alumni futures

Some Year End Numbers for 2008 (and More)

As the year winds down, I thank readers of Alumni Futures — anyone who read even a single posting, and especially those who left a comment, became a Fan on Facebook (or added me to their blog network there), and who began following Alumni Futures on Twitter.

How many people stop by this site? [These numbers were updated on 31 December, 2008]

• There are 803 822 subscribers to Alumni Futures. 185 215 of you are Fans on Facebook, and 41 76 are following on Twitter.

• Since late July 2008 (when the visitor counter reset itself as intended), Alumni Futures has seen 10,349 10,905 visitors from 119 countries.

• 96% of you came here from just six countries. Here's a chart showing those countries (and the other 4%). Click image to view larger version:

Of course, this doesn't include people who read the postings via email or RSS feed – just people who actually come to the web site.

How did readers find Alumni Futures in 2008?

Since January...

47%    via Search engines (mostly Google, of course, although 7 of you are still using AltaVista!)
26%    Direct traffic (e.g., clicking a link to here from an emailed posting)
26%    via Referring sites (somebody who linked to my site)

Top referring sites include BlogHighEd, CASE, LinkedIntelligence, and Facebook (see links above).

What was the most-viewed content?

• The Recent Presentations page
• The Definition of the word "Alumni"
• The group of items tagged "Social Networking"
• Alumni Association Mission Statements

If your Association's Mission Statement isn't on that list, send it to me and I'll add it.

It's been a great year. Before December is over Alumni Futures will see its 60,000th lifetime page view [updated: 60,504th]. That's an average of almost 90 per day since I began blogging in February of 2007. I'm looking forward to 2009.

Happy New Year. See you in January.

Campus Presidents & the Economy: Alumni Communications

With the hard economic times headlining the news pages and broadcasts each day, campus CEOs are sending a variety of messages to their campuses, to alumni and to donors.

• President Ruth Simmons wrote a screen and a half about Brown University's steps to address budget difficulty, citing "the strength, integrity, and character of the Brown community."
• University of Virginia leader John T. Casteen III wrote a very long message, requiring 1,700 words (more than a full day's output for participants in National Novel Writing Month).
• Penn State University leader Graham Spanier sent a lengthy kind of Frequently Asked Questions list, with seven questions and answers.

Among the many others addressing these issues are Lafayette College president Daniel Weiss, Bowdoin College president Larry Mills and Duke University president Richard Brodhead.

Over at College Web Editor, Karine Joly wrote about Wesleyan University's Securing the Future site, which has included a video update from school president Michael S. Roth. President Roth is noteworthy for his own presidential blog, Roth on Wesleyan.

Meanwhile, the Association of American Universities' Public Affairs Network circulated a preliminary compilation of some members' presidential messages in mid-November:

To communicate to the public how our universities are coping with the economic crisis in such areas as financial aid, budget cuts, and capital projects...AAU would like to post on our website the letters and other communications that presidents and chancellors or other university officials have issued on this subject over the past several weeks...

Here are a few:

• Cornell University
• Harvard University
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
• Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
• University of Kansas
• University of Michigan
• University of California (statewide system) [48kb PDF]
• Washington University in St. Louis
• University of Pennsylvania
• Emory University

These kinds of messages will continue on for months (and, likely, for years) to come. It is a graduate thesis waiting to be written: how campus CEOs communicated with constituents in these difficult times. While there are basic elements that they all share, are there lessons to be learned from examining the differences among them? And how do we know if they are accomplishing something?

Finally, here is a seven-minute video from the Chronicle of Higher Education, where the presidents of four private US institutions (Ursinus College; College of St. Benedict; Birmingham Southern College; and Wittenberg University) discuss how the economy is affecting their campuses, what they're doing about it, and how they're communicating.

Let's hope the coming year is kinder to higher ed than appears likely as of now. I'll add one more posting in a few days, before taking a break for the holidays.

Photo of money by Andy Shaindlin

Place-Based Media: a New Alumni Experience

What if alumni could return to campus and view virtual pictures and signs; could experience spoken stories and written memories of other alumni, students and faculty?

