alumni futures

Alumni Futures in France: September Events

As I head off to Singapore today, I'm already looking ahead to September, when I will travel to France for two teaching opportunities:

EAIE Workshop in Nantes, 15-16 September
I will co-present with Illuminate Consulting Group's Dr. Daniel Guhr at the annual meeting of the European Association for International Education (EAIE). This year, Dan has developed a workshop called How to Strategically Deploy Web 2.0 Platforms, Tools and Communities.

The workshop takes place over two half-day sessions, and is limited to 30 participants. It's not an introductory program – it is aimed at an intermediate level audience that is familiar with the tools currently used to deploy communities online.

The workshop takes place 15 and 16 September in Nantes. Other presenters include Delia de Vreeze (International Marketing Manager at Wageningen University in the Netherlands), and ICG researcher Mauro Mondino, from Germany's Hertie School of Governance.

AFF Breakfast Program in Paris, 21 September
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.

The presentation will be in English, although I plan to answer questions and discuss related topics informally in French as well. 

Here is a brief description of the program in French, with a link to the event page:

Petit-déjeuner fundraising: Alumni Community Management

Comment utiliser les réseaux sociaux et le web (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, sites internet) pour écouter ses alumni, et construire une relation avec eux. Une introduction au "community management" au service des relations avec vos alumni et de votre fundraising.

The Alumni Organization Social Network Matrix: 18 Use Cases

Back in February we saw the first version of web strategist Jeremiah Owyang's useful chart, Impacts to Alumni Organizations in a World of Social Networks. A month later, I posted a revised version of the chart, which I had updated by incorporating more specific aspects of alumni relations.

Now, with help from Cornell's Andrew Gossen and Liz Allen (of THINK Global School and Adaptivate), I've built out the matrix to incorporate almost every possible use case I can think of for social technology in alumni and donor outreach. 

The chart is detailed and lengthy, and so it is hard to read within the Alumni Futures web page (although to get an idea of the content you can click the image above for a snap shot of one section). 

Download a PDF of the full chart here:

Social Networks' Impacts to Alumni Organizations: 18 Use Cases  [90kb PDF]

Here are some ways you might use the chart:

• As a management checklist to see how you are doing in engaging constituents with interactive tools;
• For brainstorming new ways to engage your audience, in partnership with other campus units (such as student affairs, career services, community relations, development or communications);
• To create a strategy roadmap that guides your inquiries and planning as you allocate resources to new initiatives.

Finally, I hope others will update and add to the matrix in the way that Jeremiah has encouraged me to do with his version. As the technology changes, advancement professionals need to update their vision and plans, and incorporate new ideas to expand the range of possible futures.

Leave a comment telling me what you think about this resource, and feel free to share your own additions in the comments or via email: 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 18 Use Cases, 1) click through to the blog post on the web page: http://www.alumnifutures.com/2010/07/expanded-matrix.html, then 2) right click the link to the PDF and 3) select "Save As..." or "Save Link As..."

Social Media Master Class: Singapore

On 29 July I will be teaching a workshop (what CASE calls a "Master Class") in Singapore. The National University of Singapore (NUS) is hosting the event at the Shaw Foundation Alumni House (pictured here). It's a half-day overview of social media and alumni communications for colleges, universities and schools. 

The full program (or programme) web site is here:

Social Media & Educational Advancement

Below is the agenda at a glance, to give you an idea of what I'll cover. This session is great for people who know that social tools are an increasingly important part of constituent relations, but who don't feel they have an adequate understanding of these fast-changing trends. Note that this is a non-technical roadmap to these trends, so you don't need computer or internet expertise to benefit.

 

Social Media & Educational Advancement Programme

Overview
What is social media and where did it come from? What is the meaning of "Web 2.0" and why are there so many social networking sites and tools? Our discussion will cover: the rise of social networking sites; terminology; how social media affects alumni and student behavior; and why social media is important to educational advancement.

Global Case Studies
A cross-border look at how some institutions are using the most common tools: microblogging, social networks, business networks and more. The discussion will include risks and opportunities; how these tools can promote better alumni coordination, student recruiting, and fundraising.

