alumni futures

Second Life and Your Alumni

Here's a trend some people are already tired of hearing about: Second Life.

Michael Stoner blogged about Second Life the other day and gave the latest "virtual world" craze a real life thumbs down as an investment option for over-burdened alumni offices. In a post titled Second Thoughts on Second Life, Michael commented on its potential value to higher ed advancement:

...much of the current wave of activity in Second Life is based on the media hype around it....I think advancement offices and recruiters have more important things to do than think about Second Life right now....While a lot of people have heard about Second Life and visit it to find out what it’s all about, the number who return - and return often - is much, much smaller.

His summary?

For the moment, I’d follow what’s happening in this virtual world while keeping well-grounded IRL [in real life].

I agree. But I can easily picture a dedicated and enthusiastic group of alumni volunteers working to create an institutional presence for their alma mater in Second Life. Here are some resources for those pondering this:

• Three non-profits describe their use of Second Life
  
• TechSoup's FAQ for non-profits in Second Life
  
• A simple list of organizations present in Second Life

Meanwhile, check out SL so you know what all the buzz is about, canvass your most likely alumni volunteers for ideas and approaches, then upgrade your graphics card and sit back and wait for the next virtual world...it's right around the corner anyway.

Corporate Blog for LinkedIn

Two weeks ago I wrote about online business networks for alumni, and made specific reference to LinkedIn.com. Now LinkedIn has hired corporate blogger Mario Sundar to write, well, a corporate blog.

The purpose, says Mario, is

to not only help you leverage LinkedIn more effectively but also to provide you a sounding board for all things LinkedIn. So, if you’re looking for a singular information source on LinkedIn with regular updates on upcoming product features, tips-and-tricks, and events or if you’d just like to hear about all the fun stuff associated with working at LinkedIn, you have reached the right place.

Personally, I am less interested in whether it's fun to work at LinkedIn and more interested in upcoming features and potential enhancements. And I'm most interested in the LinkedIn for Groups functionality. I still plan to write about the pros and cons of using the Groups on the site for alumni association business, but in the meantime, let's hope there is information forthcoming about LinkedIn's plans for the short- and long-term:

Visit the LinkedIn Blog.

New Site: Higher Ed Experts

 

Karine Joly is the brains behind CollegeWebEditor.com, a tremendous resource for professionals interested in best practices on higher ed web sites. In a new blog posting on her site she announced the launch of an ambitious and promising effort, HigherEdExperts.com.

Karine says the purpose of HigherEdExperts.com is to provide

professional development and social networking online opportunities to higher ed professionals working in Web, marketing, PR and admissions.

I imagine that alumni association web masters will not be turned away. Karine continues:

Higher Ed Experts will provide registered users with news, resources and social networking components for free and webinars for a fee.

She's also recruiting speakers for her online seminars and lists the top five benefits for presenters:

1. Get recognized as the higher ed expert you are.
2. Promote your institution’s best practices to a larger professional audience.
3. Keep your travel budget and your time away from your office to attend your favorite conferences.
4. Get the help and tools to shape and deliver a great online presentation.
5. Earn 20% of all paid fees for your webinar session. If you prefer, your commission can even be donated to your institution’s annual fund or capital campaign on your behalf.

Meanwhile I've added a link to HEE to the blogroll here at Alumni Futures. It looks promising and we wish Karine good luck with her new effort.

An Alumni Innovation Institute?

The Los Angeles Times carried a story recently about the University of Southern California's "innovation institute," which is expanding beyond technical and scientific fields.

The Stevens Institute, as it is known, will be

a university-wide, centralized hub for nurturing inventions as well as inventors. Traditionally, schools tend to focus on inventions and ideas connected to science and technology and ignore others, but officials said all disciplines must be included for maximum benefit to the public's quality of life. Innovative ideas could also include nonprofit organizations that aid a community.

Fair enough. Sounds like a slight twist on some combination of tech transfer and community development, or some other aspect of town-gown relations. But this part jumped out at me:

In the spirit of innovation, Provost C.L. Max Nikias also announced he wants to develop in the next year a minor in innovation for all doctoral students, regardless of their discipline. "I want innovation to be the signature for the USC PhD diploma," Nikias said.

Then exposure to concepts surrounding innovation won't just be a hallmark of USC's students and faculty - it will theoretically be a characteristic of its alumni as well. If that's true (and if you believe that aspects of innovation can be taught), then an ambitious alumni association could certainly invent an Alumni Innovation Institute. This would bring together alumni with ideas that require the infrastructure, brainpower and resources available on a university campus.

