alumni futures

Relationship-Building Doesn't Scale

The Problem
Recently, Peter Maher of South Africa's University of the Witwatersrand made the following point in a LinkedIn discussion:

E-mail opened up a wonderful new world of alumni engagement, especially for a university...that has a significant number of alumni around the globe. However...each year I receive exponentially more email correspondence from alumni that require a personal response from me.

It's now taking up most of my time just reading and replying to emails in a considered way that deepens the relationship (rather than giving generic/glib replies). What is the best way of getting the most out of e-mail correspondence with alumni without it becoming your sole accomplishment for the day?

Peter's question illustrates something true of all forms of relationship in all contexts:

Relationship-building doesn't scale.

As the number of relationships increases, converting them into traditional, mutually beneficial outcomes becomes more difficult. Peter points out that a generic or shallow reply won't help an alumnus solve a problem or make valuable connections. But one person in his role can only support so many relationships. 

So what can one do?

[There are two obvious strategies – and one non-obvious one]

Possible Solutions
There are two obvious strategies, each of them somewhat challenging:

1. Exchange the creation of new relationships for fewer – but deeper – relationships;

or

2. Add staff to create and foster additional relationships, while supporting existing ones.

If you can document engagement opportunities lost to lack of time and attention, you can craft a business case for greater resources – new staff positions and bigger budget. But even with a good business case, for most of us, the additional funds just aren't there. Many alumni offices have had to cut staff; adding new positions is a fantasy.

This prompts me to propose a less obvious strategy:

3. Convert staff positions from traditional roles to online support and interaction roles.

What if someone in Peter's situation had 3 or 4 staff "replying to emails in a considered way that deepens the relationship"? His office could keep pace with the demand for written communication and support. This would mean changing some team members' job descriptions to reflect the increased reliance on online interaction (including email, the web, and social platforms).

[Do we spend too much time emailing our alumni – or not enough?]

In practical terms, maybe it means fewer events, less printed communication, or a more modest web presence. The payoff in return would be individualized, thoughtful, and relevant communication with alumni everywhere.

Two Final Thoughts
FIrst, alumni relations is communication. Even if they're not attending events or interacting with you in person, alumni feel engaged if they have an open line of communication with their alma mater. (More about this in a future post.) 

FInally, our communication with individuals need not solve their problems directly. We should connect them with resources that they can use to solve their own problems ("teach a man to fish..."). Acting as a relationship broker will decrease our time spent on an individual's needs, and show alumni how to use the network for future problem-solving. 

What do you think?

Too much time spent emailing with alumni? Or not enough?

How do we balance face to face interaction with the reality that we interact meaningfully with just a small fraction of our audience?

The Problem Sentence: How LinkedIn Hinders Effective Networking

Does this sound familiar?:

I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.

This is the standard message that LinkedIn created for you, so you can ask others to connect with you.

It is succinct, and universally applicable. It's also self-evident, and therefore, unhelpful. Of course I want to add you to my network – if I didn't, would I be asking you to join it?

The Problem
Those 11 words are actively preventing LinkedIn users from developing the skills they need to network more successfully.

What if you walked up to someone you encountered at a conference and (without providing any context) said, "I'd like to add you to my professional network"?

The response would probably be something along the lines of, "Why? Who are you?" And perhaps, "Is there any benefit to me?"

[Those 11 words prevent LinkedIn users
from networking more successfully]

LinkedIn created this introduction to remove an obstacle to reaching out, and to make it easier for people to connect with each other. But the most helpful thing that LinkedIn could do here would be to make it slightly harder to connect. 

How LInkedIn Can Help
Instead of pre-populating the "personal note" in the message window, LinkedIn should do two things:

1. Leave the message window empty, and
2. Prevent you from sending the invite until you've typed in your own, truly personal message.

This would help the sender learn the art of introducing oneself and one's networking goals to a desirable contact.

And it would help the recipient to understand why they are receiving the message in the first place. 