Putting Social Technology to Work: Interactive Exercise
In small groups, participants will quickly brainstorm and design a solution to an assigned challenge.

The Road Ahead: Trends in Online Communication
Where is the social media world going next, and can we lead, or must we follow? I'll highlight the growing importance of mobile communication and of location-based services.

We'll finish the afternoon with an open-ended Question and Answer discussion.

If you're reading Alumni Futures in Asia and can be in Singapore on 29 July, click here to register for this event.

Social Media Round Table: New York City

The Alumni Futures Social Media Round Table is coming to New York City, Thursday, July 22, 2010.

What is it? Who is it for?
The Social Media Round Table is a day-long discussion (a kind of mini-conference), open to no more than 15 professionals from schools, colleges and universities, or from other organizations whose work relates to education. Fundraisers, communications professionals, and alumni officers are all welcome, but other disciplines are welcome too: student affairs, athletics, career services, admissions and more – anyone who needs to get up to speed quickly on the promise of social technologies in education and related sectors.

Up to three spots are available for representatives from the private sector – consultants, vendors or others whose work connects them to education or non-profits.

The Round Table is designed for individuals with low to moderate exposure to social media, not for complete beginners or for experienced "power users." You will get the most from the Round Table if you: 

- have basic familiarity with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and
- are interested in mid-level strategy and tactics for engaging constituents with social technology. 

Key Features
- Mixes presentations, guided discussions, and free-wheeling idea-sharing
- Incorporates participants' topics and questions to guarantee relevance
- Touches on key themes in social media and online community
- Connects participants to a network of fellow professionals who share their interests
- Is moderated and hosted by Andy Shaindlin (of Alumni Futures) and Elizabeth Allen (of Adaptivate)
 

Preliminary Program (exact timing & topics subject to change)

8:30 to 9:00 am - Registration
Continental breakfast (included)

9:00 am to 10:00 am - Presentation
Debunking the Myths of Social Media 
(presented by Andy Shaindlin and Liz Allen, following self-introductions)

10:00 am to 10:45 am - Group Discussion
ROI: How Will You Know If You're Succeeding?

10:45 to 11:00 am - Break

11:00 am to Noon – Group Discussion
Community Management (and Your Online Reputation)

Noon to 1:00 pm - Lunch
Deli-style lunch on site (included)

1:00 pm to 3:00 pm - Discussion
Participants' Hot Topics 
(submitted in advance)

3:00 pm to 3:30 pm - Wrap up and closing thoughts 

We guarantee thought-provoking new ideas for you to take away, and a fun day of valuable professional network-building as well.
 

Location
The Alumni Futures Social Media Round Table takes place in mid-town Manhattan, New York City, on Thursday, July 22, 2010 from 8:30 a.m. until approximately 3:30 p.m. 

Your registration fee includes Round Table discussion and feedback, Social Media Resource Packet, and continental breakfast plus deli-style lunch on site.

Registration & Fees

• $229 for non-profit participants
• $299 for commercial attendees (limit 3 attendees in this category)

Click here to register

Registered participants will receive additional details about the Round Table, including the opportunity to submit individual topics of interest to attendees, which can be included in the day's program.

• Registration is on a first-come basis. Only 15 spaces available.

Questions?

Send an email to andy@alumnifutures.com.

See you there!

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.

Facebook, Privacy, and Alumni: Guest Blogger Andrew Gossen

This is the second of Andrew Gossen's two guest posts about Facebook's Open Graph initiative. Andrew is Senior Director of Social Media Strategy at Cornell University and co-chair of the Task Force on Social Media for CASE's Commission on Alumni Relations.

My previous posting addressed the potential of Facebook's Open Graph Protocol to enhance your institutional website, adding new social and dynamic dimensions as well as the possibility of a personalized browsing experience. It sounds great. 

But what about the privacy issue?

