alumni futures

Overseas Workshops and Presentations: France

As I mentioned in July, I'm heading to France this week to co-present a workshop for the European Association for International Education...

 
EAIE Workshop in Nantes, 15-16 September:

I will co-present with Illuminate Consulting Group's Dr. Daniel Guhr at EAIE's annual meeting. I've been lucky enough to deliver workshops and training at EAIE programs in Norway, Hungary, Spain and France, and am grateful to be invited back. 

This year, Dan has developed an ambitious workshop called How to Strategically Deploy Web 2.0 Platforms, Tools and Communities. 

ICG research interns have compiled a number of detailed and diverse case studies that will form the basis for part of the workshop. In a few weeks I'll let Alumni Futures readers know how to purchase copies of the reports, which I have been editing for ICG.

 

AFF Breakfast Program in Paris, 21 September:

Next week, on Tuesday, 21 September in Paris, I will deliver a breakfast talk sponsored by the Association Française des Fundraisers (AFF). The topic is Alumni Community Management. I will discuss how to use social networks and the web (including blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other online platforms) to listen to alumni and build a dialog with them. You can still sign up online.

The presentation will be in English, although I can stumble along in French as well, if needed. I am very grateful to Céline Morel for helping to make this event happen.
 

Note: I'll be away from the blog for a couple of weeks, but will return at the end of September. Until then, in the spirit of social media, enjoy this series of alumni-related messages from a Twitter user last winter:

 

 

 

Crisis Communication with Alumni: Reed College

[Updated: with link to blog post about "why crisis management and social media must co-exist," and interview with Cindy Lawson. See resource list at bottom of posting.]

How can engaging alumni through social media and email help an institution during a media crisis? The alumni & parent relations staff at Reed College believes that doing so is beneficial, perhaps integral. 

This article was written by Mike Teskey, director of alumni & parent relations at Reed College in Portland, OR (USA), and Robin Tovey, Reed's assistant director of alumni & parent relations.

 

This past spring, two Reed College students died. While the circumstances of the deaths differed from one another, the college found itself the focus of local, then national media attention. The story had numerous twists and turns, and lasted for several news cycles.

 

Background

• During spring break, 2010, a student was found dead in her dorm. The coroner did not immediately list a cause of death, but ruled out illegal drugs or alcohol.
• Shortly after spring break ended, a student living off campus died of an accidental heroin overdose.
• Prior to the annual year-end student party (known as Renn Fayre), Reed College president Colin Diver was called into a meeting by the County district attorney and the U.S. attorney for Oregon, and was told that undercover law enforcement agents would likely be present at the upcoming party.
• The first death generated local news coverage. The second death resulted in local as well as national attention. The action of the U.S. attorney and the County DA created national headlines (see links at the end of this article).

 

Commentary
There are many nuances and additional elements to this story, but here we're focusing on the role of social media and alumni relations in the crisis-communication process.

 

We believe that informing alumni promptly through email, Facebook, and Twitter and getting ahead of the mainstream news media aided the college in managing the message and the public discourse online. 

Key elements included:

Access to Information: In situations like ours, what is known and what can be shared are often different. Student privacy is paramount, and the college cannot (appear to) be insensitive to this. Still, as soon as a death occurs and the coroner is called, it becomes a public story. And as soon as the public relations staff become involved, the alumni relations team needs to be brought in to help disseminate information.

Delegation: It can be challenging when, in the institution at large, there is a lack of consensus about how to respond to the crisis, along with widely divergent levels of comfort with digital communications. In a small college, no single office is equipped to handle all the related issues, so the alumni office must be empowered to share information (with appropriate approvals) and respond to alumni questions.

Empowerment: By the same token, it helps to empower the alumni as well, arming them with invaluable information to use in their own conversations with others. Our alumni added salient comments to the online mix, becoming our best advocates, and we believe they benefited from having the full spectrum of documentation available via our news feed.

Timeliness: Getting ahead of the news cycle is hard, but sharing information promptly engenders good will, provides context, and creates an "information posse" that can work to your favor when the inevitable online comments appear following a story.

