alumni futures

How Advancement Will Change After the Recession: 4 Questions

At the recent CASE Board meeting Paul Sheff, chair of the Commission on Philanthropy (and chair-elect of the CASE Board) shared a set of questions he developed in collaboration with CASE staff. I thought the document was thought-provoking, and worth sharing more broadly.

Share your own questions (or answers to these questions) by leaving a comment.

1. If necessity is the mother of invention, what did we invent during the past year in response to the economic downturn that might remain in place when our institutions’ finances return to “normal”?

2. What have we learned about measuring and demonstrating the importance of advancement to our institutions, defining our messages, and communicating with and engaging our constituents? Which of these lessons will translate to our work in better economic times?
  
3. What have we learned about collaboration across our traditional disciplines (alumni relations, communications, development and marketing), staffing (number of staff required and deployment of staff), organizational structures and management in general? 

4. What – if anything – should CASE be doing now to develop content and services for members in the post‐recession workplace? What should be at the top of the list? 

Special thanks to Paul Sheff (president of Catholic Memorial School in Massachusetts) and to CASE's Rae Goldsmith for encouraging me to share these questions with Alumni Futures' readers.

Image of the plight of bananas during a recession from Flickr user Colin White, via Creative Commons.

10 Ways We Use Social Media to Engage Alumni, from Mashable

Over at the excellent Mashable blog, Vadim Lavrusik has written a great summary of ten ways in which colleges and universities are deploying so-called social tools to engage and serve alumni. 

10 Ways Universities Are Engaging Alumni Using Social Media

While obviously not an exhaustive list, the article provides a comprehensive but manageable overview of different approaches to web-driven alumni interaction. 

Take a look and leave a comment (here or on Mashable): do you think the article is on target, and what are you doing to engage alumni online?

Baylor University Cuts Ties to Alumni Association

[Updated 13 November, 2009: Inside Higher Ed reports that Baylor's independent association cannot perform its traditional role at Commencement.]

[Updated 28 October, 2009: Inside Higher Ed reports that Baylor has rescinded its offer to absorb the independent association. Article includes links to several prior background accounts.]

[Updated 26 October, 2009: Dallas Morning News reports on the relationship between the university and its Alumni Association.]

"I am just as confused about the Baylor Alumni Association and Baylor University parting ways completely as everybody else. And I too feel like there are holes in the story and some things aren't being said..."

That was one reader's reaction to a story on the Waco Tribune-Herald's web site yesterday, under the headline:

Baylor University removes alumni association's link from its Web site

Why would a university remove from its site the link to its own alumni association? And shut off the toll-free telephone number the school had previously provided for the association? I don't know the history of this, but the presentation of the story by the Waco paper combines with readers' comments for an interesting narrative.

Apparently part of a planned separation so that Baylor's Alumni Association could take on independent status, differing versions of the split are causing friction between the school and its support organization. In particular, the ongoing presidential search on the Texas school's campus is mentioned by both sides' supporters as a point of contention. The University's site dedicated to the search is appropriately peppered with press releases and background information from the school and its governance group. In contrast, the Alumni Association's version of the same site provides links to a number of published commentaries about the process itself and the actors involved.

A quick scan of Facebook shows official groups and pages for the school itself and the Association, but as yet no discernible discussion around these topics (other than passing comments about the last president's departure). If these issues are truly of broad interest to alumni, we might expect to see Facebook groups appear supporting one side or the other.

Meanwhile, with most independent associations moving from independent to dependent status over time, it's unusual to see a school's association moving in the opposite direction. Whatever the background or political and personal battles may involve, the reader quoted above may well have it right: some things haven't yet been explained publicly and if there's more to report that seems worthwhile I'll pass it along here.

Baylor Alumni Association

Waco Tribune-Herald story about the debate

Inside Higher Ed's summary of the situation

Baylor's "Alumni & Friends"

Photo of sign from Baylor campus by Flickr user Alan Levine via Creative Commons.

Alumni Achievement Metrics and University Rankings

What makes a college or university "great"?

We all debate endlessly university rankings or "league tables." And a recent e-mail exchange with colleagues from US and UK institutions started me thinking about how we determine an institution's quality. 

We readily refer to "elite" universities and if asked to list, say, the top 25 schools around the globe most of our lists would overlap significantly, if not completely. You and I might disagree about whether a particular school should be in the top 5 or not, but I bet we'd agree on 20 of the names we'd list in our top 25.

But how do we "know" which schools are great? Along with whatever appears on the cover of US News or Times Higher Education, some combination of faculty notoriety, research output (including technology transfer), and admissions competitiveness play a large part. 

And then of course there is the graduates' success. But while we can read the annual rankings, and measure research output, patents and citations, how do we assess alumni success? 

