alumni futures

Contest: The Alumni Futures Innovation Award

Earlier this month, I announced that Alumni Futures had been recognized with an award. I also mentioned what Katie Konrath did on her creativity and innovation blog, when she won the same award: she gave the prize away.

Now I'm going to do the same thing, and I'm going to do it the same way. It's very simple.

To be considered for the Alumni Futures Innovation Award, click the button below to generate a random word. This will help you start fresh in brainstorming an idea...

Your random word is:

       

(All the words are "hard." Go with the first one you get. Also, the button may not work if you are reading this in an email or newsfeed, so visit the web page to use the button in this posting.)

Now use that word to brainstorm an answer to this challenge:

"Briefly describe one new idea to improve or benefit higher education administration."

Your idea can apply to alumni relations, development, PR, marketing, communications, admissions, career services – or a combination. Or some other specialty. We're flexible.

I'll select a recipient from the submissions to receive the Alumni Futures Innovation Award, and post the idea and winner in a future posting.

Ideally, the winning idea will reflect some of the following characteristics:

• Hasn't yet been thoroughly tried or tested in higher ed administration;
• Challenges standard assumptions and practices in our professions;
• Could be implemented at many kinds of institutions – or better yet, could happen across many or even all institutions.
• Is so cool, so clever or so simple that we won't believe we haven't thought of it.

Deadline:

Submit your random word and your brief idea via email to alumnifutures@gmail.com no later than February 14, 2008. That's two weeks from today!

Don't write a book. A thoughtful paragraph or two is plenty.

The winner will receive prizes worth more than $300:

• Six months of Premium Services from the JibberJobber career site;
• [ADDED!] A download of the CASE webinar Students Today, Alumni Forever: Developing Lifelong Relationships With Our Alumni-in-Residence (presenter Carin Huffman Grinch, Asst. Director of Student Programs & Athletic Events at the University of Missouri (USA) Alumni Association);
• Your choice of any one of these three higher ed books:
  • Advancing Higher Education in Uncertain Times by Larry D. Lauer;
  • Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education by David L. Kirp; or
  • Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More by Derek Bok; and
• A cool custom-designed Innovation Award badge (shown above) to put on your blog, your Facebook profile, your personal web page or anyplace else you dare.

Even if you don't win the prize, this should spur some creative thinking – which is, after all, one goal of Alumni Futures. I'll share some of the non-winning entries in a future posting as well.

Link to Katie Konrath's Contest (which inspired me)

OK, fire away!

Official Content Has Little Appeal for Alumni

Excited that your alumni will get to watch your campaign video online? Don't be too sure that they'll want to.

It's just one data point, but recently Peter Robertson, director of Annual Giving at Fresno State University (California, USA), pointed out something important to a CASE conference audience. When Fresno State hosted a contest (called I Am Fresno State) for student- and alumni-created videos, they showcased the finalists on video-sharing site YouTube. And logically, they decided to have some videos ready and waiting for users who visited the site before the contest videos were uploaded.

The results are telling. When all was said and done, there were five official videos on the site, produced by the campus communications staff. And there were 11 user-generated videos, created by students for the contest. A quick look at the number of times each has been viewed will give you some idea about how Fresno State's audiences are using the site.

As of the end of 2007, the five official videos (which were posted early and therefore even got a head start) had been viewed an average of 237 times each. The user-submitted content had been viewed an average of 1,883 times each. That's right: the unofficial, silly, student-created stuff is about eight times more likely to be watched than the official videos, which have names like Advancing World Class Agriculture, and Helping the Economy Grow.

The contest generated media attention as well, with ABC News and other outlets covering the story. And in selecting their favorite among the 11 finalists, Fresno State's voting audience even managed to take a shot at their more visible State system cousins, the University of California. Check out the winning video below.

One other thought: this is another example of a campus creating and cementing brand community around the school's identity. This kind of "viral investment" now will pay dividends with alumni affinity in the future. Charlie Melichar blogged about this in 2006.

By the way, Michael Stoner's blog recently had an interesting post on the relationship of official content and user trust, plus a link to some research on this whole topic. And Karine Joly's College Web Editor blog talked about a Pew Internet survey on online video (Pew report is available below).

Here are those links and a couple of the Fresno State sites:

Pew Internet's Video Sharing Report [PDF, 96k]

'Marketers out of sync' from mStoner

Fresno State's YouTube site

The Fresno State contest's home page

And the Fresno State Winning Video:

Conference Tracks: Obsolete?

