Advancement. Despite the sweeping title, the paper was mostly a preview of how Harris clients could connect their own site to Facebook. Harris reasons that alumni offices should connect their own communities to third-party social networks (an idea that's been around for a while), explains why, and describes a tool for doing that in a special instance (i.e., connecting Harris client sites to Facebook).

In a case study, Harris shows a graph of the "Facebook User Age Distribution" for a particular school's alumni (click the graphs below to open them in pop up windows):

{graph is an approximation recreated for this posting}

Then in April, iModules published Leveraging the Facebook Phenomenon in Education Communities. White paper author Mike McCamon assigns Facebook to the class of "General Interest Communities" (alumni groups form "Common Interest Communities"). Like the Harris paper, the iModules piece includes a graph showing an age distribution of Facebook users:

{graph is an approximation recreated for this posting}

The two distributions look similar, with the youngest users accounting for the vast majority of Facebook users. No surprises there. But seeing the two graphs side by side reminded me of the "Long Tail" described by Chris Anderson. I don't have room here to explain the concept of the Long Tail, but it's well-documented (and disputed) elsewhere. For most of us, it has its most common incarnation in concepts such as "the 80-20 rule."

So here's a thought. When alumni professionals talk about Facebook users, we usually presume that all users are equally important to our institutions, and that all are equally valuable network members. A person's a person, right? So if the Facebook alumni ratio of 23 year olds to 27 year olds is, say, 20:1 (as in Harris's case study), then the 23 year olds' segment of the alumni network must somehow be 20 times as valuable as the 27 year olds' segment. Right?

Only if all alumni are adding equal value to the network. But if anything, in almost every alumni activity (except undergraduate recruiting, and of course young alumni activities), I'm willing to bet that older group members add proportionally more value to the network than younger members do. Older alumni have

• more life experience,
• more career experience,
• broader expertise,
• more extensive personal and professional networks,
• greater perspective on the role of your institution in their achievements, and
• by and large, greater financial assets.

Bottom line: While the number of older Facebook participants is quite small, the potential value they bring to the alumni network is disproportionately large. So don't worry too much about whether older alumni will embrace Facebook (or any other General Interest Community) in larger numbers; instead, think about measuring the cumulative value of the alumni network, and where that value resides within the network.

And as usual, that brings us to another huge topic just begging for its own blog posting. So some day we'll ask how to measure the value of an alumni network. I have an idea about that too, and am curious to see what others think.

Meanwhile: Is your Facebook network's value hidden in the Long Tail? Are you measuring the value of your alumni networks? How?

Link to Harris Connect's "Resource Library" [requires registration for download]

Link to iModules's white paper: Leveraging the Facebook Phenomenon in Education Communities [152k PDF]

A Novel Business Model Proposed for Harvard's Alumni Communications

The New York Times reported today that Manhattan Media, a New York publisher,

bought 02138, a magazine for Harvard alumni, with visions of expanding it into social networking and event sponsorship, and then duplicating the operation for each Ivy league school.

02138, named for Harvard University's postal code, appeared two years ago, featuring information about alumni, staff, and campus activities. Manhattan Media's president and CEO, Tom Allon said that his plan is that "this is the first of what will become eight Ivy League magazines, sites and events companies," one each for Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Penn, Princeton and Yale.

Allon (a Columbia and Cornell grad) referred to "a companion Web site that's a social networking Web site for Harvard alumni," and sponsorship of "a series of...alumni events, around the 02138 brand." He also draws the conclusion, which many readers of this blog may already have reached, that "people do share common interests when they're alumni of a university."

My first question is: do Harvard alumni need to share their common interests "around the 02138 brand"? The answer could be yes, if that brand gives them something they need, and if that something is unavailable to them elsewhere.

Harvard alumni have been doing OK overall for about 350 years. 02138 needs Harvard, but Harvard doesn't need 02138. The key, as usual, will be relevance.

Additional coverage of this story popped up earlier today from mStoner.

Web site of 02138 Magazine

Manhattan Media's press release

Facebook & MySpace Data Portability: Will It Connect Alumni Sites With Social Networks?

On May 8 MySpace announced "data availability," and about 24 hours later, Facebook announced its own version: Facebook Connect. As Mashable's Adam Ostrow reported, Facebook's version includes an appealing feature for developers building bridges between online alumni communities and third-party social sites. It's called Trusted Authentication, and using it, Facebook members...

...will be able to connect their Facebook account with any partner website using a trusted authentication method. Whether at login, or anywhere else a developer would like to add social context, the user will be able to authenticate and connect their account in a trusted environment. The user will have total control of the permissions granted.