Persistent monitoring: As the stories are posted and reposted, it is important to monitor what is said and, to the extent possible, who is saying it. It was quite validating to see loyal alumni chiming in and sharing a perspective that staff cannot offer. In fact, the most popular link we reposted was a letter from two young alumnae to the New York Times, that served as an astute rebuttal to an earlier article.

From the first publication through the last related posting from us, this crisis communications effort occupied nearly four weeks. It was rewarding to know, to arm, to answer, and finally to trust our alumni audience, so that they could engage others and be the institution's best advocates in the larger community – online, as well as face to face.

 

Related Links

An Intervention at Reed (from Inside Higher Ed, 26 April, 2010)

Reed College's President Is Told to Crack Down on Campus Drug Use (NY Times, 26 April, 2010)

Drug Use at Reed College (Letter to Editor, NY Times, 4 May, 2010)

Confronting Drug Abuse at Reed (by the editor of Reed College Magazine)

U.S. Attorney's Letter to Reed College... (from The Oregonian, 4 May, 2010)

Favorite Traditions (from Reed College Admission Office web site)

Reed College Alumni website

Why Crisis Management and Social Media Must Co-Exist

Interview with Crisis Communications Expert Cindy Lawson (from Academic Impressions)

Photo of sign on Reed College campus by Flickr member Major Clanger, via Creative Commons.

Alma Mater Going Mobile: 5 Quick Takeaways

[Updated 16 August, 2010: Newsweek covers the Flipboard launch, saying, "it's actually pretty profound. Now anyone who is gathering up Twitter feeds is, in effect, curating a magazine. It means that we're stumbling toward a completely customized form of journalism."]

[Updated 25 August, 2010: Loyola Marymount University releases an iPad "version" of its magazine. LMU press release.]

Brent Grinna wrote about the new iPad application Flipboard the other day. [Update: Cem Sertoglu wrote a good post as well, with a worthwhile 26-minute video interview of Flipboard founder Mike McCue.] Brent described it as "pioneering a new category of social magazine." He also referred to my Alumni Futures article from June, 2010, in which I said that alumni magazines would have to deploy "the interactive, dynamic and fast-changing form that more well-funded publications are already pushing to readers on new platforms and new devices."

Fast forward to this week, when I fired up my iPad, and for the first time used the free Flipboard app to log into Facebook and Twitter. I started flipping through compact, simply formatted (but attractive) pages of my friends' and followers' social stream, and within 60 seconds I happily realized that my June blog post is already obsolete.

In June I had written that for now...

"to go portable, alumni magazine publishers must choose between 

• a standalone program (an "app") and
• a mobile-optimized web site (although some may choose both). 

Some apps are certainly popular, but for this use they may not be effective. Before an alumnus sees content via your app, he must visit the online app store, download the app, and launch it to read your content. These are far from insurmountable barriers, but they are barriers to participation nonetheless." 

With Flipboard, or its likely successors, these barriers are mostly surmounted. Yes, it's a standalone app that users must download, install and configure. But unlike an alumni magazine, it does more than one thing. In fact, unlike any traditional magazine, it does many things, almost all of which are things that readers want to do anyway (i.e., participate in open social networks online). So because it feeds them information from their online social networks as well as from mainstream and independent media outlets, people are going to download it and use it. 

And there's more: You don't need to wait until your alumni publication decides to publish to Flipboard. If your alumni organization, alma mater or alumni publication have Twitter feeds, they're already publishing to Flipboard (even if they don't know it). Flipboard's official list of content providers includes mainstream magazines and newspapers such as Bon Appétit, The Economist, Fortune, and The New York Times. But anything that shows up in your Twitter stream will appear in Flipboard. 

The photo accompanying this article shows a recent page from my Twitter stream as seen via Flipboard on the iPad. Four of the five articles are from my alumni association (because they sent out four tweets in quick succession, not a great practice in my opinion). Flipboard takes links to web pages sent via Twitter or Facebook, and excerpts the contents of those web pages in a page-layout format, as seen here. Articles, images and embedded links are clickable for viewing full size in Flipboard or on the web.[Click on the image to view full size.]