At the recent CASE XV conference I co-presented what was billed as an "alumni relations master class." The title was Online Communities, Social Networks, Blogs and Podcasts. [PDF 4.1MB] Oregon State's Ben Danley and Fresno State's Peter Robertson joined me. There was little time to delve in much depth into the various topics we wanted to cover. But attendees participated fully, the discussions were wide-ranging, and we even ended on time.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Alumni Relations Track. Before the session, we looked at the registration list for the session, and noticed that of the 44 people who pre-registered, only 15 were alumni relations professionals. The rest were primarily from Marketing-Communications and from Development, plus about eight individuals whose titles were less easily classifiable.*

The overall breakdown is shown in the pie chart. [Click the image to enlarge it.]

That 2/3 of the attendees (who all paid an extra fee above conference registration to attend) were from outside of the intended field says something about the effectiveness of labeling sessions by track. This practice made sense back when we worked in relative isolation from each other. Alumni staff claimed to be "friendraisers, not fundraisers," fundraisers thought that the alumni staff "filled fruitcups," and the PR staff did all the writing, editing, design, and production of written materials other than typed invitations.

But now there is a lot of crossover, as shown by the interest from all areas in our session. This is a by-product, in part, of the drive toward "integrated marketing and communication" which most alumni and development staff assume (wrongly) is something that only "the PR people" need to worry about. [Rob Westervelt gave a good summary of integrated marketing on his UBrander blog in 2006.]

In a prior posting, I expressed hope that CASE would organize its Commissions in a more cross-disciplinary way, to reflect their overlapping interests and needs. CASE has indeed adapted the format of the meetings and the ways agendas are handled, to be more interdisciplinary. Now it's time for conference planners, whether on the CASE staff or on volunteer committees (or at non-CASE conferences, for that matter) to worry less about which "track" a topic can be squeezed into. This will free up planners to focus more on the content, and finding the right people to present it. I liked the fact that our session was divided up among presenters with very different professional roles.

The bottom line is that conference organizers do not need to channel attendees into neatly labeled silos called "tracks." Describe content accurately, and outline the level of expertise required to get the most from the session. Then let the attendees make up their own minds about how best to adapt the information to their needs.

* The eight attendees not solely in one of the three traditional disciplines are represented in the green pie slice in the chart above. They included a research strategist, two managers of student recruitment, two external relations executives, a web developer, a database manager, and an assistant head of school.

Connecting Alumni Associations With Young Graduates: Chronicle Discussion

[Updated February 3, 2008: The discussion transcript shows that Williams gave a comprehensive laundry list of possible programs which other institutions can readily use to reach out to young alumni. Some of the specific efforts mentioned include the following (although Penn State isn't necessarily doing all these things):

• Student memberships
• Young alumni trips
• Targeted e-newsletter
• Reunions in different time slots & formats
• Recognition for "high achieving alumni under 35"
• Intellectual/cultural/networking events in regional cities
• Career-related webinars
• Social networking/online community tools
• Online courses/courseware
• Free membership to new grads
• Mentoring
• Youth-oriented design and formatting of communications
• Surveys and focus groups
• Discounts
• Email accounts and/or forwarding
• Relevant content in magazine

This last point is the one that Williams drove home repeatedly, and which has the most overall value: always make your programs and services relevant to what the alumni need.]

_____

The Chronicle of Higher Education is hosting an online discussion with Roger L. Williams, Director of the Penn State University (USA) Alumni Association. Williams will reply to questions and comments about the headline topic (connecting with recent graduates) on Thursday, January 24, at 12 noon, U.S. Eastern standard time. Readers are welcome to post questions and comments now.

Here's the description of the topic:

Alumni associations have found that the new generation of college alumni is among the most difficult to connect with. The alumni groups have spent the last few years figuring out how to remain relevant to graduates who prefer cellphones over home phones, have already created their own online social and professional networks, and job-hop at a dizzying pace. What can associations do to keep their institutions a part of the lives of young alumni?

And here's part of Williams' bio:

Roger L. Williams is director of the Pennsylvania State University Alumni Association, which is among the largest dues-paying alumni associations in the country, with nearly 160,000 members. A graduate of Penn State himself, Mr. Williams has held various posts in higher-education communications, public relations, and marketing for 25 years. Before starting work at Penn State, he was associate vice chancellor for university relations at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. One of Mr. Williams's priorities at Penn State has been creating opportunities for students to get involved with alumni-association programs before they graduate.

The chat is via text on the Chronicle web site; a transcript will be available at the same location once the chat is over. I will plan to circle back to the transcript and see what new ideas and trends are discussed.

Penn State's campus coverage of the online chat

Alumni Networks: Hedgehogs or Foxes?