Which is more helpful and effective? This?:

"Dear Andy - Greetings from Denver. I'm seeking a position in annual giving after 6 years in student events. I notice we share mutual contacts, including your former assistant director, whom I know from grad school. I'd be grateful if we could connect via LinkedIn. In return, my own network may prove valuable as you add staff for your newly-announced capital campaign."

Or this?:

"I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn."

Duh. 

It's time for LinkedIn to make us tell each other something we don't already know.  

Alumni Networks: People, not Data

Recently I exchanged ideas about alumni networks with a senior advancement colleague from another university. Seeking to reconcile what associations do with what alumni need, he said:

We give alumni a directory, but what they're looking for is a network. We think the data forms a directory because that's what we know how to build. What alumni need is a web of connectivity based on common affiliation and experience as former students.

This sounded so familiar to me...then I remembered. I had quoted Brigham Young University's Keith Lue in a comment he contributed to Alumni Futures, and which I featured at the end of 2011. Keith said,

Alumni relations mistakenly focuses on who is in the database instead of why people might want to stay connected.

Two different ways of saying the same important thing:

Knowing who is in the database helps you publish a directory. Knowing what their problems are and who might help them find solutions – for that, alumni need a network.

["We focus on who is in the database instead of why people want to connect"]

Takeaways:

Your database isn't "information."
It's like Soylent Green: It's people. 

Alumni need solutions.
Connect them with people who can help solve their problems.

It sounds simple, but it's hard to execute.

However, one thing is certain: if your alumni organization can broker relationships and connect people effectively, alumni will see you as a solution. 

§§§

Image: Soylent Green diorama by h.d. lange via Creative Commons.

Related contect from Alumni Futures

• Review: LinkedIn Alumni 
• Top 5 Alumni Futures Reader Comments of 2011
• Is Alumni Relations a Form of CRM?

See What Your Fellow Alumni Have Done...To Frighten You

Back in November I received the first of what is now an occasional series of automated emails from LinkedIn, pushing out links to the profiles of my graduate school classmates.

I would not know the name of every person listed, so LinkedIn included my fellow alums' profile photos, along with the name of their current employer.

This was a good way to jog my memory and drive some traffic to the LinkedIn site.

But the best thing about it? The photo of the guy in the top row.

That's one way to work your network...

 

 

 

Review: LinkedIn Alumni

[Updated 28 March, 2012: The service described here now supports searching on any institution. Select the "More schools..." pull-down menu, and type the name of a college or university in the text box labeled "Browse by name"]

Are you logged into LinkedIn right now? If so, go to 

http://www.linkedin.com/college

and look at the business networking site's "Alumni" function.

LinkedIn launched the service in October 2011 under the name LinkedIn Classmates, but quickly changed the name "to more accurately reflect the importance of exchanging insights with your alumni network." It's possible they renamed it because it sounded like the separate third-party website Classmates.com.

Whatever the reason for a name change, here's a quick look at what LinkedIn Alumni does and how it works. 

What it Does
LinkedIn Alumni connects you quickly with fellow alumni. Why? To quote LinkedIn's director of product management, Christina Allen, "Since you have your school in common, you have a natural connection." (This is subject to some debate, which I wrote about almost three years ago.) If we assume that's a good enough reason for most people to network with fellow alumni, we can next look at how it works.

Screenshot: click image to enlarge. My annotations are in red.

How it Works
LinkedIn Alumni searches for LinkedIn members based on information you listed in the Education field of your LinkedIn profile (institution name and years attended). If you listed more than one educational institution, it lets you select which institution to search for. 

First you will see profiles of fellow alumni to whom you're already connected on LinkedIn. After that, the LinkedIn members listed appear to be those who attended during at least part of the time you did (if you've listed a class year in your profile), and with whom you share at least one connection.

You can pull down the "Years Attended" menu to search by "Graduation Year" instead.

[The service connects you quickly with fellow alumni]

You may choose to see profiles of alumni who don't include their attendance years in their profiles. It is worth clicking the plus sign next to the number of alumni found, to show those with no graduation year listed, which increases the number of profiles returned (bottom left in the screenshot shown here).

Switching to this view dramatically increased the number of visible profiles for me:

• by 45% for my graduate degree alma mater,
• by 95% for my undergraduate school, and 
• by 217% for my high school. 

