alumni futures

What Does a Community Manager Look Like?

Have you heard the job title "Community Manager"? It's been around for a while, and often describes someone assigned to monitor a company's reputation on blogs, in social networks, and anywhere else that customers are discussing the firm, its products, its services, or its competitors.

What are the ideal characteristics of a community manager? In 2006, analyst Jeremiah Owyang described an effective community manager as "an odd looking being" with "big ears and eyes, and a small mouth."

It struck me upon reading this that it's also a pretty good description of a tarsier, the little beast pictured here.

• Big eyes: to watch consumer trends and behavior;
• Big ears: to listen to what customers are saying to each other; and
• Small mouth: to keep quiet when needed, resisting the urge to defend the company at every turn.

In fact, according to a book called Primates in Question, each of a tarsier's eyeballs is as large as its entire brain. Think about that as a metaphor for observing alumni and donors.

Specifically, think about how we interact with our alumni in social settings, in the real world and online. We can easily hold a normal conversation with an alumnus at a reception or dinner. We let them talk about themselves, we ask them questions, and we're ready with relevant items that might be of interest or utility to them.

Why is it so hard to do this online? We swoop down on Facebook Groups and Pages – and now LinkedIn discussions – and we don't listen. We bombard people with event announcements, save the dates, headlines, press releases and links to web pages. And then we email them all the same information, which is also on the web. People using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, our web page, RSS and email will hear the same information six different times in six different places. We wouldn't say the same thing six times in a row to someone at an event. Why do it online?

One answer to that question is that we're using the new online channels to deliver marketing the old fashioned way: yelling our message at people, to compete with other messages. This is necessary on television and radio, in print and on billboards, where we have to force information on people and hope they notice. But online we have their permission to communicate – they joined our group or gave us their email address. We should be able to share our information in a normal tone of voice, in the course of regular interaction. And like the tarsier we should mostly be quiet and just listen and look.

Owyang (who was an online community manager in industry) has useful pointers about the role of a community manager, and I think his guidelines apply to us in our everyday work. After all, don't we manage the relationships between our community members and the institution whose identity binds them to one another?

Related:

Jeremiah Owyang on the hazards of being too connected to the community

Photo of a tarsier by Erwin Bolwidt via Creative Commons

Place-Based Media: a New Alumni Experience

What if alumni could return to campus and view virtual pictures and signs; could experience spoken stories and written memories of other alumni, students and faculty?

What if students could learn about campus history and personalities the same way, and all they needed to view and hear these stories was a PDA or a cell phone?

A few years ago, during a cross-country flight, I looked out at the landscape below and thought about how cool it would be if someone invented an interactive overlay for the window, like a heads-up display. It could tell you the name of that river, the town in the distance, the height of that peak, and even the history of the places you were flying over.

Now something like this is within reach, with prototypes being created, deployed and tested.

Dean Terry and others are working on it. Dean is the director of the new Emerging Media area at the University of Texas – Dallas. He's also director of Mobile Lab & the Online Worlds Lab. He thinks and writes about mobile media, virtual worlds, social networks, and more. He's also a film-maker, and he teaches.

Dean recently gave a talk titled Conversations in Place – Research, Collaboration and Art in the Emerging Mobile Space. A core project Dean is driving revolves around what he calls a "virtual visual layer of place-sensitive data" or "place-based media."

"When you're on the web," he points out, "it doesn't matter where you are physically." So something local, something geographic is missing from our web experience. We do create virtual "places" online (such as Second Life). But, he asks, why not turn that paradigm on its head and add virtual content to real places?

Mobile devices, he says...

...can be context sensitive so that where you are not only matters, but is a primary driver of interaction and use of the device. We can create a kind of "augmented reality" by delivering information about place. Hold your device up and view the data in real time on the screen, or hear a recorded message delivered to the spot where you're standing.

Now picture a campus landscape like the one outside your office, but silently and virtually augmented by content from alumni, faculty and students.

Dean's group is working on an application for iPhone called Placethings. It's still not quite in beta, but it's not too early to think about its potential for higher ed advancement or instruction.

In his talk, Dean also mentioned that the legal, political and ethical implications of this technology are potentially enormous: would you like it if your neighbor hung a virtual sign on your house that said "The person who lives here is a jerk"?

These "annotated experiences" raise many complex issues: social filtering, community standards, and the question, "how much information is too much?" It's all part of the world beyond Web 2.0. And it's coming, with or without our participation. But if we engage in the discussions and planning, and anticipate the benefits and potential pitfalls, we'll be positioned to evaluate these tools for our constituents' benefit.