[Updated June 4, 2008 with story about Verizon moving its social media plans to a Facebook Page]

Last June I read an interesting post on Cem Sertoglu's blog, Sortipreneur. The title of the posting was Mistakes in Proprietary Networks, and although at first it didn't seem too relevant to alumni relations, the more I think about it, the more relevant it becomes.

Cem, co-founder of corporate alumni relations leader SelectMinds, said

...in the early 1990s, the telcos were racing each other in building their proprietary [physical] networks...and the quest to create the dominant network was on, with the "networks' intelligence" positioned as the key differentiator....

Then came the stupidest network of all: the Internet. All it knew was to push IP packets around. There was no intelligence built in to the network. The intelligence resided on the edge.

Cem described the limited utility of "brand community" social networks. People whose only connection to each other is that they have the same cell phone provider (to use Cem's example) are missing something that gives value – and "intelligence" – to networks. (Just two hours before I posted the article you're reading now, blogger Phil Barrett wrote about "the failure of mobile-centric social networks" like Nokia's Mosh.)

Useful networks form when Person A needs something Person B has. A system intelligent enough to allow Person A to find Person B is a useful network. The more people in the network, the higher its potential intelligence becomes - and the more paths there are, on average, between network members.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, alumni networks are closed "brand community" networks. By definition they have a size limit, and therefore have limited total potential intelligence. One way to increase alumni networks' intelligence is to open them in ways that respect the members' school (or corporate) affinity, while providing access to a larger, open network of far-reaching intelligence.

So Cem was right. The internet, as he said, is a "stupid network." But the open social networks at its edge (like LinkedIn, Xing, Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, Viadeo and others) provide intelligence, because they connect people who need to find one another. Our alumni communities do the same thing, but only for extremely limited populations.

An ancient Greek poet named Archilochus, wrote (in a phrase made over-simplistically famous by Sir Isaiah Berlin) that "the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Our alumni communities are smart like the hedgehog. Each one rolls up into a ball to keep out interlopers. Online, an alumni network knows everything its alumni know, but nothing more.

To thrive and grow, alumni networks need the many things the rest of the internet knows. They need us to connect them to the networked world around them.

[Update: Verizon Moving its Branded Social Network to Facebook]

Photo of a hedgehog by David Daniels, used under a Creative Commons license.

European Alumni Relations Training Course

I'm privileged to be joining a team that is delivering a training course for European university administrators. The program is called Alumni Relations from A to Z and it will take place in Budapest, Hungary from March 19 to 21, 2008. It is offered under the auspices of the European Association for International Education (EAIE).

An overview of the program is available on my Upcoming Presentations page. Other faculty are Serge Sych (Central European University, Hungary); Kirsten Williamson (Petrus Communications, France); and Philip Conroy (Mount Ida College, USA).

If you have specific questions about the program, send an email to Serge Sych at Central European University. Meanwhile, be aware that the registration deadline is January 30!

Photo of Széchenyi Chain Bridge, Budapest, by Niall Battson, used under a Creative Commons license.

Privacy Claims Cut Both Ways at UMass-Amherst

[Updated January 16, 2008 with link to UMass alumni discussion boards online.]

The Boston Globe reports that the flagship Amherst campus at the University of Massachuestts (USA) will not provide satellite campuses with contact information for alumni from those campuses.

I wrote about UMass-Amherst and its Association membership problems in October.

What should the central shop do? The Alumni Association claims it's protecting the privacy of alumni who would be "peppered" with multiple fundraising requests. The campuses claim that they are losing their independence to the largest of the system's schools.

The Globe, meanwhile, says that

[the central] alumni association counters that it has proprietary rights to the [alumni] list because its membership constitutes much of the database. The alumni association is independent but receives more than $1 million a year from UMass-Amherst and works closely with its development office.

This is a little confusing. Maybe when they say "membership" they mean "alumni population." Paid membership in the central association is a paltry 3% of addressable alumni.

Also, it's not clear how an association that receives "more than $1 million a year" from the school itself can rightly call itself "independent." Interdependent, maybe?

Online Social Networks: A White Paper

Alumni Futures has a new feature.

On the blog's website, in the left column there is a new link under the heading Additional Information. It's called White Papers.

The first white paper is posted now. It's an update of an article that Caltech's Elizabeth Allen and I wrote for the Higher Ed Blog Conference in 2006. The title is Online Social Networks: A Developing Tool for Alumni Associations – How third-party social and business networking sites benefit alumni associations.