At the very bottom of the Alumni screen is a button that allows you to search for "your alumni group" with one click. It won't necessarily show your institution's official groups at the top of the results, depending on the name and description those groups use.

"Hidden" Features
The service is interesting at first because you can quickly see the names of people you had forgotten about. But LinkedIn has added granular controls that make the service truly useful. However, they are not obvious at first, because of the site's design. They are:

Search by Employer, Job Function, and Location
Those blue horizontal bars at the top are clickable. For example, select "Legal" and your Alumni results are re-sorted to show those connections who work in the legal professions. And the re-sort includes the Employer and Location listings ("Where they work..." and ""Where they live..." in LinkedIn's user-friendly labeling system).

Search by Dates Attended or Graduated
Tiny pulldown menus at the top right of the main window let you set the chronological window in which you're searching for fellow alumni. Or you can click on "Attended" and select "Graduated" instead, to focus on alumni from a single class year. 

One odd, and presumably temporary problem is that the whole Alumni feature itself is hidden. As of this writing, there is no link or other navigation showing you how to find LinkedIn Alumni from the home page or from your profile. 

[It's not the people you know who have
the greatest potential to help you. It's the people they know.]

Summary
You can use LinkedIn Alumni to find people who attended any of your listed educational institutions, and can narrow the search by years attended, class year, current location, industry and company. This suggests that the service is most useful for those with a specific networking need (as is LinkedIn in general). 

But don't forget about the strength of weak ties. Your immediate connection to fellow alumni makes it easy to reach out to them, and it's tempting to narrow your search using the tools described above. But this is only the start of exploring your network.

It's not the people you know who have the greatest potential to help you. It's the people they know.

For more about the strength of weak ties, see some of the past Alumni Futures stories in the "Related resources" list below.

Overall, LinkedIn Alumni is useful for manipulating existing data according to profile characteristics. Increased access to this kind of data makes our searches more powerful. Only when this happens does LinkedIn increase its value to users. For this reason, I'm guessing that we'll see similar functionality for every kind of affiliation you can display in your profile: places you've worked, languages you speak, awards you've won, conferences you've attended, as well as your skills, groups, and associations. 

Have you used LinkedIn Alumni (aka LinkedIn Classmates)?

Is it useful?

If so, what for? If not, why not?

Leave a comment.

Related resources

• LinkedIn Alumni (linkedin.com)
• Explore possibilities by connecting with fellow alumni (linkedin.com)
• LinkedIn Feature: "Your College Alumni" (alumnifutures.com)
• Dunbar's Number & the Strength of Weak Ties (alumnifutures.com) 
• All the People You Know Who Know People (alumnifutures.com)

Career Services, 1920s Style: "Called here for girl."

Many think of "alumni career services" as a recent invention – born of necessity as institutions struggle to provide graduates with practical, useful services.

Not so. 

In 1996 Paul Lukas stumbled across hundreds of discarded student records in a disused New York City school building. Luckily, he recognized that what appeared to be a few hundred old report cards were valuable historical documents. Understanding these records became an obsession that, in Lukas' words, changed his life. He pursued their origin and their meaning.

You can read the entire tale here:

Permanent Record: How I Found the Report Cards, and How They Changed My Life

[What he uncovered makes great reading –
part history lesson, part detective yarn, part human interest story]

One fascinating aspect of the story is Lukas' description of the way in which the school, called the Manhattan Trade School for Girls, helped its graduates find work, and continued to do this for many years after the girls had become alumnae. He writes that the school

had kept track of its students' employment history for years after they graduated, which provided a look into the students' post-school lives and also painted a striking portrait of the Depression-era labor market. 

Later, he goes on, he found out the reason they kept these records:

The school had its own job placement office – essentially an in-house employment bureau – and had helped the students secure those jobs...Many graduates continued to obtain work via the school for years—sometimes for a decade or more—which speaks to the unusually strong bond the school had with its students.