Can you go outside the box and suggest alumni relations, admissions, development or communications uses for a technology like this on your campus, at events, or elsewhere in higher ed? Leave a comment.

Think this is going too far, or that it represents a risk? Leave a comment.

And if you're interested in hanging out with the people making these things happen, check out the Where 2.0 Conference in San Jose, California:

Where 2.0 Conference 2009

Photo of Where 2.0 attendee using analog recording device, copyright James Duncan Davidson.

Community Marketing and Finding the Fish

More nuggets of wisdom from web strategist Jeremiah Owyang's excellent blog. This week he talked about corporate approaches to social web site strategies (i.e., "how should our company participate in social networks?"). Jeremiah wasn't writing about colleges and universities, but his comments on chipmaker Intel's approach apply to many kinds of organizations — including alumni associations.

In the context of the "build or join" dilemma — should we build our own online community, or join in on the ones our community members seem to be using? — Owyang quotes an Intel marketing manager:

[O]ne of the requirements of his marketing efforts was to not link to Intel.com. Rather than try to join a community then pull [members] away, the marketing efforts joined the community and stayed there — likely where the trust is highest.

Jeremiah has several survey-based sources of data showing that consumers trust their peers' views more than those of analysts, marketers or (ahem) bloggers.

Owyang then says something that I think it is critical to understand:

Savvy brands join communities where they exist, rather than solely trying to coax customers to the corporate website...

But how will we know if our participation in social sites is paying off? He says that we have to measure...something.

Marketers are often measured on the amount of traffic they generate to their corporate website, but in this case, Intel will have to measure using different attributes such as interaction, viral spread, and maybe even a survey.

Alumni associations should probably try to measure awareness, as well as whether alumni feel (and are) knowledgeable about the institution today. A kind of "net promoter" score is informative as well, as Carnegie Mellon's Judy Cole commented here way back in March of 2007.

Bottom line, to quote Jeremiah: "Rather than coax users to your irrelevant corporate website, savvy brands will fish where the fish are." 

I know, we think our association site is relevant to our alumni, because after all, they attended our school. But do they think it's relevant? Does it solve their problem? Fulfill their need? Represent something beyond an interesting curiosity? This is our challenge.

Photo of Icelandic fishing boat by Andy Shaindlin

What Do Science Students Learn? Ask Alumni

The old cliché about going to college in the United States is that it's "the best four years of your life." You do a little reading, a little writing, and let mom and dad pay the bills, while you go to parties and carry on.

After graduation the fun is over: you have to get a job, pay rent, start a family...and the carefree student life becomes a fond memory which engenders nostalgia and longing for your alma mater. That's the traditional pattern.

Now consider a science, math and engineering school where the curriculum is considered the most challenging in higher education, the admission standards are second to none, and people often mention the ratio of Nobel prizes to alumni and faculty. I am the alumni director at that school (although not an alumnus of it). I'm glad I ended up here; nearly every day I meet someone or hear something that amazes me.

Campus tour guides tell wide-eyed high school visitors and their parents that studying here is intense — like "drinking from a fire hose." As for having fun as an undergraduate, there's a campus saying about that too: "Grades. Sleep. Social life. Pick two." In almost nine years on this campus, I have never heard anyone claim that the undergraduate experience was "the best four years" of his life.

Graduates don't leave with warm, nostalgic feelings. They leave, in some cases, feeling like they have been treated harshly. And yet as alumni they turn out to be at least as loyal, dedicated and supportive as alumni of the two other institutions where I have worked (both of which are major universities with successful alumni relations and development records).

A few weeks ago a biology professor here asked me whether, as alumni director, I had any insight into this transition from disenfranchised student to grateful alumnus. Anecdotal experience supports the following model, but I wonder if others have an opinion about this. It goes like this:

1. Students arrive here passionate about math and science. They come here to learn "engineering" or "physics" or "biology." And they do learn those subjects, and much more, at the highest level possible.
2. Many years later they stop and look back on the difficult academic experience. They realize as alumni (maybe ten years after graduation, maybe fifty years) that what they really learned here was how to solve hard problems.

Alumni can apply these analytical abilities, which they learn in the context of science, math and engineering, to any career path they choose. I've spoken to alumni who are attorneys, physicians, venture capitalists, artists and entrepreneurs, as well as academics, university presidents, and government leaders. They all say "what I learned doing homework or in the lab was the key to my success as a professional. I learned how to solve hard problems. I learned that I could solve hard problems."

