alumni futures

Predicting the Future of Alumni Education – The View from 1972 and 1988

In October 1972, almost 40 years ago, Brown University's Ad Hoc Committee on Continuing Education issued a report. I first saw this document within a week or two of starting in alumni relations at Brown in early 1989. The Report was included in a 1988 update by yet another committee, whose work included looking forward and prognosticating about the future of alumni lifelong learning and the role of the alumni association.

I do like to address the future of alumni relations, but "futurism" is fraught with flaws and risks. Nonetheless, it's interesting to see what a blue ribbon committee thought about the future of alumni education, first from the viewpoint of 1972, and then from 1988.

The 1972 report exhorted the institution to invite its faculty members "to invent, devise and create new means of motivating and guiding alumni into better use of books, records, film, television and other other instruments of learning which surround us in such abundance." This multimedia approach included an outline of how videocassettes, still the realm of institutional use might soon enter the "consumer market" and be accessible to individuals. Sears Roebuck, they wrote, would soon start selling videocassette recording and playback units to consumers for just $1,600. Each.

Another technology recommended for bringing the campus educational experience to alumni in their homes was "CATV" – known to the next generation as Cable TV. And the committee urged the university to bind "sound sheets" into the alumni monthly, so that alumni could play audio of faculty lectures on their record players at home. The committee stated that "institutions like Brown must cast off the strait jacket of established formats and take advantage of these technologies."

Now fast forward your VCR to 1988.

At the dawn of the Internet era a new set of technologies was on the horizon. Rather than anticipating the ability to watch a videotape for $1,600, the second committee was pondering how to use the power of computer networks to connect far-flung alumni to campus via personal PC. In a section titled Dialing Brown via the computer, the report's authors invoked "the Communications Desktop," a combination of technologies then "in the planning stage." The concepts they described 21 years ago reflect several technologies we currently use to obtain information remotely – and we use many of them to keep our alumni connected to us and to each other. 

For example: 

1988 Prediction: "Alumni nationally and throughout the world would be able to subscribe to materials provided by the "Communications Desktop," no matter how specific." When? "The best guess: 1993."

2009 Reality: Correct. RSS provides this ability now, although listserv and USENET newsgroups provided similar functionality at the time of the '88 report.

1988 Prediction: "[By 1998], video will be sent across networks as quickly as a computer copies a file today."

2009 Reality: Correct. Streaming video hit the web in 1998, just as predicted ten years earlier by Brown's "information experts." That year, 284.6 million video streams crisscrossed the Internet.

1988 Prediction: University library systems "will be electronically accessible in the future for those alumni seeking all manner of reference material..." But "economics, not technology, stand in the way of sharing with Brown's extended family the vast resources of a great university." 

2009 Reality: Correct. They nailed that one, especially the economics part. Sure, tremendous amounts of free material are online, but expensive journals and databases remain off-limits to off-campus users because of Byzantine licensing policies. But open access publishing has begun to change that and an online academic information revolution lies just ahead.

The Communication Desktop as imagined by Brown's 1988 Alumni Education group [click to enlarge]:

Finally, the committee described a scenario, likely to become a reality "by the time the next continuing education report is written." Given the 16 year interval since the previous report, the 1988 group probably expected the following scenario to take place circa 2004.

• An alumna in Houston logs in and searches the Brown University library and the national library for documents she needs for her job as an Exxon scientist. "The search takes a minute and appears on her computer at home."
• She downloads a topographic map and has it printed in a field office. 
• Then she switches to her personal account and looks at the student newspaper, the alumni magazine, and a campus news periodical online.
• Noticing an article about one of her professors, she sends him an email and a family photo.
• She sees a listing for a talk that is being delivered on campus that night – 1,800 miles away. She requests "to have the videotape downloaded onto her machine within 24 hours after it is given."

The only thing the committee really missed was the advent of live digital video, superseding magnetic tape or other physical media that would require conversion to electronic formats. Information subscriptions, online news, remote print on demand, library access, and media sharing – the 1988 group hit several big nails on the head. 

While it's fun to review our predecessors' predictions, what about the view from 2009? Rather than make predictions of my own, I'm going to do as the 1988 committee did, and quote MIT professor Marvin Minsky:

You have to form the habit of not wanting to be right for very long. If I still believe something after five years, I doubt it.... Anything you hear about computers should be ignored. We are in the Dark Ages.... You can read what your contemporaries think, but you should remember they are ignorant savages.

And that includes me (and you)...so no predictions from this savage, not this time around anyway. But if you have a prediction, please do leave a comment.

What is the Commission on Alumni Relations?

