alumni futures

2010 in Review: An Issues Update

In early 2010 I asked, "What big issues are alumni professionals facing?" Here's a quick look back at how the answers played out during the year (with helpful comments from astute Alumni Futures readers).

What – if anything – has changed in a year?

Worth noting: When I wrote my original article, I was the alumni director at a private university; in March I moved into independent consulting full time. My perspective has changed a little, but the issues have not disappeared. 

 

1. Mattering
Faced with external and internal changes (e.g., competition for scarce resources), do alumni organizations continue to matter?

This question arose in some form everywhere I discussed alumni relations in 2010: conferences; private workshops; blogs; discussions in Asia and in Europe; and among CASE's Trustees and Commission members.

Awareness of the need for relevance generates valuable discussion and healthy debate. And as Willa McCarthy pointed out in a comment on last January's posting, it begs the question, "to whom must we be relevant?"

Short answer: less and less to alumni at large, and more and more to the institution, as well as to alumni who are either already engaged, or most likely to engage. And that means playing an explicit supporting role for fundraising.

 

2. Organizations as conveners 
People self-organize more and more. What is alumni programming's role beyond brokering people's mutual interests?

The broker role seems to be growing. Professionals understand that the institution's resources and community form a referral network that steers students and alumni to resources that address the individual's need. Willa's comment includes some great case study programming directions:

• student-alumni mentoring
• showcasing alumni outcomes (i.e., alumni as "brand ambassadors")
• lifelong learning (to highlight institutional funding priorities in teaching and research)
• driving alumni giving

Other more traditional activities overlap with several of these areas (for example, mentoring is one form of volunteerism, but so is alumni admissions work, and so is legislative advocacy for public institutions).

  
3. No more monopoly over data
People are almost universally findable online, via search and social networks. Can you deliver information that alumni need, and that they cannot easily find somewhere else? 

I see increasing willingness – even enthusiasm – for using third-party platforms to connect alumni to each other and to the institution (almost entirely via LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, but with some groups moving to open platforms such as WordPress to replace their traditional online community).

The remaining challenges are to assess the resources needed to manage the network, to map this work to your organizational chart, and to assign it to staff – if you have the staff. The "community manager" role is now better-known in education, but as the 2010 CASE Social Media survey revealed, there is no clarity around how advancement shops will build social media management into their strategy for 2011 and beyond. 

How are you going to do it?

Related articles

• Alumni Relations Issues for 2010 (www.alumnifutures.com)
• What Does a Community Manager Look Like? (www.alumnifutures.com)

Are Your Alumni Being Served?

One vigorous discussion at a recent meeting of the CASE Commission on Alumni Relations was about alumni organizations trying to be "all things to all people." The consensus was that, historically, alumni associations have tried to gather the greatest number of alumni possible under one large programming tent. And for a long time, that worked.

I have spoken to many professionals recently who say that alumni shops must assert their tangible support for institutional priorities (such as fundraising), and that this need is changing how alumni offices identify and engage their target audience. American University's Tom Minar addresses this topic with great clarity in this month's CURRENTS magazine (login required). I share Minar's profound dislike of the term friendraising when applied to alumni relations, and he articulates his thinking on this topic very well.

Instead of programming for a mythical "average alumnus" who is interested in most of the institution's engagement opportunities, alumni professionals are focusing more narrowly on two groups: the tiny fraction of alumni who are already loyal members, donors and volunteers, and the larger, more fickle group of alumni who are willing to engage with alma mater, but only if they see opportunities that speak to their personal and professional needs.

With this conversation fresh in my mind following the Commission meeting, I read a recent issue of The New Yorker magazine on the flight home. In the September 6, 2010 issue I found James Surowiecki's article, "Are You Being Served?" And in it I read: 

[Businesses] carefully monitor call centers to see how long calls last, how long workers are sitting at their desks, and so on. But none of this has much to do with actually helping customers, so companies end up thinking that their efforts are adding up to a much better job than they really do. In a recent survey of more than three hundred big companies a few years ago, eighty per cent described themselves as delivering 'superior' service, but consumers put that figure at just eight per cent.

Think of this in terms of your alumni outreach – membership marketing, event invitations, and e-mail newsletters for example. Do you think you're providing alumni with interesting content that's relevant to them? How big a gap do you think there is between your assessment of your effectiveness, and what alumni would say about it if asked?

The problem, Surowiecki continues, is that companies don't focus on engaged audience members, and that

they're always more interested in the customers they don't have...The consultant Lior Arussy calls this the 'efficient relationship paradox': it's only once you've actually become a customer that companies put efficiency ahead of attention, with the result that a company's current customers are often the ones who experience its worst service.

Alumni relations may not be this far out of alignment, but there has long been anxiety about getting the extra few per cent of alumni to attend a regional event, to give to the annual fund, and to pay association dues. And every minute spent trying to gain a new customer is a minute spent ignoring the needs and interests of someone who has already self-identified as an engaged, interested graduate. 

As pressure steadily increases to show that alumni activities are aligned with institutional needs, alumni organizations will be prudent to shift some of their attention from courting the marginally interested and the outright uninterested, and to spend it instead on serving those who are already demonstrating their commitment to alma mater.