With longer articles, you can read excepts within Flipboard, and you can click through from Flipboard items to full-length articles or photo essays in the iPad's web browser. This isn't about the iPad, by the way - the same format could work as a web page on a laptop or desktop machine, and certainly will work on tablets other than the iPad. The point is: no more squinting at nano-scale fonts, or jabbing your finger repeatedly at a minuscule hyperlink on your cell phone's display. 

Five quick takeaways:

• Organizations and publications are moving briskly toward the transformation I hinted at in June, via their audience's social streams. However, most readers won't see that content in the variable, appealing Flipboard format – they'll see it in the unappealing format of Facebook's web layout or Twitter's third-party readers (like TweetDeck, HootSuite, and Twitterrific). Very few people – yet – are using iPads, and many of them don't have Flipboard. But the app just appeared in the last two weeks – if it appeals to readers, it will take off rapidly. And anyway, Flipboard formatting could easily be built into a web interface for your laptop or desktop computer.
   
• Flipboard users' behavior will provide a real-time answer to the question, "What content do readers value?" This is also partly a reflection of the utility generated by the networks that the information comes from. In social network settings, we mostly want information from, and about, our friends and family. As danah boyd said to her audience at the CASE Summit in New York recently, "People aren't addicted to technology. People are addicted to other people."
   
• This isn't about Flipboard. It's about the behavior that Flipboard enables. Some other product or service will do the same thing better, more easily or with more appeal and Flipboard will go away. If you're thinking about what this means for your institution, nevermind the iPad and the app store: focus on the idea of readers interacting with updates from their connections online.
    
• Twitter and Facebook manifest, to some extent, our real world networks. Interacting with our networks' members delivers value, educates us, and connects us with things and people we want (or need) to know about. Replacing the tired, clumsy interfaces of existing social platforms with one that connects us to a traditional reading experience will drive even more interaction with our "social graph." As Flipboard integrates additional platforms into this flow (LinkedIn, anyone? Flickr?) we'll learn even more about which people in which network give us what we need and can use every day.
   
• Perhaps most important: The Flipboard approach avoids the temptation to create "an online version" of a traditional printed publication. This means the door is open just another inch or two to new concepts about the way that readers will receive, see, and interact with your communications. Sooner or later publishers will see the opportunity to do something they couldn't do by slavishly tethering their publications to proprietary web sites designed for desktop browsers. 

Your thoughts?

Alumni Magazines: Online Questions, Part II

In the last post, I listed three key issues that alumni publications would have to address while exploring online options: 

1. the delivery format selected, 
2. the accessibility of popular content (which raises privacy issues), and 
3. cost.

These are not the only issues they face, and the comments to my last post contain excellent points for all to consider. But I'll use the three points I made originally as a starting point for discussing some ways to move forward.

Delivery Format
For now, to go portable, alumni magazine publishers must choose between 

• a standalone program (an "app") and
• a mobile-optimized web site (although some may choose both). 

Some apps are certainly popular, but for this use they may not be effective. Before an alumnus sees content via your app, he must visit the online app store, download the app, and launch it to read your content. These are far from insurmountable barriers, but they are barriers to participation nonetheless. 

Meanwhile, mobile-optimized web sites will face the same challenges as traditional web sites: generating traffic, and then generating repeat visits (ideally by inducing alumni to subscribe to updates, as one does with podcasts, for example). Mobile sites that simply load standard versions of web page frustrate their readers with tiny print, links that are too small to "click" with your finger, and microscopic images. For these sites, "optimized" is not a good description. 

Furthermore, web developers who hitched their wagon to Adobe Flash will have to unhitch it and pair up with a different protocol (such as HTML5) if they want to be seen on the iPad. Apple's new device doesn't support the Flash format (which Apple CEO Steve Jobs called a "waning" technology).