This morning I gave a brief presentation to attendees at the CASE Institute for Senior Alumni Relations Professionals about the mission and work of the CASE Commission on Alumni Relations (COAR). As current Chair of the Commission, I wanted to make sure Institute attendees knew about this channel for guidance and direction from the profession to our professional organization. During the discussion, Dickinson College's Rick Delgiorno mentioned that it would be great if even more people knew about the Commissions and their work. So here's a brief summary of the points I made this morning.

There are three Commissions: Alumni Relations, Philanthropy, and Communications & Marketing. Each Commission's goal, broadly stated, is to "support the creation and dissemination of knowledge…and advise CASE on programming and services relative to their respective area."

The Commissions meet twice a year (once in person and once via web and phone), and the Commission chairs serve as CASE Trustees. The Commission on Alumni Relations currently has 20 members representing five countries and a cross-section of institution types: public and private, large and small, secondary and post-secondary. We work from the premise that, as their institutions' largest permanent constituency, "alumni are vital stakeholders in their institutions." As the CASE web site explains, the Commission "frames and directs research to

• examine and evaluate professional practices,
• develop and monitor programs and services in alumni relations, and 
• ensure that they reflect current knowledge, emerging issues and trends and the highest ethical and professional standards."

A set of past resources produced by COAR is available from the CASE web site, and includes 

• Principles of Practice for Alumni Relations,
• a CASE Management Checklists for Advancement Professionals,
• CASE Guidelines for Alumni Relations on Establishing Vendor Relationships 

and more.

Current COAR projects include a pilot version of the CASE Benchmarking Toolkit. This survey will allow member institutions to measure their achievements in alumni relations, including year to year comparisons within a program and accomplishments compared with peer institutions. Use of the Toolkit will rely heavily on CASE's ability to help member organizations identify Communities of Practice for benchmarking purposes, a topic we've discussed here in the past. 

At this week's meeting COAR will also discuss the effects of the economy on alumni programs: organizational structures, staffing, campus partnerships, and communication practice are on the agenda. And we'll consider working jointly with our colleagues on the Communications & Marketing Commission to explore how best to maintain effective communications with alumni and friends during difficult economic times.

What Do You Think? How can the Commissions help CASE be relevant? What could we do that would help institutional and individual members of CASE get more out of their membership in the organization? Leave a comment here on the blog, or send me an email.

Guest Blogger Elizabeth Allen: Managing LinkedIn Alumni Groups

[Updated 24 October 2009: Liz Allen is blogging about "managing communciations, technology, and social media at Adaptivate.] 

[Updated 13 July 2009: The "Notes" feature mentioned below on 15 May has been broken for a while. Adding a note to a member's record reproduces that same note for other group members, over-writing your own previous annotation.]

[Updated 15 May 2009: Liz Allen notes that LinkedIn has added a "Notes" feature to the queue for pending group membership approvals, something she proposed to LinkedIn a long time ago. "You can put in a note about an individual pending request," says Liz, "and the other group managers can see it. This will be useful for groups that have more than one person approving group requests, and for managing work flow."]

[Updated 28 April 2009: link to Liz Allen's guest posting on the LinkedIn Blog.]

This post is written by Elizabeth Allen, associate director of alumni relations at the California Institute of Technology. You can follow her on Twitter @lizallen and read her thoughts at Adaptivate.

I have managed the Caltech Alumni Association's LinkedIn Group since its launch in May 2005. Every week we receive from 50 to 100 requests to join. And yes, I check every single request against the names in our alumni database. This is time consuming and not so fun, but I do it 1) to maintain the integrity of the group itself (no recruiters, thank you) and 2) to check alumni email addresses against our records.

LinkedIn's admin tools have remained relatively unchanged for the last four years. Some cosmetic differences, maybe. But recently LinkedIn did make some changes to the group administrative capabilities – some good, some not so good.

The Good:

• Group managers can post RSS feeds to the group. The feeds are in addition to individual articles and news stories posted by members of the group. You can also post more than one feed. 


• Via LinkedIn, you can send an email blast to the members of your group, though the formatting leaves something to be desired. From what I can see, the messaging feature essentially automates a process you could have done by hand in the past: instead of downloading a list of group member email addresses and sending the message yourself, LinkedIn will do it for you.

Which leads me to 

The Bad:

Group admins still have access to the individual addresses while a member's request is pending. But as admins, we've lost the ability to retrieve a list of all group members' email addresses. Once in the group, members' email addresses are hidden from the admin (unless you happen to be directly connected to the individual group member), and are no longer exportable en masse.