 

Related Resource:

Video: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh in conversation with Lisa Napoli. He discusses the "call center" phenomenon briefly at the 0:17:00 mark, and talks about the long-term nature of returns on customer-service investments at 0:25:00. If you have time, the whole discussion of running a customer-focused business is interesting. The full video is one hour and two minutes long.

 Thank you to my wife Martha for making me aware of this video.

June 11 Deadline to Apply for CASE Conference Scholarships

CASE is offering about 20 scholarships to cover conference registration fees for advancement professionals at selected CASE programs.

The Virginia Carter Smith Scholarship Program is for you if you have less than three years' experience in educational advancement, or if you've moved from one advancement discipline to another in the last three years (e.g., from alumni relations to development). Among the criteria for awarding the scholarships are "career potential," an applicant's statement about resources available through their institution, and the candidate's "ability to express him or herself."

If selected to receive a scholarship, you will have conference registration fees waived, but will still have to cover, travel, hotel and meal costs to attend. Conferences NOT covered by the Smith Scholarship are the Summer Institutes, the Summit, or the annual District conferences. But that still leaves you with many options from the CASE professional development calendar.

Get your application started, though: the deadline for scholarship applications is Friday, June 11, 2010.

Click this link to download the application packet from the CASE web site [180kb PDF]

And in case you're wondering, Virginia Carter Smith was a CASE president, and founder of CURRENTS Magazine. 

Other CASE scholarships:

International Scholarships Programme (for global access to advancement training)

SimpsonScarborough Scholars (for young communications and marketing professionals)

Peter Buchanan ASAP Scholarship Award (for student advancement programming)

Good luck!

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.

Alumni Futures Round Table: Claremont, California

[Update 4 May: Just 2 spaces remain for this event]

In coordination with Liz Allen (author of the Adaptivate blog), I'm pleased to announce an upcoming Southern California event:

The Alumni Futures Round Table in Claremont, California

The Round Table takes place on Tuesday, May 18. It's a day-long discussion among no more than 10 professionals whose work relates to educational advancement – alumni relations, communications, and fundraising. The Round Table is open to advancement professionals from independent schools, colleges, universities and other non-profits. Three spots are reserved for representatives from the private sector – consultants, vendors or others whose work connects them to institutional advancement.

Each participant has 30 minutes in which to share with the group, as informally or formally as they like, either:

• a new idea or a new direction about their work that they want to share with others, or
   
• a challenge or problem they face in their work, to brainstorm possible solutions.

Individual participants choose the topics and set the agenda. Based on prior experience, we guarantee thought-provoking new ideas for you to take away, and a fun day of valuable professional network-building as well. Liz and I will facilitate the discussion and contribute our own ideas and input where appropriate.

How much does it cost?

• $99 for non-profit participants
• $149 for commercial attendees (limit 3 attendees)

Click here to see full details and to register for the event.

Registration is on a first-come basis. We will maintain a waiting list in case of last-minute cancellations. And keep in mind, although we're convening in Claremont, the Round Table is not limited to participation from those working at the Claremont colleges. It's open to anyone in Southern California who can make it there that day.

Questions? Email andy@alumnifutures.com.

The Round Table is independently produced, and not associated with any professional organization or educational institution. 

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

Time for a Change

I've been in alumni relations since January 1989, when I became assistant director in the alumni office at my alma mater, Brown University. That was 21 years ago, and I've been at Caltech since September 1999 – almost exactly half my career, or ten and a half years. 

My service to Caltech has been tremendously rewarding, but now I have chosen to move on to the next stage of my career in higher education. 

So I have decided to leave my position at Caltech on March 10.

Then what?

Although I am not immediately moving to a new permanent position, I plan to do so eventually, in an environment that encourages innovation and experimentation. In the immediate future I have an ample "to do" list. But I'm looking to add to it, as well.

I plan to complete my master's degree in education this spring, and if possible, continue as chair of the CASE Commission on Alumni Relations, while continuing as a member of the CASE Board of Trustees. 

I am also fortunate to have the opportunity to speak in diverse settings. In late March I'll deliver part of a training workshop in Paris for the European Association of International Education (EAIE), and will help teach a one-day master class in alumni relations for CASE in London. (At both events I will talk about social network technology and higher education).

Summer is shaping up to be busy too. In June I'll speak at the Whipple Hill Conference (for independent schools), and I'll run the second Alumni Futures Think Tank, a private workshop, in New York in July. And in August I hope to participate as a faculty member in the first-ever CASE Asia-Pacific Summer Institute in Singapore. 

I also will do consulting engagements as time allows. And of course, I plan to keep writing the Alumni Futures blog and tweeting about higher education via @alumnifutures.

Finally, I hope readers will contact me by email (andy@alumnifutures.com) to share job leads, discuss consulting or training needs, speaking invitations – or just to talk about higher ed advancement. 

Guest Blogger Scott Mory: Good Works Made Visible

This week's post is written by Scott Mory, CEO of the USC Alumni Association at the University of Southern California, and addresses the importance of strategically connecting alumni relations and the academic side of your institution.