Access to Popular Content (and related privacy questions)
Brown University is the alma mater of Brent Grinna, whose blog I quoted last week – and it's my alma mater too. Brown recently put class notes and obituaries behind a log in on its alumni magazine web site. I do read these items in the printed publication every time it arrives (it's an outstanding magazine, by the way). But personally, I wouldn't log in to read class notes and obits online unless the print version went away completely. Even then I would probably not click through; a log in, though critical from a privacy viewpoint, is an one obstacle too many for readers like me; I consume alumni content when it's relevant and convenient – not merely because it's relevant. 

For comparison purposes, the majority of the Ivy Plus Group's ten schools' web sites seem to require a log in to read class notes. Dartmouth's, Penn's, and some of Columbia's alumni notes (e.g., the School of Social Work) are unprotected. But Brown, Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, Stanford, MIT, and some of Columbia's schools (e.g., Law) require registration and a log in to read notes. Yale's online class notes, oddly, are temporarily "out of service." 

Class notes are among the most popular items in alumni magazines, in part because class notes' content is most clearly unique to the institution itself. If you believe the feature articles in alumni magazines, every school has earnest students and alumni out to change the world, top-rank researchers pushing the frontiers of science, and bold, visionary leadership ensuring the future of the institution with the latest capital campaign. But only one college or university has your classmates' and school friends' personal updates. 

Because of privacy concerns, the online version of this popular feature requires readers to do something they've never had to do with print: obtain, record, and enter a username and password when they want an update. This has serious implications for readership patterns in a post iPad era; will the rest of the content be compelling enough to bring readers back, time after time? 

See links to related blog posts at the bottom of this article.

Cost
Assuming that online versions will be add-ons to printed alumni magazines for some time to come, the cost question is long-term. The additional cost of content conversion or development is a high hurdle for publishers, if their online and printed "versions" of magazines are to exist side by side. Last week I talked about the rationale for sticking with a tried and true magazine identity online, but I personally don't get excited by the online version of a printed publication – even if I like the printed version. Having online content slavishly follow a printed magazine's focus and style can prevent the risk-taking needed to invent a new way of communicating with alumni, a way that takes full advantage of new platforms' capabilities.

The Internet is not where printed content becomes immortal. It is, however, an increasingly interactive medium which points to new forms of alumni engagement.

The Bottom Line
For decades (more than a century for many), alumni magazines have trained alumni to love their printed pages and their quirky, niche content. But this content by itself won't drive more than a tiny fraction of alumni to consume it online as well. For better or worse, it will have to assume the interactive, dynamic and fast-changing form that more well-funded publications are already pushing to readers on new platforms and new devices. And that will come at a high financial cost, which means that advancement shops will have to find support from outside the existing print publication budget. 

How is your institution supporting innovation and funding in the magazine business? 

Leave a comment.

***

In a future post I'll look at Brown University's foray into iPhone applications via EverTrue Mobile.

Previous Alumni Futures posts on related topics:

Alumni Magazines: "Be Read or Don't Bother"

Status Updates: The New Class Notes

A Few Mobile Format Alumni Magazines & Student Newspapers:

Harvard Magazine

BYU Universe

Rochester Review

Alumni Magazines: Online Questions, Part I

In a recent post titled iPads and Alumni Magazines, Brent Grinna (of EverTrue) points out that Apple's iPads are flying off the shelves, and adds,

I can't help but think about the medium-term implications for alumni magazines. According to CASE, alumni magazines are the primary way that alumni receive news about their alma mater. Unfortunately, it is extremely expensive for schools to produce the high quality publications alumni have come to expect...

It's not a stretch to imagine a world in which alumni relations and communications professionals can provide digitally-enhanced alumni magazine content via devices like the iPad while cutting out the high production and distribution costs.

I don't think we should assume that just because we have a magazine in print, we need to convert it, more or less as is, to an electronic format. Why produce a "digitally-enhanced" anything? Can we instead use the digital tools to create something that is completely new? 

Yes, we could. But there are legitimate obstacles to doing so, such as the following:

• It is hard to invent a product that doesn't fit into one of the existing categories: mobile app, digital magazine, or web site. 
• Existing frameworks can provide multimedia and interactive features that supplement existing publications, with only minor changes to written content. 

