alumni futures

3 More Questions (and Answers) on Alumni Engagement

During our Higher Ed Live online discussion about alumni engagement, we answered a few questions from readers and viewers. But we didn't get to all of them. Here are answers from Charlie Melichar and Andrew Gossen to some additional comments and questions.

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Question:
How can our offices become proactive and future-thinking, versus playing catch-up (e.g., LinkedIn replacing alumni directories)?

Charlie:
Start with a clean slate. We still view problems through the lens of old solutions. Look at the news business, for example. The industry was so entrenched in papers as the delivery vehicle, they were slow to adapt to a new model to do what was ultimately most important – deliver information in the most timely way possible. We need to focus on the need, the opportunity, or the problem – and be open to changing our ways. People want a network, not a directory. People want a job, not a careers program. People want to make an impact, not a gift. How can we facilitate all of this?

Andrew:
You can’t do this unless there’s someone in your shop whose job is to pay attention to how the world is changing. They need the time to do this, and they need the experience and perspective to recognize emerging opportunities. In Cornell Alumni Affairs & Development, we ask two questions when new opportunities present themselves:

1.       Does the opportunity enable us to pursue an existing strategic goal more efficiently or effectively than we are doing now?; and

2.       Is there an emerging critical mass of alumni activity that warrants our involvement? 

Charlie’s focus on value from the user’s perspective is also essential. We aren’t employed to perpetuate ourselves and our programs; we’re employed to engage our audience. Focusing on our alumni and their evolving needs will make it much less likely that we’ll be left behind.

[Melichar: "People want a network, not a directory. People want a job, not a careers program. People want to make an impact, not a gift."]

Question:
Most donors engage without having to "be present." They send a check whenever they want. What are some non-financial analogs to this?

Charlie:
Social media is a great example of asynchronous engagement. People pick and choose the content that is meaningful them, from the sources they care about, and then do “something” with it. They like it, share it, mash it up. We need to get away from only counting engagement when it happens on our own terms (e.g., events we organize, conversations we convene) and find mutually beneficial ways to join with our constituents.

Andrew:
As Charlie suggests, it’s content. Social media. Archived video. Asynchronous games. Infographics. Memes. High-quality, on-demand engagement is a great fit with today’s highly digital lifestyle.

We could also focus on the convener role, trying to connect alumni so that they can engage with each other when it’s convenient for them, around their priorities. We make the introduction and get out of the way.

[Gossen: "Emerging platforms & techniques blur the distinction between giving and other modes of engagement – the boundaries start to collapse."]

Question:
In fundraising, should we just count donors and not worry about dollars? It's much easier to measure...

Charlie:
It depends on what you’re counting and why, but both are critical. There are engagement models that would take size of gift, whether it is a first-time gift, renewal at a higher level, and so on, as engagement measures. This underscores that there is no "one-size fits all" model. We need to tie these measures to institutional and program-level goals. That’s the way to stay relevant and nimble.

Andrew:
Emerging platforms and techniques blur the distinction between giving and other modes of engagement so thoroughly that the boundaries start to collapse. Take crowdfunding, for example. A $25 donation is definitely "giving." But receiving an almost-instant thank you from someone involved with the project is both stewardship and person-to-person engagement. The frequent, informal updates sent to donors by the project team are stewardship, but they’re also communication that fits well with culture of the social web. This may complicate measurement, but it almost certainly will better engage the donor. 

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Related articles

Online Discussion: Higher Ed Live Explores Alumni Engagement

Lessons for Education from Obama's Re-election

Today's U.S. presidential inauguration reminds me to ask what higher ed advancement might learn from Obama's re-election. It feels a little like dejà vu from Obama's first presidential campaign, when many of us wondered whether Blue State Digital's grassroots tools would transform alumni communities and fundraising online. 

That didn't happen. One reason is that most of our profession sat back and waited for folks like Blue State to show up and teach us their ways. They did show up – sort of – but their solutions seemed expensive relative to our budgets, and it wasn't clear that they could resolve the difference between fundraising for Barack Obama and fundraising for graduate fellowships. Some good came of it though: many of us began to ask how donating to a time-bound, cause-related effort compared with supporting a college annual fund.

In 2013 the lessons aren't about building email lists or solicitation via text message. TIME Magazine's Swampland blog explained that it's all about "the secret world" of "data-crunchers." 

Some simple lessons for us:

Mashup data from disparate sources to gain novel insights
For example, overlay geography with behavioral profiles.  

Limit the number of data sets you use at one time
Related: Correlate and aggregate data sets. 

Rank audience members via predictive modeling
Correlate it to your campaign's priorities. 

Rank likelihood to volunteer
Giving potential isn't the only thing to rate.

Test and measure
This helps assess the best ROI among possible next steps.

