Back in 1998 CASE Currents magazine published an article titled What's That Up Ahead? Alumni directors predict trends and challenges that will affect the alumni profession. The idea was to get alumni directors to look ten years ahead. Nancy Osgood of Pomona College (California, USA) brought this to the attention of attendees at a recent conference, and I dredged up the full article to see how well the bold prognosticators had fared.
The predictions are too numerous to evaluate one by one, so I chose some that were specific enough to revisit and evaluate:
Jim Boon of the University of Texas - Austin said that alumni relations
...will become even more professional...And the traditional requirement that alumni directors be graduates of the institutions they serve will be less important.
This one is true. It's more important, in general, that you understand the professional components and competencies of the field. Familiarity with campus traditions and history is very valuable, but there's no substitute for experience and effectiveness in basic alumni relations practice.
Richard Boseman at Xavier University (Ohio, USA) said we would
...have to work harder to maintain interest in alumni chapters. Thanks to computers, cars, and HBO, people have more things to entertain them. And because our cities are so spread out, people are less willing to fight traffic for a chapter meeting.
That's right on the mark. Computers are over-run with social networking and video game distractions; cars have DVD players and built-in MP3 players; and as for HBO, cable television has been surpassed by satellite, and high definition now rules the tube. And where I live you can get not one, but seven different HBO channels. Did we mention iTunes, or Amazon Unboxed? Netflix (by mail) seems positively prehistoric.
Karen Hansen of St. Olaf College (Minnesota, USA) said that
...technology will continue to help us build new relationships. For example, at an alumni event in Los Angeles, an alumnus approached me and said, "You don't know me by face but you know my name. I'm David from the alumni listserv." Because we had communicated first by e-mail, we had the beginning of a relationship that was enhanced by meeting and talking in person.
Correct. In a recent post I described Travelocity's Terry Jones' comments on "virtual customer relationships."
And wise Bill Evitts, then of the State University of New York at Buffalo (now the University at Buffalo) said that
...networking and career services will become the staples of our profession. But if we're not careful, we'll turn into discount warehouses that offer a grab bag of services without meaning or purpose. As our work becomes more market driven and less nostalgic, we'll have to remain focused on our vision—to foster interaction between alumni and the institution.
Let's review this one a little more closely.
Bill was right: professional advancement, career services, continuing education, and alumni networking all have grown in prominence. And the key to remaining relevant is, as Bill suggested, delivering content that is unique to our particular institution, while trying to generate meaningful ways for alumni and the institution to interact.
London (UK) School of Economics alumni director Regina Simpson said that the
Alumni Support Index, which CASE's Commission on Alumni Relations has been developing, will go a long way in helping alumni directors evaluate their operations, benchmark against other programs and study their performance over time.
Not quite. By the time I joined the Commission, about six years later, the Support Index had long-since been scrapped. However, CASE is working on another tool which, if widely used, will provide the benchmarking capability Regina hoped for ten years ago. (More about that in a future posting).
I'll review a few more predictions and their outcomes soon. So far, though, I think our predictors did a pretty good job.
Next time we'll see what our experts said about how alumni directors can prove their value, and "prepare for changes down the road."