There are at least three important advantages of incremental change to existing formats, that help explain higher education's apparent hesitation to adapt to, and populate, new channels: 

• Minor changes, under the familiar magazine title and logotype, make it easier to bring along loyal readers. 
• Retaining the current personnel and staff structure means that senior administrators don't have to make radical changes to their organization. 
• Small risks are acceptable if the cost of failure is commensurately small. 

In higher education, systemic change often meets with resistance from entrenched parties, and it requires research, speculation, leadership, and the blessing of those still higher up (such as the campus CEO and the Trustees). And there are editorial or advisory boards to engage as well. These are daunting hurdles, so it's understandable (if unfortunate) that many communications managers prefer to avoid them. 

What's the other side of this argument? A potential disadvantage of taking baby steps, or following others, is that publishers miss an opportunity to lead through innovation, and may miss their best chance at keeping up with savvy readers' increased expectations of technology.

Perhaps the simplest and most common argument against embracing portable formats is this: "The field is changing too fast, and committing to a specific platform may cause problems later." 

Fair enough: when fickle consumers abandon the Kindle for the iPad or the iPhone for the Android, you need your content to migrate with their preferences. The technology is new and changing rapidly, but not choosing online options now will increase the likelihood that your shop falls behind readers' expectations later.

In the end, for all but the most entrepreneurial publishers, the marginal cost of repurposing existing content for a new platform (like the iPad) makes doing so the best opportunity for short-term change.

This raises a few questions...

• Can you innovate without alienating core readers, who know and enjoy the traditional magazine?
• Which direction will help you achieve your mission (and not just be "change for the sake of change")?
• What resources will you need to innovate? 

The keys to unraveling this involve, in part, 

1. the delivery format selected, 
2. the accessibility of popular content (which raises privacy issues), and 
3. cost.

I'll look briefly at these three issues in part two of this post, on Thursday. 

Are you with me so far?  Leave a comment.

Alumni Magazines: "Be Read or Don't Bother"

[Update 14 May, 2010: The Leeds 2.0 blog at the University of Colorado at Boulder mentioned this post on May 4.]

Last week we exchanged ideas on Alumni Futures about Class Notes in alumni publications. As if on cue, I then stumbled across UMagazinology – "News and observations on university magazines."  One author of that blog is Johns Hopkins University Magazine's associate editor Dale Keiger.

Keiger, who is vastly experienced in magazine journalism, explained the site's point of view back in March, and he espoused this credo:

Be read or don't bother.

Specifically, Keiger rails against 

senior administrators, deans, development communications VPs, alumni association directors, and public affairs professionals steadfast in their belief that [alumni] will shove aside The New Yorker, the sports page, the laptop, and the remote in order to read the status of their latest capital campaign, news from the Muskegon alumni chapter, six superficial profiles of earnest undergraduates who are passionate about giving back to the community, and The Dean's Message. But the truth is, almost nobody reads that stuff. It's boring, it insults our readers' intelligence, and it can't possibly compete with a new episode of Lost. [bold added for emphasis; italic in original]

OK, now we know how Dale really feels. So, what can compete with Lost, the laptop or The New Yorker? Simple: what people actually read. Keiger explains:

People read stories. Engaging, compelling, deeply reported, well-crafted stories. True stories. Ergo, if you want people to read your magazine...you need to tell great true stories, real stories that have narrative drive and vivid actors and meaningful knowledge, all conveyed with a storyteller's verve.

Easier said than done, obviously. But it sounds like good common sense – and the central importance of authenticity holds true across institutional advancement. Successful educational alumni relations, communications and fundraising are fundamentally based on relationships. Real relationships engender trust, and if university magazine authors (as well as the administrators Keiger lists) trust their audiences and don't insult their intelligence, the audience will repay that trust with loyalty and attention.

Status Updates: The New Class Notes

A series of brief exchanges on the ALUMNI-L discussion list caught my attention a few months back. The topic? 

Class notes in printed alumni publications. 

