alumni futures

Alumni Futures Turns Three

Ordinarily I post new material on Monday mornings, but this week I'm jumping the gun a little bit so that I can post on February 7, which is Alumni Futures' birthday. The first post went up on this day in 2007, which means that I'm pleased to be entering my fourth year of writing the Alumni Futures blog.

Pretty much everything I said three years ago is still true of Alumni Futures:

• I want to generate discussion about new ideas and directions for our profession;
• I am optimistic that readers will learn from information exchanged here;
• I hope readers will participate by adding their own ideas and visions for alumni relations.

It started out simple and has remained so. But while the site's complexity has not increased, I hope its utility has. For me to know what works and what doesn't, what's missing and what you'd like done differently, you need to tell me. So send an email and I'll welcome any advice. 

For fun, here are some stats about activity on Alumni Futures since its inception in February, 2007:

• There have been 116,422 page views in three years.
• Almost 1,400 individuals have subscribed to receive new materials from Alumni Futures.
• I have published 234 postings, which works out to precisely 1.5 postings per week for three years. 
• More important, you all have contributed more than 400 comments to those postings, and that (in my opinion) is what makes the blog work. 

OK, back to work. Year four begins now!

CAE: 2009 Saw Drop in Giving to U.S. Higher Education

This is the time of year when the Council for Aid to Education (CAE) publishes its annual report on Voluntary Support of Education (VSE) – that is, financial donations to colleges and universities in the United States.

According to a New York Times article about the CAE's survey, 

Gifts to colleges and universities declined almost 12 percent in the 2009 fiscal year, to $27.85 billion...the steepest decline in the survey's 53-year history.

The article goes on to state that

• private liberal arts colleges saw the largest decline (18.3%);
  
• capital gifts (for endowment or buildings and property) dropped 25%;
• the last decade has seen an average 4.1% overall increase in giving each year.

Here are past Alumni Futures postings on this survey since 2007:

2007: Alumni Dollars Are Up, Participation Is Down (Again)

2008: CAE: Alumni Participation and Dollars Both Declined in 2007

2009: I did not report on the CAE survey last year, but here is a statement from CASE about the survey's results.

Here is the Chronicle of Higher Education's report on today's announcement of survey results.

The Bologna Process and Alumni Relations, Part II

Back in November of 2009, I looked at the Bologna Process of European higher education standardization and how it might affect alumni relations in Europe. In this second and final post on the topic, I'm sharing a few more comments from Dr. Daniel Guhr and Simon Lange of Illuminate Consulting Group. Illuminate's consulting practice focuses on international strategic development in higher education.* 

In this post Guhr and Lange address:

• Threats and challenges to alumni engagement under Bologna
• The prospects for alumni loyalty to a specific institution
• The most likely time frame for changes to appear

Will threats or challenges to engagement make it harder for institutions to maintain already tenuous connections with alumni?

Daniel Guhr: Yes, but this is independent of the Bologna Process. If institutions ignore alumni demand patterns, the alumni will walk away. Down the road, having effective alumni networks will be a recruiting benefit, and it already works this way for small, elite private institutions (primarily business schools). It will be more than three years before we see concrete examples emerge – once the first full cohort of Europe-wide "Bologna System" alumni leave universities.

How does this relate to traditional "study abroad" experiences?

Daniel Guhr: It will have a negative effect on intra-European mobility, as fewer students can move around. This is being hotly debated however.

Simon Lange: Dan is right. Though the process encourages mobility when obtaining your degree abroad, the reforms have significantly increased students' workloads, and introduced the element of time pressure. In the end, this discourages students from spending a desirable semester in Sevilla, or elsewhere.

Will alumni be likely to transfer their affinity or loyalty to a university, a country, an academic program or perhaps a host institution in their target country?

Daniel Guhr: I would ask this differently. What makes alumni more loyal in the European context? First, the presence of effective alumni relations to begin with. Second, the the impact of the international experience on the alumnus's life. Third, the brand effect. You can create a matrix that displays these factors and put in the respective values. We'll see very different dynamics emerge. In short, we should ask, "What works for the alumni?"

Simon Lange: It is likely that the European Union's goal of fostering a European identity among future professionals will succeed. For scholarship recipients, loyalty to the donating country or organization, or to the EU, is likely to be higher. ICG recently conducted a nationwide survey of alumni from all eight universities in New Zealand, and found that non-New Zealand citizen alumni felt more closely connected to New Zealand if they received a New Zealand-sponsored scholarship. We compared their affiliation levels with those of alumni who received funding from other sources, and those who received no scholarship funds.

Based on both ICG's research and my personal experience in Europe, I'd say that students who go abroad feel a strong connection to their host institution, either for an exchange or for an entire program. For example, there are two Facebook groups for Erasmus students at the Universidad de Sevilla (Spain), each with more than 1,300 members. This is anecdotal evidence, but worth looking into more systematically. 

Over what time scale will changes play out?

Daniel Guhr: Some changes are already taking place. It will three years or more before we have early examples to use as case studies. In 5 to 10 years we'll see major initiatives that will produce good results. Some will come earlier, but will likely not be well-conceived. It will be more than ten years however before mainstream European universities will see any benefits – and only if they commit to building alumni networks.