Ahh, the Facebook privacy issue. Over the past week, it has been unavoidable. Several observers have maintained an excellent, broader conversation about the evolution of privacy on Facebook and the higher-level philosophical debate. Andrew Careaga highlighted a number of the most influential recent blog postings on the subject. Michael Stoner provided a nice overview of some of the issues, and there are interesting visualizations of the evolution and complexity of privacy on Facebook. All of these are worthy of careful reading and reflection. 

But back to the Open Graph. If you deploy parts of the Open Graph toolkit, are you putting your alumni in jeopardy? Consider the two main tools:

• Social plugins 
  I'm not particularly worried about these. If people don't want to click on "like" or "recommend" buttons, they don't have to. If their browser isn't logged in to Facebook, or if they don't have a Facebook account, they'll only see very generic social information (click images to enlarge):

 

The counterargument is that users may not realize that clicking the links is a public action, and that their activity may be shared with third parties. Some IT security companies are developing tools that allow organizations to control or monitor social plugin functionality in the name of data and network security. This concern should be balanced, however, against early evidence that use of the social plugins does, in fact, generate additional referral traffic to websites.

• Open Graph API 
  Here, things get more complicated. Some interesting criticism argues that neither Facebook nor its Open Graph launch partners have implemented their own protocol very well. At this point, we may just be seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms of what a website fully personalized with these tools might look like. 

So how are privacy options communicated on sites using the Open Graph API thus far?

• To start with, people can opt out as soon as they land on a web page for the first time:

• The "Learn More" link provides more detail, although the amount of detail depends on the site in question – Pandora, for instance, uses a generic Facebook explanation while Yelp offers more specific information. A more specific option definitely would play better to alumni.
• Every time you return to a page that is personalized through Facebook, you are reminded of that and given options:

 

• You can also disable much of this functionality through Facebook's privacy settings.

There is no doubt that Facebook has defaulted users' privacy settings to public sharing in a way that will make the Open Graph ecosystem work more smoothly, but you can also make the claim that privacy control tools are readily available. The presence of tools does not guarantee that they'll be used, however – recent research by Consumer Reports indicates that 23% of Facebook users are not aware of, or do not use, any privacy settings to control access to their information.

Bottom Line
At this point, I'd be reluctant to implement the Open Graph API too aggressively. Concern about privacy is one element of this wariness, but I also don't yet feel like I have a solid grasp of what the end product would look like. I'd prefer to see whether some of the more dire loss-of-privacy scenarios come to pass, as well as examine some fully-implemented examples of the Open Graph API first. Ironically, increasing levels of concern about privacy on Facebook may provide advancement offices with an opportunity to provide a valuable service to alumni by using social media channels to apprise them of privacy best practices, as well as providing this training in face-to-face or virtual formats. I'll be doing a Social Media 101 webinar with Cornell class volunteers, and I'll certainly devote a portion of it to privacy concerns.

Second, what about the institutional perspective? Should we be comfortable with Facebook gathering data on what Facebook users are doing on our web pages and sharing that information with third parties? That's a cost/benefit question whose answer may vary from institution to institution, and from various vantage points within each institution. Do the additional functionality and the potential for increased connectivity outweigh the risks? Does anyone have an accurate sense of the real risk at this point? There are far more questions than answers, but the questions are worth asking. It seems shortsighted to discard a tool as potentially powerful as the Open Graph API out of hand, especially since, as noted before, we're yet not really sure what a full implementation looks like.

And remember, in a Web 2.0 world, letting institutional considerations determine too much about how you engage your alumni may result in them leaving you behind. 

The important decision about the Open Graph protocol isn't really in your hands; it's in the hands of your alumni. If they continue to flock to Facebook and they like the additional functionality, you need to be there with them and use the tools they use themselves. Or you need to be comfortable with the consequences of not doing so. If they depart for greener pastures en masse, it's not worth your time to stay, anyway. 

Fortunately, social media is a great tool for finding out what your alumni are thinking. Ask their opinion. Listen. Engage. You'll make a better decision on the Open Graph initiative, and you'll advance your relationship with your alumni on the social web.