So, the theory goes, you can learn science, math and engineering pretty much anywhere. But the ability to solve the hardest problems in almost any endeavor (sometimes without even realizing it) is the real outcome of the difficult undergraduate experience here. And therein lies the key to graduates' appreciation for their education: gratitude to the institution for giving them those tools, which the alumni have taken with them into many other fields.

I told the biology professor one other thing. I don't think a college undergraduate can know that the real skills she is learning have nothing to do with geophysics, quantum mechanics or chemical engineering. Even the brightest teenagers don't have a context for understanding how their Physics 1 homework set will help them become finance executives, or how completing chem lab will help them to run a software start up. They'll recognize the connection only after it happens. And that's when the edge comes off their feelings about their student days, and they begin to appreciate what they really learned during those late nights in the lab.

Photo: Andy Shaindlin

Harvard's Endowment, Spending Policies, and Alumni Engagement

Harvard alumna Carroll Bogert is associate director of Human Rights Watch, and a member of Harvard's class of '83. In a May 25 op-ed piece in the New York Times ("Enjoy the Reunion. Skip the Check."), Bogert states that Harvard University (Massachusetts, USA), with its disproportionately large endowment, needs to revamp its spending practices to match its aggressive investment policies.

This argument is increasingly common now, as the public (including lawmakers) questions why schools with multi-billion dollar endowments continue to ask alumni for gifts. Many small donors feel, as Bogert points out, that the university can do without their modest contributions. So as I read the piece, I thought it was going to be about Harvard's finances.

But Bogert's specific complaint is actually about Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust's unwillingness to meet with a group of alumni who want to fund higher education in Africa:

A few hundred alumni have formed Harvard Alumni for Social Action [HASA], to try to channel 25th-reunion giving to destitute universities in Africa. In three years, we’ve raised $425,000 — a lot for the University of Dar es Salaam but hardly a match for our annual class “gift.” And evidently not enough to win the respect of President Faust, who has begged off meeting the group. Harvard clearly doesn’t like any effort that might divert a dollar away from its Cambridge coffers.

As a special interest group, HASA is dedicated to a specific cause. The money raised for the University of Dar es Salaam is noteworthy, and could obviously make a real difference to that institution. But why use sarcastic quotation marks around "gift"? When alumni give money, it's a gift. Every alumnus is free to decline to give when asked. Alumni can even ask to be removed from solicitation lists. But very few do.

Bogert says that Faust's failure to meet with the group means Faust doesn't "respect" them. This sounds passive-aggressive; there are many "respectable" groups that college presidents don't meet with, for a variety of reasons. Having said this, and assuming it's true that Faust won't meet, I am curious to know Faust's specific reason in this case. It seems like a reasonable expectation on the part of HASA leaders to speak officially with the president.

One more thing about respect, though. Bogert says she'd "have to be drunk" to "fall for" fundraisers' appeals. Her fellow alumni have elected to fund - at extraordinary levels - their alma mater. But she's sober, and they're metaphorically drunk? That shows disrespect. And anyway, she's a fundraiser too.

You have to give Bogert credit though: equating a popular complaint (Harvard is too rich) with a noble cause (Dar es Salaam is too poor) is a neat public relations maneuver. Getting it into the Sunday NY Times is fancier still. Maybe the Harvard question and the Dar es Salaam question are related, and maybe they aren't. I'm not really sure. But either way, a lot more people are talking about those causes this weekend. That's probably good.

Bogert claims to be surprised that "Harvard clearly doesn't like any effort that might divert a dollar away from its Cambridge coffers." Why should Harvard like it? Harvard, like any big organization, is in business to stay in business. You don't get a $30 billion endowment by turning down donations. You can turn Bogert's complaint around and say that "HASA doesn't like any effort that might divert a Harvard alum's dollar away from Dar es Salaam." You couldn't blame Bogert if she made that claim on HASA's behalf; she can't be surprised that Harvard wants to keep its alumni donations.

Finally, Bogert hypothesizes as to why alumni continue to donate (dare I say "give"?) to Harvard, when the school doesn't currently need the money. Donations, she says, are driven by:

• "the unparalleled networking opportunity that alumni events represent";
• Harvard grads' fear that legacy applicants won't gain admission if their parents don't give; and
• tradition.

To this last point, she asks :

...would universities still go to the trouble of organizing reunions if they didn’t make a gigantic amount of money from them? We can all enjoy the get-together, even if the university’s message today seems wildly off-kilter: Open your wallets, graying nostalgics, it’s reunion season! And suspend the critical thinking we taught you here, way back when.

She's right to ask about why reunions exist. Alumni relations is a building block of fundraising. But she is still conflating endowment payout policies with annual giving procedures. I am guessing that the "gigantic amount of money" Harvard has currently comes more from endowment income than from reunion classes' gifts.