Other features will also appeal to harried alumni officers trying to figure out how to blend closed alumni networks with third-party sites.

• Real Identity allows you to tote your basic Facebook data, photos, friend lists, and more with you, all over the web; and
  
• Dynamic Privacy means that your privacy preferences and settings will follow you too. If you change a privacy setting in Facebook, that setting is reflected in partnered sites as well.

It seems on the surface as if the much-hyped (but still very new) DataPortability effort is about to get a lot more real for users. MySpace announced that Twitter, eBay and Yahoo! were lined up and almost ready to implement, so we can expect similar announcements from Facebook imminently. And today (May 12) we will likely hear from Google about its "Friend Connect" initiative, so there will be more to write on this topic soon.

However, we shouldn't get super-excited yet about DataPortability. The systems announced in the past week are still highly proprietary, and don't match the "friction free inter-operable" model that DataPortability requires. We are a long way from open standards for moving our data around the internet. But at least we're moving in that general direction.

As for the alumni world, these announcements popped up right as I was finally sitting down to make sense of recent whitepapers from Harris Connect and iModules. I'll cover some of that content and its possible connection to this posting in a few days.

Additional coverage of Facebook Connect from Inside Facebook

Coverage of Google's Friend Connect via c|net

Loyola College Mourns Alumni Director Scott Stuart

Scott Stuart, the Director of Alumni Relations at Loyola College in Maryland (USA) passed away unexpectedly last week at the age of 43.

A former banking professional, Scott had also served as alumni director at his alma mater, Niagara University in New York. Loyola vice-president Michael Goff lauded Scott's "commitment, creativity, and spirit."

Announcement on Loyola's web site

Job Opening: Oberlin College (Ohio, USA)

Lisa Lee, Director of Alumni Relations at Swarthmore College (Pennsylvania, USA) recently told the members of the Minary Conference alumni education listserv about an upcoming job opportunity. Laura Gobbi (who happens to be the chair of this year's Minary Conference) is moving on from Oberlin to take on a new challenge at Mills College (California, USA). So her position at Oberlin will be vacant:

Oberlin College seeks applications for the position of Executive Director of the Alumni Association. This is a full-time, 12-month, Administrative and Professional Staff position in the division of Development and Alumni Affairs. The Executive Director will work closely with the President and the Executive Board of the Oberlin Alumni Association on matters pertaining to policy, direction and execution of programs under the aegis of that organization. The Executive Director will report to the Vice President for Development and Alumni Affairs on matters pertaining to performance, management and general strategies relating to the activities of the Alumni Association as part of the Division of Development and Alumni Affairs at Oberlin.

To see the full job description, go to

http://www.oberlin.edu/HR/mainpages/adminjobs.html

Look for "Executive Director of the Alumni Association" under the column headed "Position Title."

It sounds like an appealing opportunity at a great school.

Also, I like the use of the word "aegis." You don't see that much anymore.

Congratulations Laura, and good luck!

Should Universities Create Facebook-Style Social Networks?

[Updated May 4, 2008 with links, at bottom, to two other blogs.]

The April 25, 2008 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education features an article titled Colleges Create Facebook-Style Social Networks to Reach Alumni. Since I was among the people interviewed by the article's author, I was interested to see what his angle would be. The result is a surface treatment of a complex topic, but a couple of points are worth a quick review.

The author points out that it's difficult for institutions to gather data and contact info from sites like Facebook, and so some schools are creating their own versions of social networks. In these networks, he says, job seekers

can more easily identify and contact fellow alumni who are employed at companies where they want to work. Some employers that pay a fee can tap into the sites to recruit alumni from specific institutions or who graduated with certain majors.

This is a growing function for online networks, but is not a new service; online employment systems are finally maturing, but digital résumé posting has been around since the 1980s. A company called eProNet broke this ground first, but was fatally ahead of its time. While eProNet kept member schools' alumni résumés in a database, only eProNet could access the records, since the web hadn't been invented yet. They performed applicant matching searches for employers and returned printed copies of the results.

An annoying aspect of online networks as recruiting platforms is the relentless tide of headhunters trying to infiltrate closed alumni groups. Caltech verifies the alumni status of every person trying to join its official group on LinkedIn, and rejects between 20 and 40 bogus applicants per month. These are corporate recruiters trying to gain a leg up on the competition. Unless alumni associations make a conscious decision to provide non-alumni with group access, this is an aspect of online networks that university staff need to keep in mind.

