alumni futures

Matrix Update: 2 More Uses for Online Social Networks

Once again, I've updated the matrix of Social Networks' Impacts on Alumni Organizations. This collections of ways in which alumni organizations can use online social platforms now lists 20 different cases.

The primary purpose is to help you spur creative thinking about how to use online networks to help your institution achieve its mission. It can also serve as a management checklist, to see how you are doing overall. And you can use it as a road map when crafting the online components for your alumni communications strategy (you have that, right?).

     Download Social Networks' Impacts on Alumni Organizations v6 [98k PDF]* 

The updated matrix adds two additional uses for social networks:

1. Conduct alumni prospect research
Cornell's Andrew Gossen recently analyzed the pros and cons of using graduates' social network profiles for prospect research. While each service has its own characteristics, the most important thing to understand about all these platforms (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and others) is that the ethical and legal landscape is murky. Proceed with extreme caution, and in the company of legal and research experts before collecting alumni data from individuals' online profiles.

2. Manage crisis communications
This addition was spurred by further conversation with Reed College's Mike Teskey. Mike and his colleague Robin Tovey blogged here last August about their own experiences in this realm, and you can read their original article for Alumni Futures to understand some of the specifics. 

Leave a comment with your own observations and additions to the matrix. Or email me: 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 20 Use Cases,

1) click through to the blog post on the web page: http://www.alumnifutures.com/2010/11/matrix-more-uses.html then

2) right click the link to the PDF and 

3) select "Save As..." or "Save Link As..."

 

How Do Alumni Groups Use Twitter?

As Twitter (apparently) continues to grow, more and more organizations have official accounts, sending out news, event announcements, and other updates in varying proportions. 

In the next couple of weeks I plan to look more closely at associations' use of Twitter: what kind of updates they publish, how their numbers shape up, and whether there are any discernible trends. The likely result will be a short white paper and posting here about what I discover.

What do you think I should look for? What do you want to know about how alumni organizations use the microblogging service? Do you think it matters whether an alumni organization uses Twitter?

Note: This won't be a scientific survey, just a snapshot in time of some publicly observable organizational behavior.

Meanwhile, the most interesting question about associations' use of Twitter won't be answered by looking at their Twitter content. That question is, "What is the result of using of Twitter?"

Organizations should attempt to measure the outcomes of their social media usage. Quantitative, traditional marketing metrics will probably not show a huge benefit from Twitter use (for example, new donors, additional memberships, increased event attendance).

But for associations, Twitter isn't really a marketing tool; Twitter is an engagement tool. Associations not using Twitter may be conspicuous by their absence. It's a unique channel, its content appears in real-time, and is increasingly consumed on-the-go (i.e., it's a highly mobile channel steadily converging with location-based services). 

How is your organization using Twitter? And what outcomes – if any – can you cite?

Note: I'm on Twitter as @alumnifutures.

Additional resource: 

I maintain a list of Twitter feeds from about 135 alumni organizations. You can see at a glance how a cross-section of alumni associations use the service:

    http://twitter.com/#!/list/alumnifutures/alumni-orgs

If you know of an alumni association using Twitter that is not on my list, tell me and I will add it.

 

Photo: Twitter sand sculpture by someone with a lot of free time, by Rosaura Ochoa via Creative Commons.

Who Qualifies as an Alumnus?

In a recent online discussion, Ivan Low of Singapore Management University asked fellow alumni professionals the following question: Do graduates of short-duration executive education programs qualify as alumni?

The definition of "alumni" is arbitrary and varies among institutions. It's not unheard of for people who have completed, say, a six-week executive education program to be included as "alumni" of a business school.

I recently discussed this with some advancement professionals who expressed concern that treating executive education participants as alumni somehow cheapens the MBA or PhD degree from the business school.

Does treating certificate students as alumni detract from the value of the graduate degree?

Not necessarily. Resources allocated to supporting the activities and services provided to the six-week folks should be proportional to

• the scale of the students' academic effort;
• the fraction of the overall alumni population they comprise; and
• their overall importance to the institution.

