alumni futures

Nominate a Colleague for CASE Senior Leadership

CASE (the Council for Advancement and Support of Education) is currently soliciting nominations for senior volunteer leadership positions. These include positions on

• the CASE Board of Trustees,
• the three professional area Commissions (alumni relations, philanthropy, and communications & marketing), and
• the CASE Europe Board of Trustees.

What CASE needs is senior-level advancement officers from all types of institutions and from all segments of the profession.

Take a few minutes to nominate colleagues, co-workers, or other professional contacts for one of these important leadership roles. Self-nominations are appropriate and CASE encourages you to put your own name into consideration.

The nominations deadline is November 28, 2008.

To submit an online nomination, simply go to:

the CASE Call for Nominations page.

Read the background information on the service opportunities and then scroll down to the online form. And tell them Alumni Futures sent you!

Alumni Groups and LinkedIn: 7 Additional Considerations

Last week Kyle James of Wofford College blogged about setting up a LinkedIn Group for alumni. His comments may be instructional to anyone who hasn't yet looked at the Groups function on the LinkedIn site.

Since Kyle mentioned Caltech, I thought I'd comment on our three and a half year experience with LinkedIn Groups at the Caltech Alumni Association. This isn't the "update to the pros and cons of LinkedIn alumni groups" that I mentioned when I commented on his posting, but this may still be of interest.

Growth of Caltech Alumni Group since launch* [click image to view full size]

LinkedIn Groups have been available since 2005, but with limited functionality; see part two of my posting about this from exactly a year ago. The Caltech alumni group launched in May 2005. The chart above shows the growth of our total group membership (in red) over the monthly rate of growth (as measured by new members per month, shown in black). Note that Caltech has about 20,000 contactable alumni.

OK. So what?

1) Verifying alumni status
I think there is more overhead to maintaining a group than Kyle implies in his description. Specifically, you must verify the alumni status of those trying to join your group if you intend the group to be for alumni (and students). If you don't verify alumni or student status, then your group will quickly be overrun with corporate recruiters. At Caltech we allow current and former postdocs to join the Group, as they are also eligible for Alumni Association membership.

2) Working beyond the alumni network
Kyle presents a hypothetical alumnus who uses LinkedIn to "search [for] alumni who either live in Boston or are lawyers and [to] make a connection that is much more likely to contact them back and be helpful..." This makes sense: use the alumni connection to find a contact. But how likely is that contact to be one of the other Wofford alumni?

Not very likely. But that's OK — with only a couple of hundred connections, a Wofford group member can reach millions of potential contacts. With my 290 LinkedIn connections, I have access to more than 3,081,000 individuals within three degrees of me. And just 50 of my 290 direct connections are members of the Caltech Group.

So, there is great potential value in LinkedIn to alumni using the alumni network as the first step to searching an expanded network (that includes many more non-alumni than alumni). You are expanding your resource pool dramatically by searching for connections even 2 degrees away. (Incidentally, as the Caltech group has reached just over 10% of alumni, Kyle's goal of 200 alumni Group members is probably a good initial target for a school of Wofford's size.)

This example shows the strength of weak ties. You may not find a fellow alum who has the experience or knowledge or connections you need, but you will likely find one who knows the person you are seeking.

So the way to get the most out of the LinkedIn network is to work beyond the alumni network. This is one reason why alumni online directories attract such a dismal number of users. The searches suddenly seem depressingly limited — and limiting — in the shadow of massive networking databases like LinkedIn. The number of people who have joined the Caltech group on LinkedIn since 2005 is roughly comparable to the number of alumni who have logged in to the alumni directory on our web site at least one time since 2004.

3) Spreadsheet tracking
Kyle mentioned that "LinkedIn doesn't provide any sort of metrics." I agree there's a lack of reporting from LinkedIn, a black mark against the service. So his idea of tracking via spreadsheet is sensible, and that's how we've kept tabs on the data in the chart above. Groups that have existed for some time can retrieve historical data by exporting the Group membership list as a .csv file and sorting members by date joined.

4) Viral growth...
...nudged along by the web presence Kyle described, plus periodic marketing via publications, Facebook, and e-newsletters, will lead to your Group's steady increase. The spike in our group's membership (May 2006 in the chart) resulted from marketing the alumni Group to people who were already members of LinkedIn but who had not yet joined our official alumni Group. Most people simply weren't aware of it, and our membership doubled almost overnight. Our second year saw the Group grow 55% over year one. The third year saw growth of 34% over year two. In the first quarter of year four we've seen 11% growth.