What is a 'white paper'? I found several official definitions, but the shortest, simplest summary I can come up with is:

"A proposal for action on a specific issue."

Alumni Futures White Papers will:

• explore topics that are relevant and interesting;
• cover topics in more depth than a 500 word blog posting allows;
• sometimes be co-authored with colleagues;
• be written to stimulate your thinking on related topics;
• provide additional resources for people who want to learn more;
• appear at least two or three times each year;
• be announced to Alumni Futures Facebook Fans before being announced here.

If you have feedback, leave a comment here on the blog. If you have an idea for something you'd like to work on with me, send me an email.

Alumni Futures Gets the 'You Get It' Award

Recognition is great. So I was very flattered (and gratified) to receive the You Get It Award at the end of December from Jason Alba's JibberJobber blog.

It was a nice way to end 2007 and start 2008!

JibberJobber describes itself this way:

JibberJobber is like a personal Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) for job hunters.  Just as a salesperson would use a CRM system to keep track of their sales leads, JibberJobber helps you keep track of your job search and networking contacts.

I've never met or spoken to Jason, and I have only exchanged two e-mails with him. And since I have not been a reader of his blog (Don Philabaum put it on my radar during December), I checked it out. Good news: Jason writes useful posts and links to excellent content (not just mine!). And his comments and feedback on what other bloggers are doing are insightful.

In checking out some of the previous You Get It awardees, I came across Katie Konrath's blog, getFreshMinds, which I also had not seen before. Katie is on a mission, it seems, to help people think more creatively and to innovate. And she did something cool that I'm going to shamelessly duplicate in the near future.

The You Get It Award includes six months of access to Premium Services on JibberJobber. This prize is transferable, and Katie decided to reward her own readers' creativity by challenging them. She said:

Simple, all you have to do is give me one idea. I'll even tell you how to get it! Your challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to use a Random Word to come up with "fresh ways to improve cars".

(You can read who won and what their word and idea were by following the link at the end of this posting.)

Meanwhile, though, stayed tuned. In an upcoming posting I will challenge readers of Alumni Futures to present one new idea to improve or benefit the institutional advancement profession. That's right, winning an award has sparked me to create yet another award: The Alumni Futures Innovation Award.

The winner will receive the six months of Premium Services from JibberJobber.

Thanks again, JibberJobber.

JibberJobber's Comments About Alumni Futures

The Winner of Katie Konrath's Random Word Challenge

An Idea for Depicting Alumni Engagement

Over at his Intermedia blog, Charlie Melichar has proposed a very interesting approach to displaying alumni engagement metrics: an inverted pyramid. (To me it's not really a pyramid, it's a group of triangles, but that's probably beside the point. Charlie now calls it a pyrangle, which I like.)

Charlie says you can

map individuals or groups based on their participation, drawing lines from disengaged to fully engaged in each area. Are certain class years or eras highly engaged at reunion but not giving financially? Are certain groups of graduates giving generously but not engaging with campus life? This diagram, I think, could help us get to some answers.

His approach has some advantages. Of particular interest to me is that it provides a way to display quantitative information visually in a completely intuitive way. With the inverted pyramid you can, for example, display information in a general, conceptual way. In that case, the idea of engagement is the main point.

You could have the shape and size of each element represent a specific dimension that you're describing quantitatively. For example, you could set goals for alumni participation or awareness of various programs you offer – this would be represented by the top horizontal line, where Charlie has put the category labels. Each slice would represent your progress toward those goals, but each could have its own unit of measurement (attendance, dollars, participation rate, satisfaction, etc.).

Charlie commented that

the triangle allows for a left to right ranking of importance of each facet of engagement, based on an institution's priorities. So, you can not only be working constituents from bottom to top, but also from left to right.

Taking it a little further, the width of each slice is another dimension that could carry quantitative meaning, as is the overall width of the triangle top. You could add horizontal lines to each slice to show internal milestones, or project phases as well.

I'm anything but a wizard with charts and graphs, and it's possible that all this can already be displayed on a line graph or pie chart in a simple, non-busy way. But I imagine someone more organized and more accustomed to the visual display of quantitative information could apply Charlie's "pyrangle of engagement" in a number of interesting ways.

At the very least, by looking at information through a new lens, Charlie is inviting a creative and potentially improved way of finding out if we're succeeding at engaging alumni. In fact, I have an idea about how to use this display to measure something else Charlie has talked about: alumni participation in social network sites. If I can formulate those ideas coherently, I'll post them here.

Meanwhile, if you're interested in visual displays of quantitative information then check out Edward Tufte's web site for publications and one-day seminars.

And Happy New Year.