7 Things to Know About Facebook's Open Graph: Guest Blogger Andrew Gossen

This post was written by Andrew Gossen, Senior Director of Social Media Strategy at Cornell University and co-chair of the Task Force on Social Media for CASE's Commission on Alumni Relations.

It may be months before the full scope of Facebook’s new Open Graph initiative becomes apparent. The Internet is buzzing about its effect on e-commerce and businesses, as well as the obligatory concerns about privacy and explanations of how to disable the new functionality. 

Background:
For those new to Open Graph, here’s a simplified breakdown of the concept. Paraphrasing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, a “social graph” is a map of the connections between people and the things they care about. Theoretically, it could show how everybody is connected to everything. Up until now, Facebook has focused on the connections between people. With Open Graph, Facebook's focus now encompasses the connections between people and things. They’ve developed a way to make transmitting social activity between Facebook and web pages outside of Facebook almost seamless. Websites can use these new tools to personalize users' online experience, making it more social. 

Two key features make this happen:

• Social plugins: Snippets of code that make it easy to add basic connections to Facebook on your website. Examples include the “like” and “recommend” buttons.
• Open Graph API: The computer code that developers can use to further integrate web sites into Facebook's Open Graph. (API means "application programming interface.") 

The Open Graph initiative could change the way that alumni and donors think about our websites and, perhaps, our closed online alumni communities. Suddenly, it’s easy to make your static, traditional website more social.

• With a few simple additional lines of code to your site, users can now “like” or "recommend" your web pages.
  
  
• This activity appears on the users’ profile pages within Facebook.
  
   
   
  Clicking on the links drives users back to your website, not to your pages on Facebook. Up until now, traffic could only come to your website from Facebook if a user used the “share” feature to post a link to your site; now, the link is available to users’ networks as soon as they click the “like” button on your page. The connection is much more effortless.
  
  
• Activity using the social plugins displays on your web pages, and makes it possible for users to engage in activity on Facebook from your web page itself. 
  
  
   
  
  
• If users’ browsers are logged into Facebook, the transition between your pages and Facebook is seamless. The social plugin pulls into your site information about which of the users' Facebook friends have also “liked” that page, and the line between the social web and your website becomes blurred. 

Implications? 7 Things to Know:
It’s still early, but here are initial thoughts about seven important aspects of the Open Graph: 

1. The fact that alumni can now interact with us and with each other from wherever they spend time online is a huge gain. 
   
   
2. Our web pages may need to become more “social media” in feel. Static pages broken up into huge blocks of text (already poor practice) are going to appear even worse. 
   
   
3. There’s a new horizon of possibility for the viral dissemination of your site’s content.
   
   
4. Organizations that have allowed their websites to languish while they poured resources into “walled garden” online communities may have to focus on their own web presence again.
   
   
5. Increasingly-social organizational web pages will pose a challenge to some components of “walled garden” communities. If alumni can interact with their fellow alumni and their alma mater without having to log in to a separate site, they’ll stay in the space where they already spend most of their online time. In real life, people’s networks extend beyond fellow alumni. The artificial constraints of the “walled garden” environment place the institution, not the user, at the center of the experience. And if the Web 2.0 revolution has taught us anything, it’s that users prefer the latter model. True, some vendors have built applications that provide a bridge between the “walled garden” communities and Facebook, but it’s going to be tough to beat the seamlessness of the social plugin experience. 
   
   
6. As our developers become more familiar with the Open Graph API and what it can do, it may be possible for our web pages to reflect the interests of individual alumni. Remember, these tools are a two-way street. Facebook will know which content Facebook users have liked or recommended on your own pages. And in theory, you will know what those users have liked or recommended elsewhere, within Facebook or across the web. If a user has watched clips from the TV show Glee, for instance, your web page could highlight your collegiate a cappella groups when he visits. An institutional web page that reflects a user’s interests and history the same way Amazon.com does is very appealing, and Facebook's tools can make this happen in a way that few of us could ever develop ourselves.
   