How did the school maintain such strong bonds with students who generally attended for just two years, usually between the ages of about 14 and 17? One motivation for staying connected with alumnae was the intent of its first director, Mary Schenck Woolman, who established the job placement office in part "to build up a series of records that shall be of general sociological value." To build up those records meant maintaining ongoing contact with graduates, in some cases for a decade or more after they left.

[How did the school maintain strong bonds with students who attended for just two years, between the ages of about 14 and 17?]

But what mattered most was the result of this effort to maintain contact: a two-way relationship between the school's administrators and its alumnae.

Lukas describes how, 15 years after leaving, alumna Mary Meyer contacted the school to fill a job opening for a seamstress at her own company. The notation on her alumnae record states that she "Called here for girl."

Lukas writes,

...even if the school didn't supply Mary with an employee, the mere fact that she asked them to do so feels like a validation of Manhattan Trade and its mission. "Called here for girl"—it's my favorite entry, my favorite detail, in the entire report card collection.

Mine too.

It represents the mutual understanding between school and graduate, that a brief period as a student gives way to a lifelong identity as an alumna. This provides future opportunities on both sides: a source of employment for students and a source of qualified talent for the alumni employer.

It's as true today as it was in 1921, when Mary Meyer completed her own dressmaking education and entered the workforce as an alumna of Manhattan Trade School for Girls.

 

Image: Student record from Manhattan Trade School for Girls

Related articles

• Permanent Record: How I Found the Report Cards, and How They Changed my Life (slate.com)

LinkedIn Feature: "Your College Alumni"

LinkedIn has quietly launched its "Your College Alumni" feature (click image to enlarge).

What is it?

Search for a company when you are logged in to LinkedIn, and you'll see a page showing

• the company's profile on LinkedIn;
• a tab showing employees in your LinkedIn network;
• a tab listing employees who are your fellow alumni, and
• a tab with new hires, if any, at that company. 

"Your College Alumni" pulls alumni of all institutions from which you list an undergradaute or graduate degree in your profile. It won't tell you which institutional connection you share with company employees (but you can find out by looking at an individual employee's LinkedIn profile).

You can see how you are linked to each individual as well (1st, 2nd or 3rd degree connection, or shared LinkedIn Group membership).

The assumption seems to be that your fellow alumni will be more approachable and ready to network with you because of your alumni connection. By revealing your network within that company, LinkedIn may make it easier for you to gain inroads for business development, job hunting, information interviewing and more.

Have you noticed this feature? Have you used it?

Will you promote it to your own alumni?

Leave a comment.

Thank you to Alumni Futures advisory group member Liz Allen of Adaptivate who tipped me off that this function was up and running on LinkedIn.

The Key to Online Relevance: Alumni Groups

To understand as professionals what networks really are, we must go deeper than just asking ‘How does Facebook work?’ We need to understand what networks are and how they influence and enable specific behaviors.

Private online alumni networks are sometimes called “walled gardens” because they are closed to non-alumni, whereas anyone can join "open" public sites, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Walled garden communities intentionally trade size in exchange for exclusivity.

This was a viable trade-off when social interaction was limited by socio-economic status, geographical location and professional identity. Today, however, near-frictionless online interaction means that alumni can have both kinds of experience: private, "branded" connections with schoolmates, and open-ended networks of co-workers, neighbors, family, and friends.

[The vast majority of alumni interactions from now on
will take place online, not face to face.]

For organizations, creating value within these networks depends on the existence of groups. Metcalfe’s Law shows that the utility of the network is proportional to the square of the number of members. This would be all we need to know, if alumni only connected with others one at a time, forming pairs. But they don't just form pairs. Alumni congregate to form groups. 

This is where another insight, Reed's Law, comes into play.

David Reed pointed out that within social networks, groups form. Subgroups within the larger network become critical parts of the network, and their value's growth can be exponential – proportional to the number of potential groups. The larger the network, the faster its value increases. 

[The larger the network, the faster its value increases.]

Alumni organizations should help alumni share knowledge and expertise to solve each others' problems. Groups are the most effective way to achieve this. Connecting with individual alumni isn't going to help a graduate use LinkedIn very effectively. Participating in groups of alumni who share common needs or interests will help individuals who have goals for networking.