The alumni director at a small U.S. public liberal arts college wrote,

Our institution is considering cutting Class Notes, births, weddings, engagements and death announcements from our print magazine, which goes out three times per year, and posting them on our online community only...If you are doing this how has it been received by alumni?

One response came from a small Canadian college:

Cut the Class Notes and you're basically saying to alumni: "this magazine is not about you, it's about us." You don't have to be wealthy, famous or fabulous to be in Class Notes, like you do to be in a feature story. You just have to be an alum...and you don't get any more inclusive than that.

A final answer to the original question came from the Director of Alumnae Relations at a U.S. women's college:

We have an alum section in our college magazine and it is the very first section that alums go to when they receive their magazine. Many of our older alums do not go online. We use this section to include as many alums as possible because classmates want to know as much about their classmates as possible.

My immediate reaction to the comments above was to agree with them. But after thinking it over, I was less sure. Regarding the commenter who said, "You don't get any more inclusive than that," I found myself thinking: Why bother being so inclusive? Aren't we confounding "what most alumni want" with "what most alumni who read class notes want"? The latter is a very small fraction of the total alumni population. On the other hand, they are an engaged population, so ultimately we should account for their interests.

As for alumni wanting "to know as much about their classmates as possible," it's true that only online alumni will see the constant status updates from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter that the rest of us consume. But online, the class note does seem to survive in the form of updates from these social network sites. 

Ten years ago most alumni directors thought that printed class notes would simply move online, but it didn't happen that way. Alumni web sites in general have never attracted a consistent flow of traffic, so maybe the problem wasn't with class notes, but with the overall effectiveness of alumni web sites.

Class notes themselves are not dead, it's just that the "class" your alumni are reading about now includes not only fellow alumni, but fellow co-workers, neighbors, family members and others. The magic of information being aggregated and distributed in a single channel is now accessible to any group with which alumni identify. Class notes have lost their special quality to those who socialize online because it's no longer universities or schools that monopolize the communication channel. We all have equal access now.

What do you think? 

Photo of the CalArts alumni magazine by Hearken Creative via Creative Commons.

CAE: 2009 Saw Drop in Giving to U.S. Higher Education

This is the time of year when the Council for Aid to Education (CAE) publishes its annual report on Voluntary Support of Education (VSE) – that is, financial donations to colleges and universities in the United States.

According to a New York Times article about the CAE's survey, 

Gifts to colleges and universities declined almost 12 percent in the 2009 fiscal year, to $27.85 billion...the steepest decline in the survey's 53-year history.

The article goes on to state that

• private liberal arts colleges saw the largest decline (18.3%);
  
• capital gifts (for endowment or buildings and property) dropped 25%;
• the last decade has seen an average 4.1% overall increase in giving each year.

Here are past Alumni Futures postings on this survey since 2007:

2007: Alumni Dollars Are Up, Participation Is Down (Again)

2008: CAE: Alumni Participation and Dollars Both Declined in 2007

2009: I did not report on the CAE survey last year, but here is a statement from CASE about the survey's results.

Here is the Chronicle of Higher Education's report on today's announcement of survey results.

Global Competitiveness Ten Years Out: Download the Report

Last week I quoted Daniel Guhr on changes to European higher education and implications for alumni relations. This week I am staying with the international theme.

In September I was an invited presenter at a day-long seminar in London (UK), co-sponsored by Dan's firm, Illuminate Consulting Group and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Imperial College London hosted the event, which was attended by some 45 higher education leaders from more than half a dozen countries around the world. The event was titled:

How the Global Economic Crisis is Shaping Competitiveness Ten Years Out: 
 International Recruiting, Research and Relationships

The proceedings of that meeting are now available and you can download them in PDF format via this link: 

Download ICG-Chronicle-Imperial London Proceedings 09 09 [2.4MB PDF] 

The seminar was moderated by David Wheeler, Managing Editor (International) at the Chronicle, and the other speakers joining Dr. Guhr and me were Mary Ritter (Pro-Rector, Imperial College London), Maurits van Rooijen (President, Compostela Group of Universities), and Madeleine Reeve (Pro-Vice Chancellor at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia). 