This last point is tricky, as it carries clear implications for fundraising. If a Fortune 100 CEO dropped in for a 6-week refresher on your campus, he or she would be a legitimate target for relationship-building, cultivation, and ultimately, fundraising.

Do you agree or disagree? What's missing from this brief analysis?

 

Photo of lecture hall at the Sorbonne by Pierre Metivier, via Creative Commons. It has nothing to do with executive education alumni, but I thought it was a good photo. Click it to see full size.

10 Challenges of Social Technology: Familiar Obstacles

Prolific web strategist and social tech blogger Jeremiah Owyang once again summarized the online community manager's world in a simple table (or "matrix," as he calls his ubiquitous charts). This one is called Challenges of the Social Technology Industry, July 2010 Edition. He calls the matrix an "opportunity list" for those of us using social technology to improve our business. 

Look at the full matrix and at least read through the challenges Jeremiah identifies. I've listed them below (with my own comments on how they might apply in educational advancement). 

Print out the chart, and highlight the challenges that you face. 

Then work with your organization's leadership, staff and volunteers, and draft a plan to address who in your organization will lead the effort of solving these challenges – assuming you don't already have a roadmap.
 
 

10 Challenges of the Social Technology Industry 
(via @jowyang); comments from @alumnifutures (Andy Shaindlin):

1. Noise overwhelms signal:
   Filter alums' tweets, blog posts and status updates so that quality and relevance prevail. Limit your organizations's output to conversational, relevant posts, with lots of question and a few fun polls.
   
   
2. Amateurism threatens expertise:
   Invest in training dedicated staff whose job description includes social media monitoring. Reach out to alumni, students or donors who have created their own social network groups in your institution's name, and partner with them to increase quality of group activity.
    
3. Power shift to participants:
   Don't talk all the time. Remember what a community manager looks like: small mouth, big eyes, big ears. Online communities are listening stations for organizations.
    
4. Fast moving industry creates confusion:
   Once you assign responsibility for social media management in your organization, schedule an update and reassess your progress within 60 days. The space is moving that fast.
    
5. Risk of overhype:
   Don't sign up for every site or service that gets "hot." Watch trends, and try to anticipate, but remember: deploy social media tools to help you achieve your organization's pre-existing business goals. Merely seeming "up to date" doesn't help you.
     
6. Lack of qualified talent:
   Don't have an expert in house? Create one. Invest in training and professional education so you can promote from within, or hire someone who understand how students and alumni are using social technology (see #2 above).
    
7. Measurement elusive:
   It's possible to measure return on investment, return on attention, and lots of other payoffs from attending to social channels. Start with this article from the Journal of Interactive Advertising or this post on Mashable about "measuring social media health."
    
8. Disparate data and irregular standards:
   Don't worry so much about benchmarking against other institutions. Start measuring outcomes and impact and track changes internally over time. Your data, benchmarks and standards will differ from your institutional competitors'.
    
9. Culture shift creates an internal rift inside institutions:
   Institutional leaders are concerned about being criticized by bloggers, tweeters and Facebookers. Social media-crazed staff members worry about falling behind the social media curve. Seek a compromise (and give your boss a copy of Open Leadership by Charlene Li).
    
10. Privacy woes scare companies and consumers:
    Advancement shops are pretty good at protecting the privacy of the donor database. This is no different. Learn what information is private and what is public in the platforms your organization uses, and respect absolutely the privacy and shared data of your stakeholders. Their loyalty will remain intact.

Related posts from Alumni Futures:

What Does a Community Manager Look Like?

The Alumni Organization Social Network Matrix: 18 Use Cases

Photo credit: Obstacle road sign via Creative Commons from Guillaume Lemoine

The Alumni Organization Social Network Matrix: 18 Use Cases

[Updated: There is a newer version of the matrix, featuring two additional use cases, for a total of 20. See:

http://www.alumnifutures.com/2010/11/matrix-more-uses.html]

 

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 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.