As for critical thinking, Bogert should realize that while the University sounds hypocritical, so do some of its alumni. They decry Harvard's efforts to raise money, while they themselves benefit from the reputation, the visibility and the name-brand that fundraising enables and sustains.

But alumni of a prominent institution owe it to the school, to themselves and to society to use that institution's name for good, if they can. Raising money for African education is a worthwhile goal and Bogert is right about one other thing: Harvard is sitting on "a gargantuan pile of cash" which continues to grow, and a "new financial model" is at the very least a reasonable proposal.

Bottom line: Bogert's piece isn't really about endowment. But all the same, Harvard will benefit in the long run from engaging with this group on terms that both organizations can support. Bogert and HASA should be commended for asking tough questions about Harvard's finances. If they can manage to ask those questions without resorting to antagonistic sarcasm, they might even start getting some answers.

Enjoy the Reunion. Skip the Check.

Harvard Alumni for Social Action

Wall St. Journal: College Endowment Tax Idea

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.

Additional Entries from the 2008 Alumni Futures Innovation Awards

I mentioned earlier that Nora Gubins and Kevin Wesley had earned Honorable Mention in the recent Alumni Futures Innovation Awards contest. Here are their contest entries:

Nora Gubins, Director of Communications & External Relations in the Faculty of Health at York University (Canada), wrote:

My word is pole vault, and that's what I'd like to see alumni do for current students - pole vault them into the future. As I also work in Recruitment (as well as alumni affairs), I find more and more that the high school students considering university don't understand future career options. They require an authentic voice, not filtered through recruitment officers or faculty, about how important university is to the career of their choice.

I am considering holding recruiting sessions not at the high schools or on campus, but at alumni places of employment, so that the high school kids get a chance to see and hear a result of their studying. This will take a lot of planning at my end but the collaborative approach would most definitely be worth it.

I hope Nora lets us know if the workplace approach to university recruitment has some success. I have sent Nora a copy of Larry Lauer's Advancing Education in Uncertain Times.

Meanwhile, Kevin Wesley directs alumni relations at the University of Rochester (New York, USA). He wrote:

My word was pyramid...Pyramid has several immediate connotations when applied to advancement – gift pyramids, engagement pyramids, event pyramids. My thought is to take this in another direction – the pyramids of ancient and foreign cultures, and American higher education's growing interest in internationalism, the growing presence of more diverse student bodies, and the spread of our alumni bodies to farther-flung corners of the globe.

My suggestion is this – let's expand on existing partnerships that schools, faculty members, study-abroad programs, and researchers may already have and broaden the involvement of our campus with a sister university in another part of the world.

Connect students on both campuses from the time they are admitted and throughout their student experience; enable frequent cross-campus study, visiting professorships, alumni exchanges/travel programs/events, and recruitment. If the sister school is in, for example, India, let their students experience American football in person while our students cheer on cricket. Using video and webconferencing, build multi-campus courses taught simultaneously on both campuses, while researchers collaborate on shared studies, faculty (and administrative) exchanges flourish (and for more than a semester), and students spend a year (and a summer) in each others' backyard. I suggest we deepen what are today pockets of cross-cultural, cross-institutional relationships to be more institutional-wide in scope.

I'm sent Kevin a copy of David Kirp's Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education.

Thank you again to all who submitted entries last month!

Photo of I.M. Pei's Pyramid at the Louvre by Grufnik via Creative Commons license

Photo of pole vaulter (above) by Andrew Barron via Creative Commons license 

Recap: European Association for International Education

As mentioned, I recently spoke at the annual meeting of the European Association for International Education (EAIE). 2,600 international student exchange professionals from 75 countries gathered to compare notes and discuss trends and best practices. Since international students generally become international alumni, there is a small but motivated group within EAIE that considers the implications of this.

I'm still processing a lot of what I saw and heard, which ranged from assessing international rankings of universities to discussing the "student as customer."

The general attitude toward alumni relations (and by extension, fundraising) was that "North America is so far ahead" of the rest of world in this area. To me that is just another way of saying that "North American schools have a lot of baggage that they can't unload." This is exemplified by the comments I quoted here many weeks ago about volunteer management. Many well-established programs are saddled with structures, processes and events that we cannot, politically, afford to do away with. And yet, as times change we are expected to take advantage of each new opportunity that comes along.

Listening to EAIE attendees talk about the lack of alumni relations, career services or fundraising functions in their institutions, I felt a twinge of jealousy. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence: these developing programs look to North America for mature examples that they can learn from (and sometimes copy directly), while we look at their blank slates and think, "If only I had the opportunity to build a program from the ground up, I could be so much more effective."