Behavioral data comes from many platforms and channels
Examples: Recurring payments; text messaging; email appeals; online donations. 

Finally, there's a key difference between political campaigns and education that is not mentioned:

In political campaigns, candidates make the case for supporting a movement, a cause, or a set of values.

In schools, colleges, and universities, we characterize our needs as those of an organization, a capital project, or a place. 

Is political parties' approach to messaging broadly applicable to a university? If so, how? If not, why not?

 

Whatever the answer, I think we still have much to learn from the so-called secret data crunchers and their insight based on data and analysis.

 

Related articles

Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win

Life after 'Moneyball': Obama campaign vet sees a shift in attitudes in D.C.

Obama campaign to become nonprofit

Obama camp fundraising total: $1.1B

Preparing Advancement for an Ambiguous Future: Guest Blogger Andrew Gossen

Andrew Gossen (@agossen) is Senior Director for Social Media Strategy in Cornell’s Division of Alumni Affairs & Development, and is a member of the Alumni Futures advisory group. 

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Have times ever been better for advancement in higher education? Stanford University recently wrapped up a $6.23 billion campaign. Princeton’s Aspire Campaign raised $1.88 billion. At Cornell, in the midst of the $4.75 billion Cornell Now campaign, we have just completed the most successful year of fundraising in the university’s history.

But an undercurrent of anxiety runs through higher education; the world is changing rapidly in ways that may make the status quo unsustainable. Can an advancement organization position itself to succeed in an ambiguous future? Cornell’s Division of Alumni Affairs and Development (AA&D) recently embarked on an experiment that we called the Skunkworks, in recognition of the history and spirit of Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Programs organization. 

Vice President for Alumni Affairs and Development Charlie Phlegar convened the Skunkworks in Spring 2011. The group included 14 staff from across the Advancement Office – from Major Gifts to Advancement Services; veterans mixed with newcomers. Our charge? Take a broad look at the challenges, opportunities, and trends that will influence institutional advancement in higher education over the next twenty years. We were given complete freedom to explore in whatever manner we chose.

The group met regularly for a full year. Members took turns leading discussions on many topics, such as:

• The Digital Life of Alumni
• Rethinking the Endowment
• Storytelling and the Institutional Website
• Crowdfunding and Microfinance
• Young Alumni Giving
• The Psychology of Happiness in Fundraising, and
• Women and Philanthropy

By the end of the year, our conversations revolved around three main themes.

1. Increasing competition for the attention of our audience.
It is more difficult to connect our audience to Cornell meaningfully. There is rising competition from other non-profits, rapid and dramatic change in communications, and an imbalance between sharing our message and listening to our audience.

2. Changes in the philanthropic environment.
The demographics and behaviors of our audience are making traditional programs and approaches less effective. For instance, women are assuming a greater leadership role in philanthropic decisions. Different generations display different attitudes towards giving. Direct mail and phonathons will become less effective as technology and habits change.  Keeping accurate contact information for alumni has always been a challenge, and will get harder as people abandon land line phones and answer fewer calls, thanks to caller ID and mobile technologies.

3. Organizational agility.
Traditional fundraising and engagement programs have served our institution well over the years, and we are organized to sustain and improve them deliberately and incrementally. However, the world is changing so fast that this deliberate pace is no longer as effective, especially with competition from the “new and nimble” non-profits that are making inroads into our audience and threatening our donor pipeline. 

Overall, we concluded that broad one-size-fits-all fundraising, engagement, and communications strategies will become less and less effective. We need to focus on user experience, personalizing and customizing interactions in ways that meet the audience expectations shaped by companies like Amazon and organizations such as Kiva.org. We must also segment our audience beyond their giving history, and account for generational differences, gender, ethnicity, and other variables that may affect capacity and inclination to engage.

And changing the way that we think about our audience is only one piece of the puzzle. Equally important is adopting an experimental mindset. The only way you will know if something works is to test it. Some experiments will fail and that’s ok, because that’s how you learn. Organizational culture must evolve toward pilot projects and rigorous data analysis, and away from the risk aversion and conservatism that characterizes so much of higher ed advancement.

Our final report to the Vice President recommended a list of pilot projects designed to test specific hypotheses that emerged from our discussion. Among them are experiments with crowdfunding, developing advancement strategies focused on professional cohorts of female alumni, gamification, and enhanced presentation skills training for faculty, senior administrators, and advancement officers. The organization has already incorporated elements of these into broader efforts to raise annual giving participation.

The Skunkworks approach demonstrates that an advancement office faced with change and uncertainty can position itself for the future by mobilizing talent already present in the organization.

 

Skunk Works logo via Wikimedia. Copyright Lockheed-Martin

Do Events Have a Social Graph?