[Update April 7, 2010: Scott Mory was interviewed by Paul Clifford. Click this sentence to load the mp3 audio podcast.]

Many of us already link institutional advancement with "the academic side of the house." But do we really think of ourselves, or talk about ourselves, as responsible for supporting our institution's academic mission?

My administrative home at USC is the division of university relations. Our senior vice president for university relations, Martha Harris, describes our division's core mission as "Good Works Made Visible." Those good works are typically the academic and professional accomplishments of our faculty, students, staff and alumni. And if you think about much of the work an alumni association does throughout the year, we focus a lot of effort on making good works visible.

For example:

• Publishing communications that publicize the institution's academic priorities and achievements
• Planning lectures with faculty members presenting their latest research
• Identifying alumni who can promote the institution's reputation in specific industries
• Recruiting alumni as expert advisors or guest speakers
• Recognizing graduates' professional accomplishments
• Marketing the institution's lifelong learning opportunities that are available to alumni
• Building a strong alumni network to help alumni and students find jobs, internships and career advice or support

Your alumni relations program probably has most of these features already. But are you presenting them as crucial support for the academic mission? If not, you could be missing a chance to make an effective case to volunteer leaders and campus colleagues about your program’s relevance and value.  (And it’ll make for a nice change of pace from being evaluated on how we support fundraising.)

Now you may be wondering how your alumni will respond to this focus. Trust me, they’ll love it. We recently surveyed our alumni, and they told us the most important factor in their relationship with USC is their perception of the value of their degrees – also known as degree equity. Their perception of the degree’s value is informed by the accomplishments of alumni, faculty, and students, as well as USC’s rankings in various surveys. Alumni also told us that one of the most important drivers of their loyalty is how well USC prepares students for a variety of activities, including responding to new career opportunities, deepening a commitment to personal development, and instilling a commitment to continuous learning.

For me, these findings are a roadmap on how to take USC’s alumni engagement to the next level – by connecting our work to USC’s academic mission, by making USC’s good works visible.

Photo of books in USC's Doheny Library by Zabowski via Creative Commons.

Alumni Futures Turns Three

Ordinarily I post new material on Monday mornings, but this week I'm jumping the gun a little bit so that I can post on February 7, which is Alumni Futures' birthday. The first post went up on this day in 2007, which means that I'm pleased to be entering my fourth year of writing the Alumni Futures blog.

Pretty much everything I said three years ago is still true of Alumni Futures:

• I want to generate discussion about new ideas and directions for our profession;
• I am optimistic that readers will learn from information exchanged here;
• I hope readers will participate by adding their own ideas and visions for alumni relations.

It started out simple and has remained so. But while the site's complexity has not increased, I hope its utility has. For me to know what works and what doesn't, what's missing and what you'd like done differently, you need to tell me. So send an email and I'll welcome any advice. 

For fun, here are some stats about activity on Alumni Futures since its inception in February, 2007:

• There have been 116,422 page views in three years.
• Almost 1,400 individuals have subscribed to receive new materials from Alumni Futures.
• I have published 234 postings, which works out to precisely 1.5 postings per week for three years. 
• More important, you all have contributed more than 400 comments to those postings, and that (in my opinion) is what makes the blog work. 

OK, back to work. Year four begins now!

2010: Alumni Relations Issues for the Year Ahead

Unlike many higher ed bloggers, I wasn't moved to do a year-end overview for 2009. But (at the risk of sounding pessimistic) I will look ahead at some of the large issues facing many – perhaps most – alumni associations. 

My belief that these issues are becoming central to our profession was reinforced last week at the meeting of the Association of Private College and University Alumni Directors (PCUAD) in Atlanta*. Many discussions among the thirty or so alumni executives present touched in one way or another on points that I am already concerned about. So what am I concerned about?

• I'm concerned about "mattering."

Senior administrators are questioning the relevance of alumni relations in the face of external and internal changes (i.e., competition for scarce resources). Will alumni organizations matter? 

• I'm concerned about our role as conveners.

People can and will self-organize into groups, so will we have a key role beyond brokering people's mutual interests? 

• I'm concerned because we've lost our monopoly on data. 

Search engines and social networks make people findable with little effort. Do we have information that alumni need, and that they cannot easily find somewhere else?

For all these questions, the answer may well be "yes." But we must still ask questions like these, and plan on long-term solutions that allow us to contribute to the success of alumni and their alma mater.  

With these concerns in mind, here are two additional questions to consider.

• Instead of doing many little things, as we have mostly done, should alumni associations focus on delivering a few larger programs and services, more central to the institution's core mission?

And...

• Should we focus more on supporting and connecting to the academic side of the institution? (Look for a guest blog post about this topic in the coming weeks.)

I've already mentioned several of these topics here in the last year, and most were originally raised first by others. I'm not claiming to be the first person to ask every one of these questions, I just want to generate in-depth conversation about them.

Please leave a comment or email me and continue the discussion. 

* Emory University did an outstanding job of hosting the PCUAD meeting. Shown here is the beautiful Miller-Ward Alumni House. Photo by Bill Ruhsam used with permission.