At the very least, USC and its sure-to-appear copycats should reach out to alumni. Why? Alumni bring many needed attributes to the effort:

• Experience with the transition from idealistic young student to older, wiser and more seasoned alumnus;
• Hands on expertise in moving ideas from the creative stage to the market;
• Intellectual property and start-up knowledge plus leadership and experience in collaborative projects;
• A powerful network of well-placed individuals in the public and private sector outside the campus.

So look around for that sign on a campus near you:

Volunteers needed! Entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, researchers, and project managers. Alumni welcome, start today!

Click here to check out USC Stevens on the web.

Virginia Tech Tragedy

Although colleges and universities are all different from one another, there is such a thing as the community of higher education.

With that in mind, and in light of the news today of at least 30 reported shooting deaths on the campus of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, our thoughts go out to the entire campus and alumni community there.

Social Networks and Development Research

Two days ago I talked about online business networks. Here's a look at one aspect of social and business networks that alumni relations staff may not have thought about. (I'll explore many more aspects in the future, but those of you reading this on mStonerblog.com will have to surf to Alumni Futures to read them - with this posting, my enjoyable month of guest blogging for Michael comes to an end).

Next month the California Advancement Researchers Association is hosting its Spring Seminar Day here at Caltech.  (CARA is a regional segment of the Association of Professional Researchers for Advancement). We have zero contact with the Development Research staff's professional organizations, so we were pleasantly surprised in the alumni office to receive an invitation to speak to the group's May meeting.

According to Kimberly Ordunio, Caltech's manager of development research, one topic the group wants the alumni office to help them explore is "the potential for social networking sites as research tools." We spend a lot of time thinking about the role of social networks in alumni relations, so it's interesting to us that our colleagues in research are thinking along related lines.

I asked Kimberly how she and other development research professionals use online networking sites for their work, and she said:

I've used business networking sites such as LinkedIn as a tool for prospect identification; to try to find lost alumni; and sporadically as an added resource while researching individuals, especially when I've hit dead ends with standard resources. I'm sure many of my colleagues have done the same. But I have yet to use these resources in what I would call a regular or systematic fashion. Social and business networking sites have a lot of potential - especially for uncovering connections between constituents. But there are definite pros and cons to using these sites as a resource.

Some potential negatives? For starters, Kimberly cites the following:

• Information found on most sites is self-reported and may be inflated and/or inaccurate.
• Independently verifying this info is not always easy, especially with private company affiliations. (Kimberly adds a "self-reported" disclaimer to this info in a research profile.)
• There are ethical and legal questions surrounding the use of social networking sites specifically for identifying potential donors. For example, Facebook users agree not to use the information from its site for "any...form of solicitation."

Meanwhile, I wonder if enterprising alumni shops are already partnering with research for this particular purpose? Information submitted to your online community is likely ending up in your development database. Does that conform to the promises you make to alumni when they share the info in the first place? Check your online community privacy policy just in case...

You do have a privacy policy, right?

Online Business Networks for Alumni

Have you heard enough about "the MySpace generation"? Tired of the talk about "social networks" on the internet? Don't know Friendster from Facebook? There are reasons for all the buzz, but if we tried to cover all the aspects that relate to alumni relations we'd never get to the end of it. Instead I want to talk about a narrower segment of internet groups: online business networks.

Business networking is different from social networking. Social network sites allow you to share personal information and to view and connect with your friends and their friends. Business networks showcase your professional expertise while connecting you to your professional contacts' own networks.

Alumni associations already have online directories, many of which have profile systems that do some of the same things business networking sites do. So why bother with commercial business networks that include millions of people who aren't your alumni? Because:

• your alumni are using those sites more than they use yours;
• these networks are vast in comparison to your alumni population;
• they include densely interwoven connections among alumni and others;
• their functionality differs from your alumni web site's functionality.

Some alumni associations are creating groups on LinkedIn, perhaps the most populated business networking site. A colleague and I posted a "think piece" in the 2006 Higher Education Blog Conference, exploring the role of third-party business networks in the alumni relations toolbox. I think our observations remain relevant today. Read it for a structured exploration of some basic questions, including:

• Do alumni networks even exist?
• Are commercial networking sites a threat to alumni associations?
• What makes alumni-to-alumni interactions unique?
• Can associations benefit from connecting alumni with non-alumni?
• How might alumni professionals collaborate with commercial sites?

Meanwhile LinkedIn has been plagued with growing pains, almost doubling its membership in the last twelve months. And its customer service has suffered. With about ten million users as of this writing, LinkedIn is pedaling fast to catch up with customer expectations and it remains to be seen how that will play out. There are many independent discussion groups for LinkedIn users as well as a couple of blogs that focus on the site's ups and downs.

