alumni futures

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

The Bush-Cheney Alumni Association

I spend almost all my effort with this blog talking about academic alumni associations and the schools they support. Once or twice, I've mentioned corporate alumni associations.

Now there's a new category to cover: government alumni associations.

The Bush-Cheney Alumni Association is the first I've seen for people who worked for a presidential (or gubernatorial) administration, as staff members, interns or volunteers. I searched for a similar organization for Clinton administration alumni but came up empty. If you know of other, similar organizations and their activities, leave a comment.

I heard about the Bush-Cheney site when Inside Higher Ed described it in its Quick Takes section Monday, and drew attention to the site's description of "the Bush Record." As of today, this section featured the following variety of reading choices for historical perspective:

"Praise for President’s Accomplishments"
"More Praise for President’s Accomplishments"
"Praise Continues for President’s Accomplishments"

Obviously, the Bush-Cheney Alumni Association is going to promote the work of its namesakes, so it's not surprising that documents praising their achievements would be available for download. The three files comprise well over 200 pages of essays, editorials, and encomiums that laud the administration's work.

But as seriously as I want to treat this, I am still amused by the straight-faced delivery of the documents' titles. Click image to view in separate window:

Alumni Networks: Hedgehogs or Foxes?

[Updated June 4, 2008 with story about Verizon moving its social media plans to a Facebook Page]

Last June I read an interesting post on Cem Sertoglu's blog, Sortipreneur. The title of the posting was Mistakes in Proprietary Networks, and although at first it didn't seem too relevant to alumni relations, the more I think about it, the more relevant it becomes.

Cem, co-founder of corporate alumni relations leader SelectMinds, said

...in the early 1990s, the telcos were racing each other in building their proprietary [physical] networks...and the quest to create the dominant network was on, with the "networks' intelligence" positioned as the key differentiator....

Then came the stupidest network of all: the Internet. All it knew was to push IP packets around. There was no intelligence built in to the network. The intelligence resided on the edge.

Cem described the limited utility of "brand community" social networks. People whose only connection to each other is that they have the same cell phone provider (to use Cem's example) are missing something that gives value – and "intelligence" – to networks. (Just two hours before I posted the article you're reading now, blogger Phil Barrett wrote about "the failure of mobile-centric social networks" like Nokia's Mosh.)

Useful networks form when Person A needs something Person B has. A system intelligent enough to allow Person A to find Person B is a useful network. The more people in the network, the higher its potential intelligence becomes - and the more paths there are, on average, between network members.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, alumni networks are closed "brand community" networks. By definition they have a size limit, and therefore have limited total potential intelligence. One way to increase alumni networks' intelligence is to open them in ways that respect the members' school (or corporate) affinity, while providing access to a larger, open network of far-reaching intelligence.

So Cem was right. The internet, as he said, is a "stupid network." But the open social networks at its edge (like LinkedIn, Xing, Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, Viadeo and others) provide intelligence, because they connect people who need to find one another. Our alumni communities do the same thing, but only for extremely limited populations.

An ancient Greek poet named Archilochus, wrote (in a phrase made over-simplistically famous by Sir Isaiah Berlin) that "the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Our alumni communities are smart like the hedgehog. Each one rolls up into a ball to keep out interlopers. Online, an alumni network knows everything its alumni know, but nothing more.

To thrive and grow, alumni networks need the many things the rest of the internet knows. They need us to connect them to the networked world around them.

[Update: Verizon Moving its Branded Social Network to Facebook]

Photo of a hedgehog by David Daniels, used under a Creative Commons license.

Blackwater's Corporate Alumni Association

Embattled U.S. government contractor Blackwater has started an alumni association. [Note: If you allow pop-ups in your browser, this link may launch an automatic download of a PDF file from the Blackwater website. This file is their alumni newsletter.]

The alumni web pages read like those of many corporate alumni groups:

The Blackwater Alumni Association is attempting to reach those who have trained here, those employed here and those who were once employed here and left in good standing....

As the Blackwater Alumni Association grows, you will find programs and opportunities to be involved [sic] including projects of good will and the chance to participate in alumni-exclusive events.

OK. Another employer using good alumni relations practice (and, unfortunately, poor proof-reading) to pursue many of the benefits mentioned in my June posting about corporate alumni relations.

But the next sentence caught me a little off guard - so to speak:

In the near future, an annual Blackwater Alumni Association shooting tournament will be announced, limited to association members.

Given recent media coverage of Blackwater's activities overseas, this struck me as ill-conceived - at best - from a public relations standpoint.

I guess shooting is something many of their contract employees need to know how to do, given their work assignments. But there are an awful lot of other competitions the company could sponsor. It almost makes you long for a golf tournament.

Meanwhile, Blackwater should probably include something about alumni in future issues of its alumni newsletter. [PDF download]

Corporate Alumni Relations: The Basics

Have you heard? Educational institutions are not the only ones pursuing alumni relations. Corporate alumni relations continues to grow as an industry. What is it? Private sector firms maintaining communities of former employees - communicating with them about changes in their old firm, mining their networks for business referrals, and sometimes recruiting them back at the executive level.

If this last part is done effectively, it can result in big savings, since hiring C-level execs can mean shelling out big bucks to executive search firms. Do the search in house and the savings are real. According to SelectMinds, the prime mover and industry leader in corporate alumni consulting, "the average Fortune 500 firm could save $12 million a year by actively recruiting alumni." Plus, re-hires will already be familiar with corporate culture, policy and procedure. This leads to savings in training and staff time at the executive level.

New York-based SelectMinds started out doing "corporate alumni relations" but in line with recent developments are now describing their work as "enabling corporate social networking." Whatever you call it, it's part traditional alumni relations and part corporate business development.

Traditional aspects include:

• online platforms for networking and communications
• career networking resources and events
• "class" [former employee] notes
• regional gatherings
• company alumni associations

One thing you won't find in higher ed is the corporate calculation showing shareholders how much the alumni network is saving the firm (but in higher ed we boast about how much alumni donate - sort of the same thing).

An early primer on the field's potential appeared in Harvard Business Review, co-authored by Cem Sertoglu and Anne Berkowitch, founders at SelectMinds. You can request a copy from their web site.

In the future I'll look into recent developments in the field, as well as the intersection of (surprise!) social networks and corporate alumni communities. We'll look for insight into how individual corporations are approaching alumni relations.

Do the private sector and higher ed have things to learn from one another when it comes to alumni relations?