Our programs all sit somewhere on the continuum between having every possible alumni service and having no alumni program at all. In the immediate future those of us in North America will meet many nascent programs part way, and perhaps be asked to help them build additional pieces based on our own experience. But I would encourage this group of new international professionals, struggling to create a culture of alumni relations, to invent its own programs that alumni will find relevant.

As this happens, those of us who are supposedly experts will learn a thing or two as well. Then we'll just need to summon up the courage to cross off our own lists one or two things that we frankly do not need any more, and replace them with something we can proudly label: "Not invented here."

Alumni and Legacy Admissions

Note to Alumni Futures' readers: Starting June 18 I will be posting on Alumni Futures once per week (Mondays) for the rest of the summer, with occasional exceptions - more often if something newsworthy happens, and not at all when I go on vacation.

I recently asked a former alumni relations colleague, Bill Caskey, for his perspective on the role of alumni in undergraduate admissions. Bill was an Ivy League admission officer, was director of an on-campus alumni college advising program, and is now an independent college admission consultant. He said one topic's been on his mind for a while: irate alumni whose child was denied admission by alma mater.

Bill sums up the problem this way:

Universities regularly face the challenge of admission and irate alumni. Schools develop programs to counsel alumni families and they fret over potential lost donations. I believe that in the end these efforts are largely wasted. Most alumni will return to the fold anyway once they cool down and realize their child's life has not been ruined. In other words, human nature is to forgive and forget.

So Bill's advice to advancement professionals is that the legacy hurdle is neither as large nor as financially devastating as many believe. In short, "there are better ways to dedicate resources" than  by creating alumni admissions counseling programs.

The source for all the alumni angst is the increased competition for elite college admission. As Bill points out:

• The number of high school graduates has grown by 35 percent over the last decade.
• More high school seniors are choosing to attend four-year colleges.
• They are applying to more schools than ever before. 

On this last point, Caskey quotes some stats: 72% of college applicants are submitting apps to more than three schools. That's a 20% increase in the last decade. And the number of seniors submitting six or more applications was up 41% between 1994 and 2004.

Back to legacies. If "forgive and forget" is the eventual outcome, it's the flip side of another human trait: alumni willingness to suspend disbelief when estimating Junior's chances of being admitted at Alma Mater. And even if he's rejected, the alumni have a facile explanation, says Caskey:

If our children don't get in, we'll say it proves that the school has become a bureaucratic institution that sacrifices allegiance in favor of statistics. Alumni resign from the boards of local alumni clubs and refuse to "give another dime."

And most alumni will not be placated in the short run. As an alumni admission counselor, says Caskey,

there was little I could do other than listen sympathetically and recognize that the angry parents would likely rejoin the alumni community. Once they cooled off, most saw that their child had survived, and they realized that their wunderkind didn't care nearly as much about attending their beloved alma mater as they had.

Meanwhile, Inside Higher Ed reports on a study supporting the conventional perception that alumni increase their donations to alma mater to aid a child's application for admission.

Bill Caskey is the founder of AdmissionReady and serves as an independent college admission consultant. He can be reached at bill@admissionready.com.

First-Generation Alumni

In March I mentioned Professor Ken Smith of Indiana University - South Bend, who blogs about instructional technologies. We exchanged messages about mutual interests, and he said

Our campus has long served many first-generation college students coming from families without a tradition of giving to the university or even attending events on campus. We’re trying to create a new culture that makes the university a richer part of the region’s life....

Ken was curious whether there are examples of institutions that had learned how to engage this audience effectively. And his comment about "first-generation college students" made me wonder about those graduates' relationships with their alma mater - and not just in terms of giving. How will their overall pattern of engagement look? Will they be more likely to

• come to a reunion?
• pay membership dues?
• submit a class note?
• read the magazine?

An admittedly quick scan for research on this topic yields nothing related to first-generation alumni relationships. However, using NCES statistics, the authors of a paper called The National Academy Foundation’s Career Academies [pdf] indicate that nationally,

in 1995, only 47 percent of high school graduates whose parents had no college education enrolled in college the fall after high school completion. In 1999, the figure was about 54 percent....First-generation students nationally are also not very likely to enroll in four-year postsecondary institutions; only 30 percent of first-generation college students did so in 1995.

Clearly the numbers are small. And  yet, if this cohort's behavior is measurably different from that of alumni with college-going family backgrounds, alumni directors at schools with many first-generation college enrollees will want to take note. This is an area with great potential for useful research.