In a recent article titled The Next Big Thing, social network analyst Valdis Krebs pointed out that just as a person has a "social graph" that depicts how they connect and interact with others, a book can have a social graph too. His network map displays connections between the purchasing behaviors of individuals who bought a specific book on Amazon.com: 

Below is a network map of a very interesting new book – Too Big to Know [2B2K] by internet scholar David Weinberger. David's book is shown by the magenta node in the center of the network. Directly connected to his book are the books that Amazon mentions that customers also bought [green nodes], in addition to 2B2K. These books are probably more similar than different to 2B2K. The blue nodes are books that are 2 steps away from 2B2K, they are probably more different than 2B2K, but retain similarities also. The arrows show the direction of the majority of also-bought activity. 

His conclusion? Amazon is building an "Interests & Passions network...under the radar."

"Social Graph" of the book Too Big to Know on Amazon.com, via The Network Thinkers - Click to enlarge

It occurs to me that if a thing (like a book) can have a social graph, so can some of the "things" we use to engage alumni and donors. For example:

Events can have a social graph.

Is someone who attends a particular event more or less likely to attend certain other events? The answer could improve our target marketing for events.

Volunteerism can have a social graph.

Is someone who volunteers for a specific role more or less likely to fulfill another, specific role? The answer could improve volunteer recruitment.

[If a book can have a social graph, why can't an event?]

And directionality matters here too. For example, arrows would show which volunteer roles lead to future activities.

This is hardly a new idea. Overlay behavior onto a social graph and you're creating an interest graph. That's how several popular online services work, in a general way: Zappos, Netflix, and of course Amazon. But these sites mostly aggregate past users' behaviors to influence the next user's behavior, without those users being connected otherwise. A true "interest graph"–based system would interpret your behavior to help organizations understand why you attended that additional event, or how you felt about your volunteer experience.

Intrigued by this idea? Then see this article by Derrick Harris: The personalized web is just an interest graph away.

Do events, volunteer roles, and other engagement tools have social graphs?

If they do, should we be capturing and analyzing them?

Why – or why not? 

Related articles

• Amazon is building a social graph under the radar (thenetworkthinkers.com)
• [2b2k] Too Big to Know's network (hyperorg.com)
• Looking Beyond the Social Graph, Capsule Aims To Map the 'Experience Graph' (prweb.com)
• The personalized web is just an interest graph away (gigaom.com)

EdSocialMedia Summit, San Francisco

[Updated May 30, 2012: A video of my talk is now online for free viewing:

Balancing Creativity with Leadership: The Challenge of Social Media]

Next month in San Francisco I'm speaking at the EdSocialMedia Summit. The event is for "professionals involved in any way with social media in their organization." The focus is on schools, universities, and non-profits.

The sessions, along with great networking opportunities, take place during a single day:

Wednesday, April 4, 2012 

NOTE: Alumni Futures readers earn a 20% discount on registration.
The link at the bottom of this posting takes you to the registration page.

Seven presenters (including me) will examine current trends and roles for social platforms from a pretty diverse range of perspectives.

The other speakers are:

Brian Carter (author of The Like Economy: How Businesses Make Money with Facebook)

Georgy Cohen (co-founder of Meet Content)

John Hill (higher ed evangelist at LinkedIn)

Erin Swanson (marketing programs manager at Water.org)

Ian Symmonds (president & founder of Ian Symmonds & Associates)

and

Rand Fishkin (CEO and co-founder of SEOmoz)

[Alumni Futures readers get 20% off the registration fee]

Topics
Everything from viral video to inbound marketing, from integrated social fundraising campaigns to Facebook marketing, and from brand story-telling to alumni networking online.

Great Venue
Beautiful historic Fort Mason Center overlooking the Marina and San Francisco Bay.

My Talk
I'll review some recent research in experimental psychology to show why "strong leadership" doesn't usually seem compatible with innovative efforts such as social media. And I'll suggest what decision-makers can do about it to succeed. 

I hope I'll see a few Alumni Futures readers at this event next month.

Register

Register for the EdSocialMedia Summit – April 4, 2012 – San Francisco

Note: 20% discount ($40 off the regular cost of $199) is built in to this link, but you can always click "Promotional Code" on the registration page and type in: AlumniFutures

And...EdSocialMedia will donate 25% of profits to local charitable education organizations.

See you there!

 

Photo: Port of San Francisco sign by Andy Shaindlin

 

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

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

Not so. 

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

You can read the entire tale here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lukas writes,

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

Mine too.

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

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

 

Image: Student record from Manhattan Trade School for Girls

Related articles

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

White Paper: 10 Best Practices for Organization Twitter Profiles

I'm pleased to announce a new white paper from Alumni Futures, available as a free download in PDF format [1.2mb]:

Alumni Organization Twitter Profiles:
A Quick Guide to 10 Best Practices

As mentioned recently, I surveyed the Twitter profiles of 150 alumni organizations that use (or have used) Twitter. I asked 10 questions about each profile, gathering information on links, photos, logos, account names and more. Then I drew on that information to generate 10 easy-to-replicate best practices.