* I serve as a volunteer member of ICG's Academic Advisory Board.

Survey on Twitter in Educational Advancement

[Update: The survey is now closed. Thanks for all who participated! Watch this space for results later in February.]

One year ago today Alumni Futures published a white paper on Twitter's potential as a tool for alumni relations. We are updating that paper's findings and predictions and will publish the new white paper here during February.

As part of our research we are again conducting our short (12 question) survey to collect information on which kinds of institutions are using Twitter for which purposes. Even if you don't use Twitter (or even if you don't know what it is) please take the survey. For those who don't use Twitter there are just three survey questions. 

Click this link to complete the survey:

Brief survey on Twitter in educational advancement

Thanks for your help! 

Watch this space for the new white paper in February: Alumni Networks and Twitter –An Update.

Alumni Associations and Twitter Lists

The popular microblogging service Twitter launched its "Lists" function a couple of months ago, and Twitter users can compile, publish and follow lists built around Twitter users with shared characteristics. For example, an alumni association can compile a list of its members' Twitter profiles to make it easier for alumni to connect via Twitter. This allows alumni to use Twitter as an alumni networking tool, not just as another communication channel. 

At Caltech we have followed back any of our followers we could identify as alumni or current students (as well as following faculty members and campus organizations using Twitter), and we recently compiled the alumni users into a Twitter list (you must be logged into Twitter to view it).  

Institutions could compile lists of volunteer leaders, regionally organized alumni, or alumni affinity group members (such as athletics, student government, performing arts or Greek life).

Twitter doesn't maintain a directory of public lists, but a recently launched service called Listorious bills itself as "The Directory of Awesome Lists on Twitter" and offers a compilation of alumni associations using Twitter (95 are listed as of this writing). 

They are listed in descending order, by how many followers they have:

http://listorious.com/EtiquetteWise/alumni-associations

It's important to remember that we're still at the beginning of the development and use of these kinds of tools, but keeping up with these trends will increase our ability to connect with alumni, and to connect them with our institution and each other. 

Is your association maintaining a list of alumni on Twitter? Do you have a different way of enabling the alumni network via Twitter? Leave a comment.

Alumni Relations Training in Europe: Registration Deadline

The registration deadline for the EAIE training course, Managing Alumni Programmes Effectively, is just a few days away. Although EAIE may accept late registrations, if you are interested in this workshop, register today.

The workshop is 17 to 19 March, 2010 in Paris, France. As summarized in the description, topics will include

• strategic planning
• alumni associations and non-traditional alumni groups
• records management
• alumni surveys, and
• communications and online community management.

I will be one of the faculty presenters at this event, which is designed for middle- and senior-level alumni relations managers from across Europe and the UK. I look forward to seeing several Alumni Futures European readers at this workshop in Paris!

Cool panograph of the Eiffel Tower by Alexandre Duret-Lutz via Creative Commons. 

2010: Alumni Relations Issues for the Year Ahead

Unlike many higher ed bloggers, I wasn't moved to do a year-end overview for 2009. But (at the risk of sounding pessimistic) I will look ahead at some of the large issues facing many – perhaps most – alumni associations. 

My belief that these issues are becoming central to our profession was reinforced last week at the meeting of the Association of Private College and University Alumni Directors (PCUAD) in Atlanta*. Many discussions among the thirty or so alumni executives present touched in one way or another on points that I am already concerned about. So what am I concerned about?

• I'm concerned about "mattering."

Senior administrators are questioning the relevance of alumni relations in the face of external and internal changes (i.e., competition for scarce resources). Will alumni organizations matter? 

• I'm concerned about our role as conveners.

People can and will self-organize into groups, so will we have a key role beyond brokering people's mutual interests? 

• I'm concerned because we've lost our monopoly on data. 

Search engines and social networks make people findable with little effort. Do we have information that alumni need, and that they cannot easily find somewhere else?

For all these questions, the answer may well be "yes." But we must still ask questions like these, and plan on long-term solutions that allow us to contribute to the success of alumni and their alma mater.  

With these concerns in mind, here are two additional questions to consider.

• Instead of doing many little things, as we have mostly done, should alumni associations focus on delivering a few larger programs and services, more central to the institution's core mission?

And...

• Should we focus more on supporting and connecting to the academic side of the institution? (Look for a guest blog post about this topic in the coming weeks.)

I've already mentioned several of these topics here in the last year, and most were originally raised first by others. I'm not claiming to be the first person to ask every one of these questions, I just want to generate in-depth conversation about them.

Please leave a comment or email me and continue the discussion. 

* Emory University did an outstanding job of hosting the PCUAD meeting. Shown here is the beautiful Miller-Ward Alumni House. Photo by Bill Ruhsam used with permission.

5 Alumni Social Networks You Never Heard Of

All we hear these days (in the United States at least) is "Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn." But over the last couple of years a number of almost unknown sites have tried connecting alumni across school lines. Like the original version of Facebook, theses sites have used alumni identity as the basis for personal profiles. Unlike Facebook, they have either failed, or at least failed to gain much traction.