5) Setting goals
As Kyle says, this can be important. Our stretch goal is simple (and on one level, simplistic): we want LinkedIn to replace our online alumni directory as the tool people use to find the resources they need — inside or outside the alumni network. Having said that, we will probably extend the trend line on this chart and create some marketing ideas and membership targets to increase the slope over the next year or so.

6) Group totals versus LinkedIn totals
Almost 2,300 alumni (more than 10% of all Caltech alumni) are registered in the LinkedIn Caltech Group, and there are dozens of students and postdocs. When Groups launched as a new feature, there were 3 million users on LinkedIn. That number has increased ten times since then, as has our Group membership number. So the rate of our Group's growth since 2005 is in line with the site's overall growth since then. We're keeping up with the public adoption rate for this particular service.

7) Your Group logo and badge
Don't underestimate just how absurdly tiny the Group logo is when it shows up in an alum's LinkedIn profile or a search result. You must make any image, acronym or words as large as you reasonably can in the impossibly tiny 60 x 30 pixel space. Here are three groups' logos side by side. Click the image to see them the actual size they appear on the LinkedIn site:

Can you identify these three alumni groups? Merely resizing an old logo or banner to 60 x 30 pixels will not work. You have to create a legible image designed for this purpose. Too many LinkedIn Groups can't even be identified because of careless planning and design by Group owners.

Enough for now. When the recently added Group Discussions feature has had more time to mature, I'll take a look at its pros and cons right here.

* Chart data is from LinkedIn and Caltech Alumni Association

GoCrossCampus Returns

Nine months ago guest blogger Andrew Gossen from Princeton University told us about "an unusual online student—alumni connection" — a game called GoCrossCampus (GXC). The multiplayer game, based on the popular board game Risk, offered some surprises.

Gossen suggested why GXC was "worth thinking about" for alumni relations. It is, he said:

• an unusual opportunity for alumni and undergraduates to interact;
  

• a powerful driver to inspire alumni to sign up for alumni e-mail forwarding;
  

• a chance to leverage institutional rivalries to engage alumni; and

• an online forum based on affinity that people actually want to use — there were 8,627 people playing the Ivy League version of GXC last December.

GXC has returned to the Ivy League and alumni offices are thinking about it too. 2,645 3,635 3,969 4,350 4,828 players had joined the free game within the first five 12 14 18 days 4 weeks of its restart this past week. I recently received the following Facebook message from my own alma mater's alumni office:

Come join the newest battle of the Ivies and show the League who’s the boss this time! GoCrossCampus is an online adaptation of Risk that pits schools against each other for territorial domination. With enough players and the right strategy, Brown can come out on top...

Join the action at http://gocrosscampus.com/game/ivy (you’ll need your @brown.edu or @alumni.brown.edu address to sign up) and keep up with new plans of attack at Brown’s GoCrossCampus Facebook group...   

See you there!

The message also included a link for activating an alumni forwarding address.

So GXC gives the Brown Alumni Association a chance to push its free alumni forwarding addresses and a reason alumni (like me) might actually want the address (i.e., it's required if you want to play GXC). I signed up to play the game, and to review it as a student-alumni activity (and to win the TV, the stereo system and the Wii that they're giving away).

Meanwhile, Princeton grad Andrew Gossen (who also has a Harvard degree) tells me:

I'm playing again....GXC used my Alumni Futures posting to help persuade Penn and Harvard that they're legit and worthy of promotion in Alumni Association communications — I just saw it featured in my Harvard e-newsletter.

Ironically, Princeton has so far decided not to promote gameplay to alumni. But Andrew and many other Princeton alumni will be playing anyway.

So who knows? Maybe I'll get to see Gossen crossing the Delaware.

See also: GXC's press coverage page

Accountability Trends and Alumni Relations

"Accountability" is a hot topic in education, at least in the United States. For example, the federal government's 2002 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act mandates quantitative standards for schools, with scores based on testing. Legislators who voted the act into law said it would make primary and secondary schools more accountable to the public.

At the heart of accountability is measurement. The so-called NCLB Dashboard of accountability is meant to show whether individual states are reaching the federal government's arbitrary standards. Many feel that the NCLB goals represent an unfunded mandate, others say that the goals are overly simplistic, and still others criticize the metrics for focusing heavily on standardized test results. But even many of NCLB's critics believe that an asset as important as public education will benefit from more accountability of some kind. And the sheer volume of data generated around benchmarking schools' performance is a gold mine for analysts and researchers.