Presentation content from our talks is in the Proceedings. Anyone seriously interested in the future of international higher ed recruiting, research and relationships should find the contents provocative and useful, and I encourage you to download it and read it. It is free and doesn't require you to provide any contact information.

During 2010, similar invitation-only seminars will take place in conjunction with major international academic meetings, providing senior leaders with opportunities to

• focus on strategic issues,
• share intensive discussion of issues critical for professional success, and
• network with peers across international borders.

Note: I serve in a volunteer capacity on the Academic Advisory Board for ICG.

We Should Learn About Network Science

Last week I spoke at two events in Europe. First, Illuminate Consulting Group (I'm on their academic advisory board) and the Chronicle of Higher Education teamed up to deliver a day-long seminar for senior university leaders from the UK, Australia, Canada and other countries. Imperial College London hosted the program, titled How the Global Economic Crisis is Shaping Competitiveness Ten Years Out: International Recruiting, Research and Relationships.

Second, with Illuminate's founder, Dan Guhr, I spoke at the annual meeting of the European Association for International Education (EAIE) in Madrid. I first spoke at that meeting in 2007. The topic this time was technology's role in changing international student recruiting and alumni relations.

The presentations generated thoughtful discussion and useful insights (for me, anyway). The London program was convened under the Chatham House Rule* so I won't attribute specific comments to individuals. But here's a brief general treatment of one specific idea for readers of Alumni Futures. 

It's Time We Learned About Network Science

Both meetings last week consisted of multiple presentations stitched together by a single thread: how networks behave. Many of the discussions were built almost entirely on the idea of the many networks that hold together the educational disciplines: alumni networks, student networks, academic networks, research networks, business or professional networks – and of course, social networks.

This theme occurs more and more frequently in our professions, and that's one reason I write about it here. But mostly, I think it can help us be more effective at maintaining a useful role in the lives of alumni. (I also just think it's interesting.)

But only one of the presenters I heard explicitly acknowledged that we were talking about the formal aspect of how members of networks behave, influence each other, and relate. Of course, for decades (centuries, I suppose) we have known that we belong to networks – families, companies, towns, sororities, sports teams, graduating classes, political parties, religious groups, and more. But only recently have the structure, behavior and characteristics of networks under different conditions become a systematic scientific pursuit.

The mathematics behind network science is beyond me (which won't surprise anyone familiar with my academic achievements in that field). However, there is a wealth of accessible literature that explains in understandable ways what we do know about networks, and it is past the time for fundraising and other advancement professionals to learn about the simple ideas that underpin network science. Learning about scale-free networks, power law distributions, Metcalfe's and Reed's Laws, and more has completely changed my understanding of what alumni and student networks are, and what their members can do with them.

We constantly talk about "the alumni network" but I don't think we have a very good idea what a network really is, how it works, what its potential value is, and how networks evolve. Even common sense observations seem to be beyond some (otherwise sensible) people's ability to understand. For example, people often blame the network when they don't get results – in a job search, a business deal, or a simple referral. I've heard this from people who had recently joined LinkedIn, expecting job offers to appear with no effort on their part. One speaker in London said, "Networks don't fail. Network members fail." With a few specific exceptions, I think this is generally true.

Below are links to some general resources that you can use to get started thinking about networks. If you have your own favorite sources of information on this topic, or constructive criticism of the ones I've listed, please share links or citations in the comments.

• Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What it Means by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
• How to Build Your Network by Brian Uzzi (Harvard Business Review)
• Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan Watts
• The Network Thinker – a blog about self-organizing behavior in networks

In future postings I'll mention a few other ideas I absorbed at last week's interesting meetings. And I'll also talk about what might influence the success or failure of alumni networks in particular.

* At a meeting held under the Chatham House Rule, "participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed." The point is "to encourage openness and the sharing of information" at the meeting. Most people use the plural "Rules," but there's only the one rule.

Photo from the EAIE meeting in Madrid by Andy Shaindlin, all rights reserved.