alumni futures

The Alumni Organization Social Network Matrix: 18 Use Cases

Back in February we saw the first version of web strategist Jeremiah Owyang's useful chart, Impacts to Alumni Organizations in a World of Social Networks. A month later, I posted a revised version of the chart, which I had updated by incorporating more specific aspects of alumni relations.

Now, with help from Cornell's Andrew Gossen and Liz Allen (of THINK Global School and Adaptivate), I've built out the matrix to incorporate almost every possible use case I can think of for social technology in alumni and donor outreach. 

The chart is detailed and lengthy, and so it is hard to read within the Alumni Futures web page (although to get an idea of the content you can click the image above for a snap shot of one section). 

Download a PDF of the full chart here:

Social Networks' Impacts to Alumni Organizations: 18 Use Cases  [90kb PDF]

Here are some ways you might use the chart:

• As a management checklist to see how you are doing in engaging constituents with interactive tools;
• For brainstorming new ways to engage your audience, in partnership with other campus units (such as student affairs, career services, community relations, development or communications);
• To create a strategy roadmap that guides your inquiries and planning as you allocate resources to new initiatives.

Finally, I hope others will update and add to the matrix in the way that Jeremiah has encouraged me to do with his version. As the technology changes, advancement professionals need to update their vision and plans, and incorporate new ideas to expand the range of possible futures.

Leave a comment telling me what you think about this resource, and feel free to share your own additions in the comments or via email: andy@alumnifutures.com.

Note: The matrix is designed to print on US legal size paper, 8.5 x 14 inches. If you are reading this message via email or RSS and cannot download the 18 Use Cases, 1) click through to the blog post on the web page: http://www.alumnifutures.com/2010/07/expanded-matrix.html, then 2) right click the link to the PDF and 3) select "Save As..." or "Save Link As..."

New Notions of Community: Ten Years Out

I was inspired last week to revisit some remarks I delivered last year at a "Thought Leader Seminar" hosted by Illuminate Consulting Group. The impetus to review what I had said came from a comment left by Santa Clara University's Kathy Kale on the Alumni Futures posting last week. Kathy asked, 

What is the call to action for alumni organizations? What are we supposed to do to respond to or interact with loose social networks that include our alumni? We may not play a central role but what role do/can we play?

The word we have been hearing for years is "relevance." This is increasingly central to alumni organizations' missions and activities. It was the first bullet point I addressed when I wrote about "mattering" in my first posting of 2010. 

So here's an update to what I was saying about this a year ago. I had the perspective then of nine years in my role as executive director at one institution; now my perspective includes time as an independent consultant to education. My views overall haven't changed that much.

New Notions of Community: Ten Years Out
As the value of some traditional alumni relations activities fades steadily, and as new ways to self-identify, to communicate and to collaborate internationally continue to grow, advancement professionals must rethink their notion of what it means to “have a community” of alumni, friends, and donors. 

Alumni offices can become brokers of information that alumni need from one another (and from the institution): making potentially valuable connections discoverable should be among their strategic goals, and deploying helpful tools according to a structured, but flexible, framework will enable them to succeed.

Career and professional help, fundraising, communication and marketing (as well as alumni relations and admissions/recruiting) will overlap more and hybrid offices and job titles will appear on campus. I can imagine something like the following:

• Director of Alumni Relations and Career Services  
• Major Gifts Officer and Alumni Network Broker 
• Annual Giving Coordinator and Community Manager

How we measure our success will also change, moving toward outcomes and success stories, network value, and visibility online. Alumni organizations will measure success, in part, through alumni connections and influence in other organizations (government, education, and business).

Getting started in this direction may require only a modest reallocation of existing resources, and willingness by advancement professionals to stand up and point out a new direction. 

Leadership opportunities abound, and as with every truly new effort, for most that enter this field there will be no “wrong way” to go – but there will be many unexplored avenues to pursue.

New Staffing Models in Alumni Relations

[Alumni Futures is partnering with Charlie Melichar's Intermedia blog this week, to share some views on the changing landscape of institutional advancement in education. Read Charlie's interview with Andrew Gossen, Cornell University's new senior director for social media strategy as a companion posting to my comments below.]

