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.

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.

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.

White Paper: Alumni Networks and Twitter - An Update

Today I'm excited to announce the publication of a new white paper, co-authored with Elizabeth Allen. The paper is titled Alumni Networks and Twitter: An Update. It's a quick look back at changes since our January 2009 paper, which examined Twitter's potential to influence alumni relations and higher education advancement.

We repeated the non-scientific survey on Twitter awareness and usage in alumni relations, so there is now basic comparative data to show changes in Twitter's role in our professions. This year we also added questions about Twitter Lists to the survey.

To download the paper (PDF format), click on the link below and the document will be downloaded to your computer.

Download Alumni Networks and Twitter: An Update [713kb PDF]

Leave comments about the white paper below this posting. To notify your own Twitter followers about the white paper, click this link: 

Tweet This White Paper

Or use the "Tweet this White Paper" button on the second page of the PDF. 

Thanks for reading; we hope you find it useful!

Social Networks' Impact on Alumni Associations: Jeremiah Owyang

Update: I updated and revised the matrix somewhat, and blogged about it here:

A Revised Matrix of Social Network Effects on Alumni Relations 

***

This morning I was lucky enough to hear Altimeter Group's analyst and consultant Jeremiah Owyang address the Council of Alumni Association Executives (CAAE) on "Social Marketing and Research Strategy" for alumni organizations. I have quoted Owyang here on occasion and it was great to have a chance to discuss directly his ideas for alumni groups using social technologies.

Every alumni professional should read the blog post that Jeremiah wrote to accompany his presentation:

Matrix: Impacts to Alumni Organizations in a World of Social Networks

His comments are self-explanatory, but the reader comments are illuminating as well. And be sure to read the five use cases in the matrix, which shows a simple snapshot of the risks and rewards of various approaches.

I'll post a follow up article here soon, discussing some of Owyang's specific comments about the opportunities available to alumni organizations connecting with alumni where they live online. 

LinkedIn for Alumni Professionals at Technical Institutions

Many of us use LinkedIn to help alumni activate their networks for professional advancement. But do you use LinkedIn for your own benefit? LinkedIn has a Groups function which, though far from perfect, can be useful in many cases.

There is a CASE (Council for Advancement and Support of Education) Group on LinkedIn, and there are also a few subgroups. As of this writing, they include

• Independent Schools
  
• CASE District II
  
• Alumni Volunteers in India
  

and

• Alumni Professionals in Technical and Engineering Institutions.
  

I suggested this last group as one that would appeal to those of us whose alumni audience is heavily weighted toward engineers, scientists and other research professions. If this describes your own institution then check out the subgroup and post discussion items to share program ideas and to ask questions. Basic LinkedIn membership is free for individuals.