alumni futures

Are You Boring?

[Updated 24 February 2009: Jeremiah Owyang in 2007 on the irrelevance of traditional corporate web sites.]

In past postings I have quoted Seth Godin and I do so again here. He has a knack for expressing simple ideas that are broadly relevant.

In January Godin told me I was boring. Well, not me. Us. He wrote:

If people aren't discussing your products, your services, your cause, your movement or your career, there's a reason. The reason is that you're boring...You have boring pricing...a boring location...boring products....That boring staff?...

Published during the week of President Obama's inauguration, a week of the remarkable, Godin's call is for organizations and institutions to strive to be remarkable as well. But he cautions:

You don't get unboring for free. Remarkable costs time and money and effort, but most of all, remarkable costs a willingness to be wrong.

In other words, you can try to ensure moderate success and good-enough performance, by doing what you know you need to do to get by. But to excel you need to risk messing up and trying things that may well fail – but that, if they succeed, will propel you further than you've gone before.

Does your audience honestly think you're interesting? Relevant? Are you willing to be wrong? Is it worth risking a "mistake," in order to achieve something remarkable?

Leave a comment and tell others what you're doing (or what you see others doing, inside higher ed or in other sectors) to avoid boring the customers and to achieve the remarkable in this challenging, remarkable year.

HERS Bryn Mawr Summer Institute

As I did a year ago, I'm letting readers know that it's time submit your application to the HERS Bryn Mawr Summer Institute, for women administrators in higher education.

The application deadline is March 2, 2009. Once again the program takes place on the campus of Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania (USA).

The letter from president and executive director Judith S. White says, in part,

This year's HERS Bryn Mawr Summer Institute will feature a special focus on Women Leaders Leveraging Responses for Institutional Renewal. The Summer Institute, held on the Bryn Mawr College campus, June 20 to July 15, 2009, will offer 60 participants the opportunity to bring a Campus Leadership Project to develop with HERS Core Faculty and 30 Senior Officers serving as presenters and advisors. For a PDF of the Summer Institute announcement, please click here.

Once again, this is not a conference – it's a 25-day leadership training institute of the highest caliber. And it's a scarcer resource this year, as enrollment will be capped at just 60, compared with last year's 75 participants.

More information is available at www.hersnet.org, or call Judith White directly at 1+303/871-6866. Tell her you heard it here!

(And for the record, HERS stands for Higher Education Resource Services.)

Conference: Institute for Senior Alumni Relations Professionals

Next on the list of professional development opportunities is the CASE Institute for Senior Alumni Relations Professionals. It takes place April 19 to 21, 2009 in Rancho Mirage, California (USA) near Palm Springs. This is a little more than a two hour drive from Los Angeles.

The Institute promises attendees "hands-on learning aimed at senior level professionals in alumni relations."

From noon on Sunday until lunchtime on Tuesday, experienced presenters will challenge Institute participants to discover:

• Creative insight into the changing landscape of alumni relations
• Strategies for increasing understanding of your program among campus leaders
• Approaches to handling the difficult economic situation around us
• Best practices to recruit, train, and retain staff and volunteer leaders
• Insights into market research, benchmarking and collaboration

The program and schedule are available online in full detail. I'll be presenting an update on the work of the CASE Commission on Alumni Relations, as well as the following session:

Notions of Community: Expectations and Trends in Alumni Outreach
Can online interaction possibly replace traditional, face-to-face relationships with our constituents? Can so-called “new media” — Web 2.0 or other online channels — counter looming budget and staff cuts? What can we realistically expect from electronic communications and the Internet? A few simple principles can help guide our strategic approach to building community online and to keeping our institutions visible and relevant to alumni and donors.

Presenters include:

• Sherri Schmidt (Chair), Associate Executive Director, North Dakota State University
• Barbara Dick, Executive Director, Alumni Affairs, University of Toronto (Canada)
• Peter Rooney, Vice President, Development and Alumni Relations, Oglethorpe University
• Jeff Todd, Executive Director, Oregon State University Alumni Association
• Andy Shaindlin, Executive Director, Caltech Alumni Association
• Guest keynote: author Jason Ryan Dorsey

See you there.

Full Faculty Bios

Conference Home Page

Hotel: Westin Mission Hills Resort & Spa

This program is approved for CFRE accreditation.

Conference: The Chronicle Technology Forum (and Cherry Blossoms)

It's conference registration season! In this and upcoming posts, I'll list professional development opportunities that I personally think will be worthwhile for higher ed professionals in 2009 (even in this time of reduced budgets). I'm a presenter in at least two of them, including this one:

The Chronicle of Higher Education is hosting its second Technology Forum on April 5 – 7, 2009 in Arlington, Virginia (USA), just a couple of miles from Washington, DC. Among the topics covered:

• How can you use technology to save money in a tight economy?
• How can technology strengthen your relations with faculty, administrators, students, alumni, donors, and parents?
• How much should you invest in IT, and what should you spend it on?

The Forum web site also points out that

• this year's shorter program means less time away from the office;
• they have capped the number of attendees to allow for a more intimate conference experience;
• networking time to meet colleagues has increased; and
• the conference is just 5 minutes from DCA (Washington Reagan Airport).

My portion of the program is as a panelist in this session:

From Eager Applicant to Generous Graduate: Managing the Student Life Cycle
Technology is reshaping college admissions, course-management systems are making it possible to detect students in academic trouble before it gets too deep, and development offices are creating social networks that energize alumni giving. But not every high-tech strategy pays off for colleges. This session will highlight expensive pitfalls as well as rewarding opportunities.

Moderator:
Michael Zastrocky, former managing vice president, education research leader, and research director for academic strategies, Gartner Inc.