   
7. Should we be re-evaluating our strategic plans in light of all this? These tools could make it easier for our websites to be social, dynamic, and customized to our alumni. Alumni expectations of how a website should look and feel are being shaped by the adoption of these tools by other businesses and organizations, so if we don’t adapt, our web presences will look increasingly stodgy in comparison. (Over 50,000 websites began using the new toolkit in the first week of its release.) Only alumni who use Facebook will get the full benefit of the enhanced user experience. Therefore (and this is exactly how Facebook wants it to play out), you could argue that an organization’s strategic plan ought to include getting as many constituents as possible on Facebook. 

But don’t break out the champagne and mobilize the web team quite yet – there’s still the privacy issue. 

I’ll address that in an upcoming post on Alumni Futures.

Separating Personal and Professional Networks Online

I recently read (and enjoyed) the novella The Death of Ivan Ilych. For all his misfortune, Tolstoy's suffering magistrate had it better than we do in at least one respect. He could keep his "professional life discrete from his actual life" (and I like Tolstoy's dichotomy of "professional" and "actual" lives). For regular users of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, separating personal and professional networks can be a desirable, but elusive goal. 

Here's how Tolstoy described it:

Ivan Ilych had practiced this skill for keeping his professional life discrete from his actual life for a long time, and had developed it to such a degree that he sometimes, like a virtuoso, would blend his personal and professional attitudes together, as though for fun. He allowed himself to do so because he felt sure he'd be able to disentangle them when he needed to...

There are some insightful higher education professionals whose regular tweets and blog posts inform and inspire me – but who often deliver scene-by-scene online critiques of their favorite television shows. Other colleagues have added me as a Facebook friend – although I am already connected to them on LinkedIn, and don't think of them as "friends" (even by Facebook standards). This isn't a big deal, but unlike Ivan Ilych, I don't feel like I can "disentangle" these connections as easily as I would like to. 

And so these interactions slip and slide among online communities, blurring the personal and the professional, the Friend and the Fan. Eventually – soon, maybe – tools will evolve to help me put the right information in the right place, easily accessible in the right way. Of course, with periodic pruning of our networks, we can make a little headway ourselves. 

How? 

• By deleting LinkedIn connections whose work we don't know first-hand, or can't otherwise vouch for;
• by unfriending (or hiding updates from) the over-zealous Facebooker who reached out to everyone from Mrs. Leonard's 4th grade homeroom class; and
• by unfollowing Twitter contacts who have mistaken your professional profile for a restaurant review repository.

Of course, many people prefer to mix professional and personal connections and content in online communities. I do link to Alumni Futures from my Facebook profile, and sometimes even tweet about a baseball game (but LinkedIn is for professional use only). Overall, though, I prefer my work and personal profiles online to be more separate than connected. 

Until I can easily assign my contacts to what I consider the "right" place in either network (or in both), I'll just have to live vicariously through the Ivan Ilyches of the Internet age, who can patiently and readily disentangle the two.

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.

A Revised Matrix of Social Network Effects on Alumni Relations

Back in February, web strategist Jeremiah Owyang blogged about "impacts to alumni organizations in a world of social networks." Part of his posting was a matrix that showed these impacts in five different use cases. His excellent summary was designed as a brief analysis of the risks and potential rewards for alumni organizations approaching online networks in various ways.

I found this matrix very useful, and well thought-out. As I read it, I found myself annotating it with additional points based on my own experience. Jeremiah encouraged me to blog a slightly expanded version, and I did. It appears below.

My additions and changes to Jeremiah's original version are written in italics in the matrix accompanying this blog post. I hope you can use it, and I hope you will add missing factors in the comments below, or point out aspects with which you disagree. 

Click image to enlarge:

 
Jeremiah embedded in his matrix a couple of links that are worth listing separately:

• Stanford's tagged directory of alumni-written blogs (opportunity to aggregate alumni voices)
• Jeremiah Owyang's checklist for developing advocacy for your program (ambassador/marketing opportunity)

Here's my original posting about the matrix.

Thanks to Jeremiah for encouraging me to build on his efforts.