No more email addresses means one more barrier between an organization and data about its group members. Having access to that information – email addresses, as well as other user data that aren't downloadable by admins – would be really helpful. Are most of my group members located in urban areas? Foreign countries? How many are currently looking for work? How many have participated in a group discussion, or posted a job? How about the average number of connections? And the number of connections within the group? Crunching these numbers would help us as group managers determine the real value our alumni get from LinkedIn.

To accomplish this, I'd like access to a Google Analytics/Group Management hybrid: a dashboard where group admins can access data (like the kind I mentioned above) about their group and its members. Andy Shaindlin proposed a Group Manager's dashboard here in 2007.

The updated groups features for LinkedIn admins do add tools that make it easier for individuals to disseminate information. And communication and connectivity among group members are key reasons to have a group in the first place. Tools like this add value to the group member experience, and I have no doubt that our LinkedIn group is a useful resource for alumni. I'd just like something more than anecdotal evidence to prove it.

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Note: Speaking of LinkedIn Groups, the group Alumni Nets will serve professionals using LinkedIn for alumni groups. If you manage a LinkedIn alumni group, or want to discuss online alumni communities, you can join Alumni Nets.

Guest Blogger Ian Moore: A UK Perspective on Alumni Reunions

Last Monday's Posting about the New York Times commentary on reunions and Facebook elicited some great comments. Among them was a reflection on reunions by Ian Moore, Deputy Director of Development & Alumni Relations at Coventry University in England. I thought it was worthy of its own posting, so Ian becomes the first non-North American guest blogger on Alumni Futures. Here's a slightly edited version of his remarks about reunions from a few days ago.

Large reunions can mean a huge workload, and yet proportionally reunions engage relatively few alumni annually. This is especially true when you consider what can be achieved if you allocate the budget and workforce to other schemes, including online community building.

I can understand that for established programmes in America, reunions may serve a justified purpose as part of a balanced programme of activities. However in the UK, many of us in start-up operations are being asked to create a tradition of reunions from scratch, with initial events expected to be sell-outs, as they are certain "that's what happens in the US." Obviously, it’s much easier to host a reunion if you have been actively stewarding alumni through structured alumni engagement since graduation (and before). However, not only is this not always true in America, for relatively new alumni relations operations, many graduates will have had lengthy periods with no contact from the institution. It always surprises me therefore how much importance is placed on reunions as a global measure of an alumni operation's success. Admittedly, events are a highly visible part of an alumni operation but so many other crucial yet less obvious activities must precede them. I would expect start-ups to put goals in order and 

1. create databases 
2. create communication channels (publications, e-newsletters, websites) 
3. establish & promote community connections (interaction with publications, personal updates, address changes, web communities, etc.)
4. encourage engagement (including asking alumni to return for reunion events)
5. harness alumni goodwill in some way, and steward at the next level 

1. and 2. can be set-up relatively quickly but creating a community is a slow, trust-building exercise. At my institution I expect to be in the community building phase for many years before sizable numbers of alumni wish to reunite with one another as standard practice. At the moment, alumni wish to reunite specifically with their old friends. If those friends are not attending, alumni do not want to come regardless of how exciting the event (and similarly those friends do not come for exactly the same reason – catch 22). I suspect that although this will undoubtedly be true in the US for some alumni, many will return for a reunion because they feel a commitment to the alumni community and a shared identity that they wish to demonstrate and nurture. This reflects the many decades' work in establishing an alumni culture. In the UK we need to recognise our cultural differences and our relatively late arrival to this profession. People do not attend reunions for another chicken dinner. They come to see old friends and reflect their commitment to a proud relationship with that institution that has not dulled over time. The alumni profession needs to accept that alumni, thanks to services such as Facebook, can now network more efficiently than ever and retain contact with friends much more easily. They may not need an official reunion if they wish to meet up with their old classmates. A simple email sent personally to a large group inviting them to a selected bar, restaurant or home may be just as effective. However, they cannot demonstrate their pride in their connection with an institution anywhere else. By offering institutional reunions we allow cherished memories to be dusted down and given greater value. Don’t we all at some stage want to look back fondly on our past in the belief that we have made good choices?

Do I think reunions have a future? Yes.

Do I think reunions are overrated? Yes.

Would I like to see equal or greater value given to other programmes, such as online community development? Absolutely.

Finally, some events serve multiple purposes and can help to establish community. In my list of 1. to 5. above, some reunions are worthwhile at an early stage of alumni operation development; indeed, some giveback (5.) is possible very quickly — but these should be the exceptions and not the rule. So pick the easy wins first and don’t chase the impossible dreams currently set by senior institution leaders who see the success in North America, and expect it can be duplicated quickly and easily elsewhere. Make it clear that American success is a product of long term investment in many things – not just hosting parties.