Understanding the structure, the potential, and the limitations of alumni networks allows you to serve your audience more effectively. Creating value for members can keep alumni organizations relevant to their community, because the vast majority of alumni interactions from now on will take place online, not face to face.

How are you making online tools relevant to your mission?

How are you measuring your success?

Image: Visualization of my LinkedIn network via LinkedIn Labs

Related articles

• 7 Tips For Leveraging Your Professional Profile On LinkedIn (krishnade.com)
• A Recent Grad's Perspective on LinkedIn (thesnarkoleptic.wordpress.com)

7 Commonly Missed Opportunities in Alumni Relations

CASE president John Lippincott recently asked alumni relations professionals for their thoughts on "common mistakes in alumni relations." His upcoming column on this topic will be a welcome follow-up to his pieces on common mistakes in advancement communications and fundraising.

I sent along my own thoughts, but they may not be among those published in CURRENTS Magazine. So, in the spirit of John's request, here are seven commonly missed opportunities in alumni relations.

In no particular order:

Failing to balance institutional needs with alumni needs
Your institution needs engaged, loyal, generous alumni. Your alumni need a supportive, communicative, responsive alumni organization.

Ignoring the academic side of the institution
Guest blogger Scott Mory wrote about this for Alumni Futures, and his article remains one of the more visited ones on the site. I like to ask alumni directors, "When you walk across campus, do the professors you pass know you're the alumni executive? If they do, do they know what you do? Would they say you do it well?" 

Not partnering with other administrative units
Career services, admissions, the libraries, academic departments (or schools and colleges), athletics, student life, tech transfer, public events...the list is endless. These are all potential partners for your programs and services to alumni and to the campus. 

Not engaging students early enough
Many alumni organizations, it seems, still wait until students are in their final year before they pay any attention to undergraduates at all. You have to build awareness from day one. They'll be students for a few years, but alumni forever. 

Wasting valuable volunteer resources
Your board, committees, and regional volunteers are a formidable force for work and change. Don't just let them show up, get a free dinner, and leave without harnessing their affinity, experience, and energy on behalf of alumni and the school. This goes for "virtual volunteers" too – the alumni who help manage your Facebook content, reunion class pages, and LinkedIn Groups.

Not seeing oneself as part of the fundraising team
Some alumni professionals still cling to the idea that something called "friendraising" exists independently of fundraising. It doesn't. Any successful fundraiser is a "friendraiser" too, whatever that might mean. Alumni relations, executed successfully, enhances front line gift officers' ability to raise the financial support your institution needs. Alumni relations is part of fundraising – an important part, if done right.

Not seeking true innovation
Many alumni offices define "innovation" as "implementing something that has already worked elsewhere." Sure, it's new to your institution, but it's not a new idea. There are limitless opportunities to experiment with programs and services that nobody has tried before. 

What would you add to the list? Do you disagree with anything above?

Profile: Dean Dwigans and the Marshall European Center for Security Studies

New in 2011: Profiles
Alumni communities serve critical roles in many kinds of organizations – not only in schools, colleges or universities. This year I'll post short interviews with professionals from some non-traditional alumni programs.

Profile: Dean Dwigans
Director of Alumni Relations, and
Chief of Graduate & Stakeholder Support,
George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies
(Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany)

Last year, while teaching a workshop for the European Association for International Education in Paris, I met Capt. Dean Dwigans, U.S. Navy. In addition to his career as a military Judge Advocate, Dean (now retired from the Navy after a 25 year career) took on the role of alumni executive at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies.

I interviewed Dean to learn more about how his work at the Marshall Center compares with traditional alumni programs.

¶¶¶

Alumni Futures: Dean, you spent your career in the U.S. Navy, focused on legal practice and more recently, teaching international law. How have you managed the transition to alumni relations work?

Dean Dwigans: I really enjoy the alumni business, especially in the international environment. I get to apply creativity and energy to developing meaningful and lasting relationships with, and among our 8,000 graduates from more than 100 nations. I'm in the government end of it, but I hope to stay engaged in general alumni relations discussions and training, which I find very useful. I brought back many ideas from the EAIE workshop in Paris, for example.