Encouraged by increased scrutiny of public schools, critics of post-secondary education are asking, "Shouldn't we hold colleges and universities to quantitative standards as well? What about assessment? How do we know whether colleges and universities are succeeding?"

Researchers and policy analysts have deployed a variety of metrics in the past to measure college and university effectiveness. Some focus on the long-term monetary benefit to the student, others on learning outcomes or career-preparedness.

However, critics of uniform standards for higher ed say that education is not an assembly line and that students are not widgets that can be manufactured to some arbitrary level of conformity. It's OK, critics say, if we have a general feel for how higher ed is faring; the inputs and outputs are too varied and diverse to submit for standardized scrutiny.

What does this have to do with alumni relations?
There's a parallel between this question ("Should we hold universities accountable in the same way we do primary and secondary education?") and the debate about measuring the effectiveness of alumni programming ("Can we hold alumni relations to numerical goals, as we do with development?').

For a long time, alumni professionals have bemoaned the lack of objective assessment measures for the profession (beyond tracking event attendance). Our fundraising colleagues produce the ubiquitous "progress toward goal" line graphs and "donations by source" pie charts. And recently, we have finally seen efforts meant to help alumni officers gauge the effectiveness of their programs and compare their progress.

As I noted above, those who resist making higher ed accountable say "Learners are not widgets. It's OK if we don't have numerical assessment. Student achievement is too hard to measure with a quantitative value."

So I wonder, what if maybe — just maybe — it's OK if we don't have strict quantitative measurements in alumni relations? The pressure to "prove" our worth is partly an outcome of the accountability trend within advancement itself. If we resisted it, the campus finance office would not know whether we were providing a reasonable "return on investment." But who else would care? And would we be doing a worse job if we didn't measure? Would our institutions — or the alumni — be worse off?

I'm not sure, and I'm not arguing against metrics. But it's worth asking these questions periodically to make sure we're using our time effectively to improve future operations.

Inside HigherEd: Private Colleges and Assessment

Collegiate Learning Assessment Consortium

Chronicle Article on Europe's Example for America [subscription required]

Prior Alumni Futures Benchmarking Discussion

LinkedIn Adds Discussions to Groups

Late last week LinkedIn launched Discussions for Groups. Until now Groups performed limited service, allowing members to message each other directly and allowing organizations (like alumni associations) to display a logo in members' profiles and in search results.

The new Discussions feature allows a Group member to post a discussion topic; other members can then comment. LinkedIn's only other attempt at community-building, the LinkedIn Answers function, is a hit-or-miss affair; many of the so-called questions serve solely as vehicles for users' pre-established opinions, while others ask questions that could easily be answered with Google and some common sense.

There should be more on the way for Groups. According to LinkedIn's Ben Guthrie via the company's corporate blog,

This is the first step in a series of upgrades to the Groups functionality that you will be seeing in the months to come. In addition to discussions, given below are three [sic] more new feature enhancements to LinkedIn Groups:

• Group home page: A private space for your members on LinkedIn.
• Discussion forums: Simple discussion spaces for you and your members.
• Enhanced roster: Searchable list of group members.
• Digest emails: Daily or weekly digests of new discussion topics.

Discussion forums just launched, of course (so it looks like this posting was written a while ago and published without being updated). Also, it's not clear whether the "Group home page" is what currently exists under the Overview tab, or is something yet to come.

Meanwhile there are some bugs to be worked out and some obvious functions missing. Group membership numbers are not displayed accurately, member lists are not sortable (though you can search for name or keyword), and there are discrepancies in the views that Group members at large and group managers can see.

This summer's launch of a searchable directory of Groups on LinkedIn led to an explosion of new (and newly-discovered) Groups, including alumni associations'. But the Discussions functionality needs to advance rapidly to keep up with the expectations and needs of LinkedIn members.

Here are enhancements that I think would be useful (some of these are mentioned in comments on LinkedIn's blog):

• a mouse-over view of the basic profile info for someone requesting to join a group;
• pre-setting a welcome message to send to new Group members;
• simple import for calendar or event information (e.g., professional conferences for industry meetings);
• tagging of Discussion posts, or advanced searchability;
• optional moderation of postings so spam or objectionable content can be intercepted;
• a Discussions widget to embed in other sites (such as blogs or organization homepages), to make content portable.

(They should also fix the system-wide typo in the screen shot shown above.)

So what would you like to see in LinkedIn Discussions for alumni association or campus-wide groups? How are Discussions working for your Groups so far?