[Updated July 18, 2008: Michael Stoner wrote up his impressions of the panel described below on mStonerblog.com.
Note: The original posting below was cross-posted on the CASE Advancement Summit blog. Click through to read postings based on the New York City conference, which took place July 13—15, 2008.]
On July 13, 2008 I served on a panel at the CASE Advancement Summit, addressing The Future of Community and Affinity in an Online World. Dan Guhr of Illuminate Consulting Group and Lou Alexander from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology joined me to share observations about these ideas — "community" and "affinity." Along with "engagement" these squishy concepts probably share the highest "heard:understood" ratios of any words currently used in advancement. They are hard to define and, by extension, difficult to measure.
Chris Thompson of CASE moderated the session, saying that "based on the senior level of the audience, we want to examine online social communities in the context of higher strategic and institutional themes."
Dan provided context by highlighting the fact the today's youth join online communities as young as five or six years of age (via child-centered sites such as Club Penguin or Webkinz). Lou remarked on the spontaneous formation of online community among MIT's incoming students and that phenomenon's implications for alumni relations and fundraising. In between, I made three points about the online landscape for alumni relations today. Here they are:
The "top down" model of online programming is fading away.
Telling alumni what tools to use, and how to use them is old school, and they won't care one way or the other that we have certain information on our web sites. We are not in a position to say how alumni will do things, we are only positioned to learn what alumni need to do, and to facilitate them doing it. If we're not engaged in that process alumni will do it without us, and won't miss our participation one bit. We must let alumni build their own online activities, using a framework we provide for the purpose of enabling that process.We are not at the center. The alumni are.
The alumni are not orbiting us like satellites. Increasingly, it's the other way around. Alumni are finding effective tools to self-organize — and alumni view themselves as the center, and staff as the outsiders. And they are the center. They will always be alumni, and we will not always be on staff, so again, our job is to establish frameworks that alumni can use to build out their online interactions in the medium and long term.
There is no such thing as "online communities."
Social networks are not new. What's new is that they are electronic. Community is a fundamental feature of human interaction, whether that interaction takes place in person, via phone, or on the internet. As I have written on the Alumni Futures blog, the online community is not a separate community — any more than the people we talk to on the phone are a "phone community." It is fundamentally the way people interact, is deeply embedded in modern society, and we must incorporate this understanding organically into all the services we offer alumni.
See Michael Stoner's posting about the conference session described here.