AF: You and I exchanged some thoughts about the "magic formula" for successful alumni work. I said, "Relevance + Access = Engagement." Do you think that's true in your organization?

DD: As long as the definition of "relevance" includes being meaningful and responsive to alumni needs, I think it's a valid short-hand for success.

The Marshall Center has unique focus: building a network of security professionals to create a more stable security environment. We advance democratic institutions, promote active and peaceful security cooperation, and enhance partnerships among nations in North America, Europe, and Eurasia. This is instead of, say, fundraising, marketing our programs, or other more traditional alumni association roles.

But I also see how we're similar to traditional programs. When I look at communications from some civilian alma maters, I'm sometimes put off by the emphasis on fundraising in almost every contact. At the Marshall Center, we have to offer our graduates something useful that applies directly to them or they'll tune us out, and I think civilian institutions should do the same. We promise our graduates that we'll stay in contact, continue to help them grow professionally, and provide a forum for their ideas.

AF: What kinds of activities and programs do you have in place?

DD: We get to know each student while they're in residence. We then work hard to stay in contact from the moment they leave, offer programs "in country" at least once a year, and invite some alumni back each year for professional training, and for contact with other alumni and with faculty. We have a new, improved web presence coming online this year to make collaboration and distance education easier – helping us stay in contact with alumni worldwide.

Our magazine, per Concordiam, is devoted to alumni research and writing. Our "communities of interest" track the subject matter of our resident programs, and we have conferences several times a year for small groups of distinguished alumni. They serve in important, visible roles – ambassadors, defense ministers, and parliamentarians. Our goal is to have contact with each of our 8,000 alumni twice a year, even if it's just to update their contact information. 

I'm now trying to put this all into a strategic plan, to focus and coordinate our efforts, and help me explain our program to senior leadership. 

AF: What resources do you have to deliver on these goals?

DD: I have a staff of eight, with five devoted to specific regions where they're responsible for maintaining the relationship and knowing the graduates' needs. Three staff members are devoted to alumni events. The Marshall Center is a U.S.–German partnership, and we teach in three languages – English, Russian and German. So our regional representatives speak multiple languages to communicate with alumni. We also benefit from very supportive and involved leadership, which is vital to any alumni program.

AF: What are your biggest challenges, and where do you see the greatest opportunity?

DD: We have a relatively narrow educational mission, compared with a liberal arts college for example. But the challenges that governments face now are so varied and complex that we have to expand our educational efforts. Cybersecurity, crime and corruption, immigration, disaster relief, negotiation and mediation, border security, the environment, religion, trade issues, international law – the list is endless. We keep alumni up to date with lectures, resident courses, and conferences on these topics. The quarterly alumni magazine focuses 80% of its content on one of these topics, and a mix of the other topics for the remaining 20%. We also try to maximize the use of technology and virtual interaction.

We get our students involved very early. I'm one of the first people they hear from. I welcome them before they arrive, and ask them to join the Alumni Knowledge Portal. On the Portal we provide travel information, area info, class schedules and other information they need for settling in. We meet with them when they arrive, introduce them more thoroughly to the Portal, invite them for private or country meetings, host field trips, and talk to them all again before they depart. We see many of them every day while they're here, and they become not only alumni, but our good friends as well. But I learn more from them than they do from me, especially when I visit them after they've returned home. They've opened my mind to new perspectives, and they reinforce how we're all committed to the same goal – a peaceful, productive existence for our families and nations. 

After all this interaction, they know who we are, and we in turn have a very good idea of their needs. That's one of the keys to our ultimate success.

¶¶¶

Photos by Karlheinz Wedhorn. Top: Woerner Hall at the Marshall European Center. Below: Interior of the large plenary at the Marshall Center.

Related resources

• George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies (marshallcenter.org)
• Marshall Center Alumni Home Page (marshallcenter.org)
• Marshall Center on Twitter (twitter.com)
• Marshall Center on Facebook (facebook.com)