According to the "About Us" page on each site, people would think your profile, your photos and your blog were so interesting that they would be compelled to "connect" with you. I wish I had kept a comprehensive list of these sites, because now that I am finally writing about them, most of them are gone. 

So to end the year, instead of going on ad nauseam about the sites we're tired of hearing about (and writing and talking about), here's a quick glance at some of the social networks you probably haven't heard of. A couple of them you'll never hear about again after reading this. So enjoy. 

thesquare.com
This site won't die. It's amazing. It started as a social network for Ivy League graduates (later spreading to "top colleges") and it quickly expanded in the pre-Facebook world. The other day I easily retrieved my password after not having visited the site for three or four years. The web design leaves a bit to be desired. Here are the schools whose students and alumni are invited to join, as listed on the home page. Click to view actual size:

 

After logging in I noticed a couple of odd things. My profile listed the wrong college graduation year, but a search for "classmates" did return a list of people who really were in my graduating class. The real sign that something was amiss came when I clicked the job postings for my home city. There are 3,800,000 people in Los Angeles; TheSquare has four job listings for the city. And all four are from 2007. Enough said.

Yahoo! Kickstart 
Yahoo! Kickstart never had a chance. During its brief lifetime (about eight months) it was plagued with downtime and error messages at every turn. Even if it had worked, Kickstart was a solution in search of a problem, a recruiting site masquerading as a social network. 

To attract members, Yahoo! offered a prize of $25,000 for the alumni association that could recruit the most Kickstart members. I recall hearing that Stanford signed up a paltry 300 soon-to-be-disappointed recruits and (reportedly) won the cash. From anything other than a marketing standpoint, it was a silly competition (except maybe for Stanford), since it rewarded absolute numbers of new members instead of proportional participation. No matter, Yahoo! killed the site a couple of months later, just as it killed Yahoo!Live, Yahoo!360 and Yahoo!Vibe. Kickstart's demise was so unimportant that today it's hard to find any mention of its closing. Meanwhile, maybe Yahoo! has finally figured it out by starting to integrate with Facebook.

bigsight.org
Bigsight bills itself as "the web's central people directory," which it is not. According to Quantcast, the site saw significantly decreasing traffic over the last two months, averaging 7,800 monthly uniques for the year (about 4.5 times the traffic of Alumni Futures). This doesn't qualify it as "the web's central people directory" – Facebook has about 130 million uniques per month. When I tried to use Bigsight last week, every click produced the following error message. I probably won't be going back. (Click image to view larger):

 

OnlyAlumni.com 
Despite a laudatory press release quoting a mysterious administrator of the site (known only as "Todd"), this site lasted about as long as a Yahoo! social network. The site's developer described it on her blog as "a social networking site with about 8,000 colleges, fraternities and sororities." It was pre-populated with rudimentary information about each school or organization, but lacked a unique role and had no buy-in from those institutions – in fact, they didn't even know they were members. Today, clicking the link for OnlyAlumni sends you to a site that sells bicycles. It's not a total loss, however; I am seriously thinking about getting the ABICI Granturismo Uomo Grigio. 

BrownGrad.com
I graduated from Brown University, so this would have been my site. This service quickly devolved from a social network to an email forwarding system "with flair." The flair part, they explain, is that the name of your school (or its mascot) becomes part of the domain name. 

So, why use my alumni.brown.edu email address when I can use browngrad.com? 

Summary
I haven't mentioned some of the more well-known sites (Friendster, MySpace, Friends Reunited, Classmates), or some of the slightly different ones. There are aggregators such as Regroup.com, or the grad-student focused inDegree. And then there's Academia.edu, a truly higher ed-focused network for graduate students, researchers and faculty members at colleges and universities worldwide. Plus there are the many, many sites built on the Ning engine, each focusing on a specialized group or interest.

How many of the remaining social networks will still be here at the end of 2010? What new ones will take their place? Maybe we'll check back in a year to find out.

Note: Alumni Futures will be on break until mid-January, 2010. Happy New Year to all, and thank you for your support and interest during 2009.

CASE Calls for Senior Level Volunteers

CASE (the Council for Advancement and Support of Education) is currently accepting nominations for senior volunteer leadership positions. 

These include positions on 

• the CASE Board of Trustees, 
• the three professional area Commissions (Philanthropy, Alumni Relations, and Communications & Marketing), and 
• the CASE Europe Board of Trustees. 

CASE seeks senior-level advancement officers from all types of institutions and from all segments of the profession. Self-nominations are appropriate and encouraged.

To submit an online nomination, simply go to the CASE web site's online form.

Hundreds of volunteer leaders have committed their time and talent to the advancement profession. You can join them, or help steer capable people to this opportunity.

Thanks!

Job Posting: American University in Paris

For someone who is comfortable in a multinational setting (and who has permission to work in the EU), there's a challenge available at the American University in Paris. The position is Director of Development.

There's a general description on the UK universities' education recruiting site, and a more detailed one on the AUP site itself. Note: If that last link has expired it means the job is no longer posted.

Best of luck!

Photo of the géode at La Villette from Flickr user Panorama via Creative Commons.

Click image to view larger.