I've been thinking a lot recently about something I heard on a SelectMinds webinar a couple of years ago. 

Ethan McCarty, program manager for Greater IBM (the corporate alumni community for current and former IBM employees worldwide) was discussing social media. He described how IBM was connecting the organization to its audience via its sprawling, worldwide LinkedIn Group (more than 46,000 members today). A webinar participant asked how IBM measures the return on investment for social tools. McCarty replied, "What's the ROI for your phone service?" 

In other words, online networks are part of the fabric now, they're what people do. They are as critical to many businesses as telephone service is. Online community is not an experiment or a half-measure to make up for the fact that people won't read your direct mail pieces.

Our work requires ever-increasing incorporation of online networks and so-called social media – these are tools for doing our work, not just "programs and services" that we offer. So what are the implications for alumni relations? One implication is that staffing models, organizational structure and professional roles must change, and change soon.

Cornell University (Ithaca, New York, USA) is adapting to these opportunities by creating permanent roles that embed these practices in the alumni relations effort. Their decisions raise the bar for how alumni offices incorporate social tools into traditional engagement. I asked Cornell's Associate Vice President for Alumni Relations, Chris Marshall, to comment on their rationale.

Chris told me,

I've hired most of our team members for their ability to motivate and manage volunteers, to develop deep relationships, to plan strategic events, and to work hand-in-hand with fundraisers. Asking staff with those specialized skills to also become experts in a rapidly-evolving field like social media, with its complicated task of collecting, synthesizing, and reporting metrics, simply won't get the job done. I believe we need dedicated staff in these areas for alumni affairs to succeed.

We’ve decided that social media is going to be the primary way we ‘touch’ most of our 215,000 alumni. We also believe it will help us advance our relationships with key donors and volunteer leaders. So we have to do it right, and have to show our results with data. That’s why we’ve hired Andrew Gossen as our Senior Director of Social Media Strategy, and given Jennifer Cunningham the title of Senior Director, Marketing Strategy and Business Analytics.

This doesn't mean that other staff members are off the hook and don't need to know or think about the newer tools that alumni are using. A new hire today should be familiar with social sites and comfortable using them for alumni engagement, in ways that make sense in their own organization. 

Other organizations, such as the Stanford Alumni Association, have also begun carving out these roles even in the face of limited resources. By measuring the results analytically, these front-runners will be able to show how our online efforts influence alumni relationships (with each other and with our institutions), and to what extent. This is the beginning of an important new direction for alumni relations, communications, and development staffing models.

Related postings: 

A post about Princeton's mobile-optimized reunion web site

Andrew's guest blog post about "an unusual online student-alumni interaction"

Andrew's guest blog post about social networking meeting philanthropy

White Paper: Alumni Networks and Twitter - An Update

Today I'm excited to announce the publication of a new white paper, co-authored with Elizabeth Allen. The paper is titled Alumni Networks and Twitter: An Update. It's a quick look back at changes since our January 2009 paper, which examined Twitter's potential to influence alumni relations and higher education advancement.

We repeated the non-scientific survey on Twitter awareness and usage in alumni relations, so there is now basic comparative data to show changes in Twitter's role in our professions. This year we also added questions about Twitter Lists to the survey.

To download the paper (PDF format), click on the link below and the document will be downloaded to your computer.

Download Alumni Networks and Twitter: An Update [713kb PDF]

Leave comments about the white paper below this posting. To notify your own Twitter followers about the white paper, click this link: 

Tweet This White Paper

Or use the "Tweet this White Paper" button on the second page of the PDF. 

Thanks for reading; we hope you find it useful!

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.

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.

Is Your School Too Old To Fail?

Recent news items about the anniversary of the failure of Lehman Brothers asked whether large, private financial institutions should be protected by government – whether they are, in effect, "too big to fail."

It's interesting to ask something similar of a college or university. If I told you that Oxford or Princeton was going to shut its doors, would you suggest that they should be bailed out? Protected? If so, would you advise using public money for the cause?

Many of the most prominent schools have been around for hundreds of years. 

Are they "too old to fail"?