In an upcoming post I'll talk about the potential advantages and some caveats for organizations thinking of creating alumni groups on LinkedIn, as well as some lessons our office has learned in the 22 months we've run our alumni group there. For homework, you might want to read our Higher Ed BlogCon posting and then check out the following sites related to online business networking.

LinkedIn.com's "About" page

Scott Allen's LinkedIntelligence blog

XING, an online business networking site popular outside the U.S.

The Virtual Handshake Blog, a useful resource guide

Business Week piece on corporate uses of online networking sites

Alumni Relations Communities of Practice (CoPs)

I have conditioned my boss to ask, "what is the experience of the other PCUAD members on this?"

An alumni executive in the Association of Private College & University Alumni Directors (PCUAD) sent this to me in response to my query about the value of "communities of practice" (CoPs). For decades the primary organization for alumni professionals has been CASE: the Council for Advancement and Support of Education in Washington, DC. CASE represents advancement in its broad sense: alumni, development, and communications professionals in higher education and independent secondary schools.

Meanwhile, alumni professionals are investing time and effort in smaller communities of practice, groups of similar institutions with whom it makes sense to benchmark and to share ideas. The groups' acronyms are a Scrabble player's dream...PCUAD, SCICAP, NEAR, SCAD and more (the full names of these groups are listed at the end of this posting). While CoPs like these have existed for a long time, lately they seem to be picking up steam.

CASE's strongest suit may be its scale: the sheer number of members and participating institutions represents a tremendous wealth of experience and expertise. Furthermore, CASE advocates on our behalf when there are legislative or policy issues that affect support for higher education.

But the CoPs are positioned to take advantage of their members' unique characteristics. In an upcoming issue of Currents magazine, RIT's executive director of alumni relations Kelly Redder writes about one CoP's contribution to its members' effectiveness: benchmarking among like institutions. In an upcoming post on Alumni Futures I'll highlight Kelly's comments and try to spur some thinking about the value of CoPs for your own work.

• How will CoPs influence CASE's role in the future?
• Might CASE become a hub for functional CoPs, instead of an expansive core for the profession?

While CASE remains dominant as the umbrella, CoPs seem to grow in number, sophistication and specialization. CoPs are capable of feeding innovation and improvements in practice to CASE, and it will be CASE's job in that instance to spread the word through the professions.

Alphabet Soup - A few Communities of Practice:
PCUAD: Association of Private College & University Alumni Directors
NEAR: North East Alumni Relations
SCAD: Small College Alumni Directors
SCICAP: Southern California Independent College Alumni Programs

(There are numerous other groups organized by region, athletic conference and institutional type as well. Tell us about the ones you belong to by leaving a comment.)

Should Alumni Associations Be Blogging?

Over at Blogging for Business, author and blogger Ted Demopoulos asked "why aren't more alumni associations blogging?" Ted's primary point is that "blogs are great ways to build community." He suggested these ways to get started with alumni relations blogging:

• a group blog, where several bloggers each blog occasionally,
• student-written blogs, and
• hosting a list of alumni blogs.

In a linked podcast interview, Ted says that "alumni web sites don't work as well as they used to." Although I hope he's the last person to mention alumni associations in the same sentence as Enron and Tyco (why not throw in WorldCom?), his point is that official-sounding organizational web sites have less appeal than they used to, compared with informal, conversational sites such as blogs. (I wrote in an earlier post that alumni web sites would get more traffic if organizations and websurfers used RSS feeds to syndicate and to read dynamic web pages.)

Meanwhile, what problem will you solve by creating an alumni relations blog? As with all alumni programs and services the real question to answer is "what do your alumni need?"

Here's an idea for someone daring: Continue providing the same kind of information you already offer online, but use a blogging format instead of the static informational pages you have now. For example, which calendar item sounds more interesting?

This one?

March 28, Noon to 2 pm
Admitted Students Reception: Detroit Area
Organizer: Alumni Association
Contact: [email protected]
Description: Reception for admitted students.
Location: The home of Jayne Mayne '88, 100 Main Avenue, Oak, MI 48000
RSVP Info: [email protected]

Or this one?

It's that time of year - top high school seniors have their envelope from State U - either the fat envelope (good!), or the thin one (sorry!). Up near the Motor City auto industry exec Jayne Mayne '88 hosts the fat-envelope crowd at her hip downtown loft next Sunday (3/28) from noon to 2:00. Want to meet the admits and some other alumni? Shoot a note to [email protected] and let us know how many are coming and we'll send directions and get you on the RSVP list. (Lucky for you, we're like THIS with Jayne). See you there!

You get the idea. Give it a shot...I dare you.