[Updated February 28, 2008 with direct link to registration page for Jim Flynn's April 3, 2008 online presentation.]
[Updated February 18, 2008 with comments about the relationship between attitudes and behavior.]
A few weeks ago I mentioned Charlie Melichar's ideas about depicting alumni engagement. Jim Flynn of Harford Survey Research has worked on objectively measuring alumni engagement. Jim, who is presenting in CASE's Online Speaker Series (see link at the bottom of this posting) says his Alumni Engagement Survey evaluates, in part,
alumni attitudes toward the school, and their interest in participating in alumni programs, events and volunteer opportunities. This two–factor measure is predicted by differences in the college experiences of individual alumni, and it predicts differences in giving.
Jim also says that
alumni attitudes and interest in participating [in events and activities] are important indicators of engagement. Alumni who have not made a gift or attended alumni events may nonetheless be engaged with their alma mater. They want to receive news about classmates and campus events and are more likely to make a gift or to attend an event in the future than are their 'unengaged' classmates.
This squares with something I've experienced with alumni surveys: they can provide good data about alumni attitudes, but little predictive insight into alumni behavior.
[Updated: Jim Flynn points out that "attitudes do predict behavior....However, they are not perfect predictors," and other variables account for differences in attendance, participation and giving. I was referring to simplistic surveys that ask alumni what kind of programs they'd like us to provide, after which we provide those programs and alumni don't participate in them.]
Discussing the reasons for low alumni participation, Dr. Flynn says
when we asked open-ended questions about why alumni did not attend events, the most frequent responses were travel time, work and family constraints. The next most frequently reported reason was that their classmates and friends were not attending.
As a result of this initial research, Jim suggests that "if you are using actual participation as an indicator of alumni engagement, you are greatly underestimating alumni engagement."
So even when alumni don't show up for events or make a donation, they may still be interested and engaged in the life of the campus. As for using the data, Dr. Flynn says that
combining individual graduates' engagement levels with alumni contact information and data on their activities as students can yield powerful data for recruiting and soliciting "engaged" alumni.
We still have a lot to learn. Meanwhile, though, don't assume low participation rates mean low alumni engagement – unless your alumni tell you to stop inviting them to events, and ask you to stop sending campus news. But at least then you'll know how they really feel.
Check the following site for Jim's upcoming online session and others (registration was not yet open at the time of this posting):
Data-driven Programming: Building Strong Alumni Engagement at a Small College
CASE Online Speaker Series
Thursday, April 3, 2008
2:00 to 3:30 PM, EDT (GMT-4)