The first part of the white paper reviews the ways that alumni organizations commonly configure their Twitter profiles. Those of you who just want to learn the best practices can start on page 7, where the 10 suggestions begin.

Note: This is not a survey of the content that is in the tweets – I'll look at that early next year. In the spirit of taking a narrow topic and exploring it in depth, this white paper looks only at the Twitter profile information.

I hope it helps you configure your organization's profile to be more effective. If you like it, click the "Tweet this White Paper" button on page 2 of the paper to tell your Twitter followers about it! (Do this from your individual account – your alumni probably won't care that much...)

 

Bonus: Twitter Profile Worksheet! (Score your profile to see where you can improve!) 

As a fun (and fairly subjective) aid to self-improvement, I put together a simple Twitter Profile Worksheet [45kb PDF] for organizations to use. Download and print the PDF, then for each of the 10 best practices from the white paper, mark how your alumni office Twitter profile measures up. There are four levels for each practice. Yes/No choices, however, give you just two options. For example, you either have a URL in your Twitter profile, or you don't. 

To find your score: Mark the number of times you selected each response, apply the multiplier and add the resulting scores to get your total.

A quick look at the practices where you scored "1"s and "2"s (i.e., the lowest scoring areas) will guide you to the quickest improvements.

Hope it helps – and if you feel like sharing your result, leave a comment telling us how you fared.

Related resources

• Download the white paper: Alumni Organization Twitter Profiles [1.2mb PDF]
• Download the Twitter Profile Worksheet [45kb PDF]
• Twitter list of alumni organizations (maintained by Alumni Futures)
• Other white papers from Alumni Futures

Matrix Update: 2 More Uses for Online Social Networks

Once again, I've updated the matrix of Social Networks' Impacts on Alumni Organizations. This collections of ways in which alumni organizations can use online social platforms now lists 20 different cases.

The primary purpose is to help you spur creative thinking about how to use online networks to help your institution achieve its mission. It can also serve as a management checklist, to see how you are doing overall. And you can use it as a road map when crafting the online components for your alumni communications strategy (you have that, right?).

     Download Social Networks' Impacts on Alumni Organizations v6 [98k PDF]* 

The updated matrix adds two additional uses for social networks:

1. Conduct alumni prospect research
Cornell's Andrew Gossen recently analyzed the pros and cons of using graduates' social network profiles for prospect research. While each service has its own characteristics, the most important thing to understand about all these platforms (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and others) is that the ethical and legal landscape is murky. Proceed with extreme caution, and in the company of legal and research experts before collecting alumni data from individuals' online profiles.

2. Manage crisis communications
This addition was spurred by further conversation with Reed College's Mike Teskey. Mike and his colleague Robin Tovey blogged here last August about their own experiences in this realm, and you can read their original article for Alumni Futures to understand some of the specifics. 

Leave a comment with your own observations and additions to the matrix. Or email me: andy@alumnifutures.com.

Note: The matrix is designed to print on US legal size paper, 8.5 x 14 inches.

* If you are reading this message via email or RSS and cannot download the 20 Use Cases,

1) click through to the blog post on the web page: http://www.alumnifutures.com/2010/11/matrix-more-uses.html then

2) right click the link to the PDF and 

3) select "Save As..." or "Save Link As..."

 

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:

 

 

 

All The People You Know Who Know People

The mania over social networking is really a mania over the online component. Social networks have been in place for millennia. And reminders of this pop up in unexpected places all the time. Like in Truman Capote's classic novella, Breakfast at Tiffany's. 

The earnest, plodding young narrator follows all the rules for getting his writing published. He mails each manuscript off and passively waits for rejection letters by return post. But he gets a casual dose of common sense networking from his neighbor, Holly Golightly, who says that she can help him land a Hollywood script deal:

"I'm going to help you," she said. "I can, too. Think of all the people I know who know people." 

There's the strength of weak ties, clearly articulated in a fictional conversation, 15 years before Granovetter published it as a scholarly finding.

And there's something else here. Holly and her author-neighbor are not connected by a common alma mater or some other granfalloon. They're connected by something that Holly herself determines is relevant:

"I'm going to help you, because you look like my brother Fred. Only smaller."

This can serve as a cautionary reminder about how little it often takes for groups to form, with or without your alma mater as a focal point. And now that forming groups is so easy, looking like brother Fred is sometimes much more important than sharing a school connection. 

That should be a wake-up call to alumni organizations, which no longer (necessarily) play a central role in connecting people to one another and helping them organize around their interests.