Back to the Chronicle. Some additional thoughts:

• The article equates alumni events with online communities as a proxy for alumni engagement. One can argue that "the more people who sign up, the better the result," but it's a non-sequitur to say that your online community with 10% of alumni registered is twice as effective as events, which attract 5% of alumni. They are different behaviors with different drivers and outcomes.

• Describing the heroic efforts of Elon College to build a campus-wide, private Facebook-like site from the ground up, the Chronicle quotes an Elon administrator as saying that because the site has launched, "There really aren't any ongoing costs." Users and web developers realize the importance of updating not only content, but functionality as well. If college leaders think the site is "free" because it's "done" and they're not paying annual fees to a software company, someone should point out that users join and abandon social sites faster than developers can update them. There are, absolutely, ongoing costs. All sites are works in progress.

• It was gratifying to see the article acknowledge a point that Caltech's Liz Allen and I first made in 2006, but which has only grudgingly gained acceptance, that

alumni directors...see the restrictive nature of the social-networking sites offered by colleges as a major drawback.

The University of Southern California's Scott Mory is right on track with his advice that schools should "stay connected with current and former students through Web sites those people already use..."

• Finally, Elon's assistant vice president Daniel J. Anderson is quoted as saying that "the jury is still out" on how much the college's private social network site will be used. That's probably true, but it's more important to realize that with online services, the jury will always be out. There's never a "final decision" on what site, or which type of service, will work for the long-term.

Disclaimer: Despite what the article claims, I swear I did not tell the reporter that "social networking is definitely hot."

The article can be found in the print version of the Chronicle of Higher Education, in volume 54, issue 33, on page A18, or online here:

Colleges Create Facebook-Style Social Networks to Reach Alumni

[Update May 4, 2008:] Critique of the CHE article via Swift Kick Central

and

Conservative blog Phi Beta Cons mentions the CHE article too

Advancement and IT: Speaking Each Other's Language

Sometimes I save things I find online. Occasionally I come across them later and discover they have relevance to something else I've been reading or hearing about. One example is a posting by blogger (and BlogHighEd co-founder) Matt Herzberger from more than a year ago.

Matt is a web designer with Texas A&M Engineering. Writing on a now (apparently) defunct blog called Fuzzy Content, he wrote about job mobility for web experts in higher ed. But I noticed a follow up comment Matt added a day after the original posting:

The plight of the web professional is the plight of one caught in between; between the extremes of programming and data integration on one side to professional communication (copy editing, writing, marketing) on the other side...The language of IT [information technology] continues to grow in sophistication...and unless you step out of that culture on a regular basis, your ability to translate is limited. The webmaster, positioned in the middle, is likely to be more approachable and successful as a translator and advocate.

Matt's right about the importance of translation, in his example, from IT to marketing and communications. And IT language has to be translated into every part of the institution, including alumni relations, development, student affairs, and academic divisions. 

So why am I still re-reading his comment more than a year later?

Because I've been pondering another question. Matt was writing about moving into the management ranks. But what if you're already in a management position? You have a different motivation for understanding IT language, culture and protocols: you need it to strategize, to request, and to negotiate for the services that will help you attain your program goals.

Advancement staff, from the assistant director right up to the VP, spend a lot of time complaining that IT people can't explain things clearly and can't communicate in plain language. But it's critical for us managers to understand as much about IT as we can. Why should the entire communication burden be on technical staff? If you can explain what you need to the web team, to development operations and to central IT in a way that they can understand, you gain at least two advantages:

1. You will be more likely to get what you really need, and
2. You will show that the alumni association is doing more than just filling fruit cups at garden parties: it's providing relevant, up-to-date tools and services to alumni.

If you're an alumni executive, a fundraiser or a communications professional, don't hide behind the excuse that you "don't know much about computers." These days, information technology is less about the technology, and more about the information.

Thoughts from CASE Europe & EAIE Budapest

As planned, I recently presented at two London workshops hosted by CASE Europe. Then I continued on to Budapest, Hungary to present in a three-day training program offered by EAIE (the European Association for International Education), a European counterpart to NAFSA.

The London "Masterclass" and the EAIE program laid out in broad strokes the fundamentals of alumni relations, including the connections between alumni relations and development (fundraising) as well as marketing, communications and public relations (PR).

Evaluations of my presentations from the UK workshops mentioned not only that North American institutions seem to be "far ahead" of European institutions in these fields, but also (in one case) that the information I presented was "very American." The implication of course is that I did not account for differences in culture, governance, resources or mission when discussing alumni relations in Europe.