What if students could learn about campus history and personalities the same way, and all they needed to view and hear these stories was a PDA or a cell phone?

A few years ago, during a cross-country flight, I looked out at the landscape below and thought about how cool it would be if someone invented an interactive overlay for the window, like a heads-up display. It could tell you the name of that river, the town in the distance, the height of that peak, and even the history of the places you were flying over.

Now something like this is within reach, with prototypes being created, deployed and tested.

Dean Terry and others are working on it. Dean is the director of the new Emerging Media area at the University of Texas – Dallas. He's also director of Mobile Lab & the Online Worlds Lab. He thinks and writes about mobile media, virtual worlds, social networks, and more. He's also a film-maker, and he teaches.

Dean recently gave a talk titled Conversations in Place – Research, Collaboration and Art in the Emerging Mobile Space. A core project Dean is driving revolves around what he calls a "virtual visual layer of place-sensitive data" or "place-based media."

"When you're on the web," he points out, "it doesn't matter where you are physically." So something local, something geographic is missing from our web experience. We do create virtual "places" online (such as Second Life). But, he asks, why not turn that paradigm on its head and add virtual content to real places?

Mobile devices, he says...

...can be context sensitive so that where you are not only matters, but is a primary driver of interaction and use of the device. We can create a kind of "augmented reality" by delivering information about place. Hold your device up and view the data in real time on the screen, or hear a recorded message delivered to the spot where you're standing.

Now picture a campus landscape like the one outside your office, but silently and virtually augmented by content from alumni, faculty and students.

Dean's group is working on an application for iPhone called Placethings. It's still not quite in beta, but it's not too early to think about its potential for higher ed advancement or instruction.

In his talk, Dean also mentioned that the legal, political and ethical implications of this technology are potentially enormous: would you like it if your neighbor hung a virtual sign on your house that said "The person who lives here is a jerk"?

These "annotated experiences" raise many complex issues: social filtering, community standards, and the question, "how much information is too much?" It's all part of the world beyond Web 2.0. And it's coming, with or without our participation. But if we engage in the discussions and planning, and anticipate the benefits and potential pitfalls, we'll be positioned to evaluate these tools for our constituents' benefit.

Can you go outside the box and suggest alumni relations, admissions, development or communications uses for a technology like this on your campus, at events, or elsewhere in higher ed? Leave a comment.

Think this is going too far, or that it represents a risk? Leave a comment.

And if you're interested in hanging out with the people making these things happen, check out the Where 2.0 Conference in San Jose, California:

Where 2.0 Conference 2009

Photo of Where 2.0 attendee using analog recording device, copyright James Duncan Davidson.

Features or Benefits? What the Alumni Tribe Wants

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that alumni don't want the features of social networking sites – they want the benefits of connecting with other people.

This week I was going over the notes I took during the excellent annual meeting of the Canadian Council for the Advancement of Education (CCAE), last summer. One of the presenters was Stanford's Jerold Pearson, Director of Market Research for their alumni association. Jerold said the same thing, and gave a simple example to clarify the point.

When you're promoting your association's programs or services, focus on the benefits, not the features. In a car, "a powerful engine" is a feature. But "speed and acceleration" are the benefits. So, a LinkedIn alumni group is a feature, but jobs and information are the benefits.

It sounds simple when you hear it, but it's surprisingly easy to forget this difference.

And on a related note, this same topic surfaced this week as I read blogging star Seth Godin's posting on "tribe management," along with the slim book that amplifies his arguments. He says, in part,

...what people really want is the ability to connect to each other, not to companies. So the permission is used to build a tribe, to build people who want to hear from the company because it helps them connect, it helps them find each other, it gives them a story to tell and something to talk about.

Get it? In our version of Godin's scenario the institution – and its alumni association – are "the company."

And the alumni are the tribe.

...what people really want is the ability to connect to each other, not to companies. So the permission is used to build a tribe, to build people who want to hear from the company because it helps them connect, it helps them find each other, it gives them a story to tell and something to talk about.

Get it? In our version of Godin's scenario the institution – and its alumni association – are "the company."

And the alumni are the tribe.