Panelists:

• Stephanie Balmer, dean of admissions and financial aid, Dickinson College
• John Campbell, associate vice president for information technology, Purdue University
• Cole W. Camplese, director, Education Technology Services, Pennsylvania State University at University Park
• Andrew Shaindin, executive director, Caltech Alumni Association

And April 5 – 7 sounds like a nice time to visit Washington, DC — the popular National Cherry Blossom Festival is taking place at the same time as the Forum.

List of Speakers & Panelists

Full Conference Program

Photo of cherry blossoms and Jefferson Memorial by Michael Foley under Creative Commons.

A New Resource: Impact Alumni

After two years of Alumni Futures as the only ongoing blog about alumni relations, things might be changing. Friend and colleague Paul Clifford of East Carolina University has launched Impact Alumni, a forum for discussing "issues that impact the profession of alumni relations." What's new is that Paul is podcasting his ideas – along with the ideas of other thinkers and practitioners.

Paul's first effort features an informative conversation with George Dorfman, Associate Director at the Duke University Alumni Association. And the Impact Alumni site not only has links for subscribing to future podcasts, but also features links to Paul's Facebook fan page and his Twitter homepage. And he was kind enough to mention Alumni Futures as well.

I look forward to future installments of the podcast, and wish Paul the best of luck. And I've added his new site to the listing of Other Useful Sites here on my blog.

Visit Impact Alumni.

^^^

A word about podcasting for those unfamiliar:
Podcasts are short audio recordings that you can listen to via the web site, or that you can download for listening in iTunes or on your iPod or other mp3 digital music player. The great thing about podcasts is that you can subscribe, so that when a new one is available it will download to your computer or iPod automatically next time you connect to the internet. So you don't have to remember to go back to the web site and check for new content. This is the same way that RSS or email subscriptions work with blogs like Alumni Futures.

Two Years of Blogging at Alumni Futures

I don't usually post new items on weekends, but this quick posting is simply to note that today marks the two year anniversary of Alumni Futures. With approximately 200 postings and more than 250 comments behind us (and some 850 subscribers), I am eager to continue on into year three.

E-mail your ideas and suggestions for topics to [email protected] or leave a comment on the web site and let me know how Alumni Futures can serve you better.

Two weeks ago, incidentally, I reached a different milestone: twenty years in the alumni relations profession.

Thank you to all the readers, subscribers, commenters and guest bloggers (as well as Facebook fans and followers on Twitter). I'm looking forward to another year of new ideas.

The Bush-Cheney Alumni Association

I spend almost all my effort with this blog talking about academic alumni associations and the schools they support. Once or twice, I've mentioned corporate alumni associations.

Now there's a new category to cover: government alumni associations.

The Bush-Cheney Alumni Association is the first I've seen for people who worked for a presidential (or gubernatorial) administration, as staff members, interns or volunteers. I searched for a similar organization for Clinton administration alumni but came up empty. If you know of other, similar organizations and their activities, leave a comment.

I heard about the Bush-Cheney site when Inside Higher Ed described it in its Quick Takes section Monday, and drew attention to the site's description of "the Bush Record." As of today, this section featured the following variety of reading choices for historical perspective:

"Praise for President’s Accomplishments"
"More Praise for President’s Accomplishments"
"Praise Continues for President’s Accomplishments"

Obviously, the Bush-Cheney Alumni Association is going to promote the work of its namesakes, so it's not surprising that documents praising their achievements would be available for download. The three files comprise well over 200 pages of essays, editorials, and encomiums that laud the administration's work.

But as seriously as I want to treat this, I am still amused by the straight-faced delivery of the documents' titles. Click image to view in separate window:

Would You Vote AlumnIdea Up or Down?

[Updated 4 February, 2009: Paul Clifford mentioned AlumnIdea on his new blog and podcast, Impact Alumni; and Amy Yen wrote about AlumnIdea over at Our American Shelf Life]

[Updated 17 February 2009: Mindpower's Brain Candy blog followed up on this posting with a detailed discussion – and fresh insights – of their own.]

Violet Lim of Heavybag Media emailed me last week with an interesting project that her firm is helping to develop and implement for the alumni association at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD).

The site is in beta, and is called AlumnIdea. Violet explains it this way:

This social media site encourages alumni to submit their event ideas which can be voted 'up' or 'down' by other alumni. The most popular ideas are aggregated into a top-10 section which are then selected for implementation by UCSD alumni officers. The site is a platform for UCSD alumni to voice their ideas and thoughts towards building a strong alumni network. 

What do you think?

Would you implement something like this on your own site? What concerns do you have about its use? How many votes would you require before you implemented even a "top 10" idea? Is it a solution in search of a problem? Or a cool tool for engaging alumni and, as Violet claims, "building a strong alumni network"?

I think it has a lot of potential. It is a way to collect ideas, to measure alumni interest in particular types of programs and services, and it is interactive so UCSD can engage the community, and share ownership of ideas rated on the site.

However, as a colleague suggested, driving traffic to the site will be a problem, as the "destination" model for alumni sites continues to weaken. For this reason, Heavybag will need to distribute as widely as possible a widget that alumni and staff can install in a variety of places – web pages, blogs, social site profiles – to let the content roam free.

As an aside, maybe students and alumni could be asked to vote 'up' or 'down' on the name...AlumnIdea doesn't really grab me. I'm also confused by the logo. Why is the letter "D" capitalized? Do you like the name, or have alternate suggestions?

Visit http://ucsd.alumnidea.com and check it out. Then click back to this window (which will remain open) and leave a comment with your reactions and feedback, which Violet can collect to report back to UCSD.