I don't deny having an "American perspective" (whatever that means), but I always try to be clear in presentations that I am not going to tell participants "what they should do." I present many program ideas that have results (good or bad) as a way of showing what has happened. But the purpose is not to have others slavishly copy what American schools do. Quite the contrary.

The purpose in sharing case studies is to provide a jumping off point for creating new alumni futures, appropriate to each institution. I created this blog partly in response to listserv discussions and conference sessions that look only backwards: "What programs have worked for you in the past?" "Do you have samples of brochures you have mailed in the past?"

There's nothing wrong with knowing how you got where you are. But not enough people in advancement talk about innovating, or propose changes to the marketing, the communications, the programs and the events of the past. We should think deeply about where we are headed and whether that's where we need to go. For this reason, I also present "what if?" ideas and challenge participants to try these out in thoughtful but experimental ways.

So I am glad that a few of the participants in London and Budapest shared ideas about the future of their programs. If they and others follow through with entrepreneurial spirit, the future of alumni relations in Europe may be very bright. Of course, short-term frustrations are many, due to student and alumni attitudes toward newly-imposed tuition and fees, and due to scant resources for alumni programs. However, European professionals have a chance to work from a clean slate. The American model seems unattainable because we have more staff and budget, plus a history of alumni connections. Yet we are saddled with programs from the past, and long for the chance to build a program from the ground up, based on what we want to do in the future.

Somewhere, these models converge, and by encouraging overseas (not just European) partners to create a relevant and innovative future, North Americans in higher ed can help newly-built programs avoid the rut that many of us have fallen into.

Soon, international visitors will be presenting North American "experts" with their version of the ideal alumni program, and we'll be scrambling to "copy and steal everything" they've done.

Have I overstated my case? Am I flat out wrong? Leave a comment and let me know how it looks from your vantage point.

Buckingham Palace at night. Photo by Andy Shaindlin (some rights reserved)

What is the Meaning of the Word Alumni?

Last August, Ann Thomas of the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith shared something interesting on the ALUMNI-L listserv. It's a short article from the AO Foundation, a "medically guided non-profit" devoted to educating surgeons. The article discusses the origin of the word "alumni." When I read it, I realized that in my 19 years in the profession, I had never seen the etymology of the word.

The author of the article, Dr. Antonio Pace, is the president of the Foundation's alumni association in Europe. He tells us that the word alumni

is Latin [and] derives from the verb alere, which means 'to bring up,' 'to nourish'...In Latin literature, the term alumnus is used frequently...to indicate "he who is nourished by a person who is not a natural parent."

In ancient times, Dr. Pace continues, the word referred to abandoned children, who would often be sheltered and raised by foster parents. He adds that

the meaning of the term was extended to those persons who receive an intellectual nourishment, like the one people receive at school. Therefore, alumni became the students who are intellectually nourished at school, outside the familiar sphere.

Personally, I like the idea that the institution's relationship to the alumnus is one of "nourishment," which can be the intellectual variety that Dr. Pace mentions. It can also be a more practical educational nourishment, or it can refer to the personal development students ideally experience while enrolled at our institutions.

Click the following direct link to download the article, which appeared in the February 2003 issue of the AO Foundation's Dialogue Magazine: 

The Meaning of Alumni
[PDF 98kb]

Predictions Part II: What's Your Alumni Future?

Last week I reviewed some comments that alumni directors made in 1998, when CASE Currents asked professionals to forecast how the field would develop by 2008.

Rather than dwell on the past any more (this is Alumni Futures, after all), I thought that for fun I'd make a few predictions for 2018. Ready? OK...

• We will have a structured quantitative benchmarking system across the profession, and it will be largely automated.


• In the US, commercial affinity relationships (like alumni credit cards, insurance, and travel) will be legally regulated and providers will have to be licensed by government. Associations and institutions will be required to solicit and document competitive bids before selecting business partners.


• Admissions and recruiting will drive a dramatic internationalization of alumni relations; international students become international alumni, after all.


• Online communities won't exist. Electronic interaction will be so completely integrated into all our behavior that we won't think of it as a separate activity, any more than we think of people we talk to on the phone as a "telephone community."


• Finally, and on that same note, a few short years from today we will all be connected to each other online. Anyone online will easily be able to find the most direct connection between himself and anyone else online. Today's clumsy, fragmented so-called "social networks" will be replaced by a layer of complete connectivity that spans the electronic world the way an operating system lies across a single computer's functions today.

Now it's your turn.

What are your predictions? Where is the profession going, and how it will change?

Leave a comment under this posting on the web site, or send an email.