[Updated 4 February, 2009: Paul Clifford mentioned AlumnIdea on his new blog and podcast, Impact Alumni; and Amy Yen wrote about AlumnIdea over at Our American Shelf Life]
[Updated 17 February 2009: Mindpower's Brain Candy blog followed up on this posting with a detailed discussion – and fresh insights – of their own.]
Violet Lim of Heavybag Media emailed me last week with an interesting project that her firm is helping to develop and implement for the alumni association at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD).
The site is in beta, and is called AlumnIdea. Violet explains it this way:
This social media site encourages alumni to submit their event ideas which can be voted 'up' or 'down' by other alumni. The most popular ideas are aggregated into a top-10 section which are then selected for implementation by UCSD alumni officers. The site is a platform for UCSD alumni to voice their ideas and thoughts towards building a strong alumni network.
What do you think?
Would you implement something like this on your own site? What concerns do you have about its use? How many votes would you require before you implemented even a "top 10" idea? Is it a solution in search of a problem? Or a cool tool for engaging alumni and, as Violet claims, "building a strong alumni network"?
I think it has a lot of potential. It is a way to collect ideas, to measure alumni interest in particular types of programs and services, and it is interactive so UCSD can engage the community, and share ownership of ideas rated on the site.
However, as a colleague suggested, driving traffic to the site will be a problem, as the "destination" model for alumni sites continues to weaken. For this reason, Heavybag will need to distribute as widely as possible a widget that alumni and staff can install in a variety of places – web pages, blogs, social site profiles – to let the content roam free.
As an aside, maybe students and alumni could be asked to vote 'up' or 'down' on the name...AlumnIdea doesn't really grab me. I'm also confused by the logo. Why is the letter "D" capitalized? Do you like the name, or have alternate suggestions?
Visit http://ucsd.alumnidea.com and check it out. Then click back to this window (which will remain open) and leave a comment with your reactions and feedback, which Violet can collect to report back to UCSD.
