alumni futures

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?

Alumni Futures Turns Four Years Old

Today marks the 4th anniversary of my first article on Alumni Futures. As on past birthdays of Alumni Futures, I'm stopping to check and (happily) reaffirm the goals I originally set for the site, when it was just a blog:

• To generate discussion about new ideas and directions for the advancement professions;
• To help education professionals learn from information exchanged here;
• To encourage readers to add their own ideas and visions for advancement.

Here's the annual peek at some numbers:

• There have been more than 174,000 page views in four years; 58,000 in the last year.
• About 1,800 individuals subscribe, and receive new materials from Alumni Futures every week. 400 of them signed on in the last year.
• I've published an average of 1.3 articles per week over four years. 
• Best of all, Alumni Futures readers have contributed almost 600 comments to date, and as I always say, that's what makes the site work as a community for exchanging ideas.

Also in the last year, I added the Alumni Futures Jobs Page:

http://jobs.alumnifutures.com

You can reach a highly targeted professional audience of advancement professionals with your job posting, which stays at the top of the list for 60 days. I also tweet new jobs to 1,177 followers of @alumnifutures on Twitter, and publish the job posting to the News Feed of the 415 folks who "like" Alumni Futures on Facebook. 

One other service I introduced this past year (in addition to newly published original white papers), is the Twitter list of Alumni Associations, which includes the Twitter streams of 191 alumni organizations of various types as of February 2011. 

Alumni Futures, the Business:
Everything above is about the web site. The last 11 months, for me, are about Alumni Futures as a full time business. I've enjoyed that time as an independent freelance consultant, speaker, trainer and author. 2011 is already packed with speaking and teaching engagements, but there's always room for a little more. 

Finally, I owe thanks to my expert advisory group, and most of all, thanks to all the clients, subscribers, fans, readers and followers of Alumni Futures. I look forward to whatever else comes to Alumni Futures in 2011 and beyond.

Related articles

• 2010: Alumni Futures Turns Three (alumnifutures.com)
• Upcoming Alumni Futures Events (alumnifutures.com)
• Availability for Speaking, Training & Consulting (alumnifutures.com)

The 5 Most Popular Alumni Futures Tweets of 2010

Here's a quick summary of the most-clicked links from the @alumnifutures Twitter account this past calendar year. I've written a short description for each, to clarify the content. After all, this is a macro-blog – no 140 character limit here!

 

Most-Clicked Links from the 2010 Alumni Futures Twitter Feed

1) 10 ways Twitter has changed, 7 questions for the future. Alumni Networks & Twitter white paper: http://ow.ly/1b4bD 

This March 2010 white paper updated our 2009 look at how alumni organizations could use Twitter effectively. The link opens a page where all Alumni Futures white papers are available. 

 

2) 100 tweeting alumni associations on this twitter list now: http://ow.ly/3ttDs 

I maintain a list of alumni associations using Twitter. As of January 2011 the list includes 173 organizations (it was 100 when I posted this tweet). 

 

3) Are status updates the new "Class Notes"? http://ow.ly/1rZt9  

A lively debate about the interplay between online and printed alumni notes. 10 comments (including my reactions to readers' replies). 

 

4) Recap of the CASE Social Media and Community Conference via @lizallen: http://ow.ly/1zYgS  

I'll be among the faculty for the April, 2011 version. Sign up here: Social Media & Community 2011. 

 

5) MIT social network analysts: Individual bias limits the benefit of having the right professional connections. http://ow.ly/1CDBK  

Interesting that this was so popular, since there was virtually no discussion about it among advancement professionals, as far as I could tell. 

 

I hope these links still hold some interest in 2011. Meanwhile, you can follow me on Twitter here:

Alumni Futures on Twitter

I will never tweet about what I had for lunch, but I will share plenty of links to people and ideas that I find informative, provocative, or just plain interesting.

And over on Facebook, "Like" Alumni Futures for weekly updates in your Newsfeed.

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.