The University of Bologna is more than 900 years old; just about the only organizations that resilient and long-lasting seem to be universities and organized religions.* 17 American colleges, universities and schools operating today are older than the United States itself. Few national governments can claim the long runs of which schools like these can boast. 

So schools last a long time. But what exactly is it that persists? Is the school we revere today really "the same" as the one that first bore its name? Of course not.

Schools (like many organizations) survive in name, but they must rebuild, reimagine and retool themselves ceaselessly, one small segment at a time. Saying that Bologna hasn't changed is like saying that a Model T Ford in an antique car show is "the same car" that Henry Ford rolled off the line in 1920. In reality, piece by piece it gets fixed up, "restored," and "maintained." A headlight here, a bumper there. Engine parts wear out and are replaced. Rubber moldings dry and crack and new ones are attached. The body fades and pits and the car is sanded and repainted. The upholstery gets torn, and....well you get the idea. Is it really the same car?

And so it is with our schools. We are lucky in some cases to have architecturally significant buildings that survive, but even those have to be updated for technological reasons, for safety, to please donors, or increasingly, to be "sustainable." So the buildings – like the institutions they serve – survive, but in forms that are new and often distant from their historical roles.

U.S. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes (Brown University class of 1881) famously quipped of his alma mater, "It is always the old Brown and it is always the new Brown." We would be hard pressed to sum it up more succinctly or more eloquently. And we'd be ill-advised to forget it.

* Iceland established a parliament in 930 A.D., but had no centralized administration until about 330 years later. 

Photo of old buildings and new students at the University of Bologna, from Michele Ursino via Creative Commons. Click photo to enlarge.

Alumni Villains, Real and Imagined

Bear with me for a minute. This post will take us in a couple of different directions, one serious, one not so serious.

The serious part is an admonition:

Monitor your institutional brand online to the greatest extent possible.

In the past few months I have posted alumni-related comments from Twitter, and it would actually be easy to fill an entire blog with nothing but examples of people making comments about their alma mater or fellow alumni on Twitter.

I'm resisting that temptation, but I still have to share this one. I saw this on Twitter a few weeks ago and for some reason, saved it:

Later the same day I saw yet another tweet referencing high school alumni. It used the word "infamous" and here's what I saw when I clicked the embedded Wikipedia link:

Something tells me that Kevin, the "Youtube Comedy Star" listed here, may have had a hand in editing his high school's list of notable alumni. Nonetheless, it just illustrates that keeping an eye on institutional references is a good idea.

Meanwhile (here comes the less serious part), a blog called io9 follows all things science fiction-related. And a posting this weekend asked the important question, "What are the top schools when it comes to producing super-villains?"

...it's time for students to turn their thoughts back to school and classes. But what if your area of study is supervillainy? We look at the top schools for aspiring supervillains.

You may have your own schools to add to their list of 15 institutions of evil learning (which includes DC Comics' Legion Superhero Academy, whose grads created an alumni affinity group known as the Legion of Supervillains). But I laughed when I saw one commenter's almost-too-easy suggestions for expanding the list:

"Yale? Harvard?"

Survey: Benchmarking Alumni and Parent Relations

[Updated 2 September: Please answer questions 3 and 4, even if your own campus has more than 1,000 undergrads! Survey will remain open til further notice.]

If you work in U.S. higher education, in alumni relations or parent programming, will you please help with a modest benchmarking project I'm conducting for a small college?

This brief unscientific survey will ask for your opinion about 

• who has the best small college alumni programs, and 
• the pros and cons of combining or separating alumni programs and parent programs.

Click to access the quick four question survey

Thanks very much.

10 Ways We Use Social Media to Engage Alumni, from Mashable

Over at the excellent Mashable blog, Vadim Lavrusik has written a great summary of ten ways in which colleges and universities are deploying so-called social tools to engage and serve alumni. 

10 Ways Universities Are Engaging Alumni Using Social Media

While obviously not an exhaustive list, the article provides a comprehensive but manageable overview of different approaches to web-driven alumni interaction. 

Take a look and leave a comment (here or on Mashable): do you think the article is on target, and what are you doing to engage alumni online?