Dan Guhr of Illuminate Consulting Group has mentioned to me that he sees alumni outcomes as a likely (if not inevitable) component of university ranking systems in the future. Any metrics around this would have to provide a quantitative (or rank ordered) proxy for categories such as

• alumni achievement
• alumni influence
• alumni network value 

We can probably propose arbitrary benchmarks for these kinds of categories in the form of ranges and ratios. For example, if "PhD completion" is an achievement metric, then we can measure the approximate fraction of our alumni who have completed a PhD within some finite period after we granted their bachelor's degree. This is just an example off the top of my head.

One survey that has started down this road is the Professional Ranking of World Universities (PRWU), established by Mines Paris Tech (also known as the École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris). They've selected a single criterion for ranking the "professional effectiveness" of institutions: the number of alumni from a single school who are CEO (or equivalent) at the "500 leading worldwide companies" as measured by annual revenue. 

They also quickly acknowledge the limitations of this specific model, but claim it is the only practical one that they can currently apply. The authors further admit that there is no way to measure, say, successful entrepreneurship among alumni:

The creation of companies by graduates could also be a relevant criterion to be taken into account but, once again, the data on an international level do not exist, and achievements (companies actually created) are difficult to compare.

This single criterion for business is no more flawed than the Jiaotong University Shanghai rankings', [link opens two windows] which award points for alumni receiving the Nobel Prize or the Fields Medal. But saying "our survey is equally flawed, but in a new and different way" is hardly a defense of a system such as the PRWU. (A flaw of the Shanghai ranking is that they consider the total number of prizes won by a school's alumni – without accounting for the size of the alumni population. At tiny Caltech the chances that a particular grad has won a Nobel are about 1:1300; what's the ratio at other research institutions?)

So an obvious problem with the overall approach of using alumni achievement is that it will be extremely difficult to assess the prevalence of a particular outcome for an institution with poor data about its alumni. In the long run, however, this could exert pressure on institutions to invest in improved data collection, internal data sharing and data maintenance.

The email exchange that started me thinking about alumni achievement as a ranking criterion did indeed move on to a discussion of internal data processes and the lack of will that many staff members exhibit when presented with a chance to reveal meaningful truths about alumni by sharing and analyzing data. Perhaps that will provide me with a topic for a future blog post.

Do you think alumni outcomes can and should be measured as a proxy for institutional success? What should we measure, and how?

Also: Wikipedia article about rankings with links to a number of such schemes and outlets

Image of university rankings from Flickr user Mathieu Thouvenin via Creative Commons.

Caught in the Middle of Social Network Growth

CASE's hard-working staff members should be resting up this week after pulling off a successful annual CASE Leadership Summit in San Francisco (except now they have to run the Summer Institutes). The conference ran fairly smoothly; here are a couple of comments about content.

In the opening session, At the Nexus of Innovation, Technology and Learning – What Are the Lessons from Silicon Valley?, Stanford University president John Hennessy moderated effectively. He was engaging and light in his approach to the discussion with Allen Blue (Vice President for Product Strategy and co-founder of LinkedIn), and author Tim O'Reilly (founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media). O'Reilly is credited with coining the term "web 2.0" (which he pronounces "web two-dot-oh").

O'Reilly began by commenting that 

under Web 2.0, the network itself becomes the platform. The way things work is shifting to the network. 

This is critical for understanding that it doesn't matter if Facebook or LinkedIn is the network of choice, or whether you prefer those sites' "status updates" or Twitter's "what are you doing right now?" What matters is that the function itself (e.g., telling people what matters to you, what is important to you at work or play) will transcend specific sites or services. 

To O'Reilly, the secret of success in social media is to 

think of yourself as a community member, and then act as an amplifier of relevant information in the community. Twitter is the most minimal newspaper and I'm the Editor-in-Chief. I'm pointing to other people and their information streams.

In an ironic moment, Allen Blue said that if collaboration tools such as Twitter can "break down the way information is sequestered in silos, you'll have a more innovative enterprise."

This sounds good, but it's completely unconvincing – at least, coming from LinkedIn. The business networking site is notoriously stingy with information about its members' activity, with no analytics or aggregate reporting of any kind available to organizations (like alumni groups) that use the site's Groups function. If LinkedIn is committed to helping universities and schools become "more innovative enterprises," they'll start letting the information flow out of the silo they've built, in the way that Blue describes.

Of course, it runs counter to LinkedIn's business interest to let information leave the silo – their only real asset is data about members' relationships and interaction (a point made indirectly later in the conference by Brian Uzzi, who spoke about The New Science of Networks). This tension between enabling innovative use of data, versus constraining data flow in order to pump up its value, is at the heart of commercial social networks' business models. In LinkedIn's case, Group owners such as alumni associations are caught in the middle.

I raised this exact issue the next day with LinkedIn's Adam Nash (Sr. Director of Product and User Experience), who was a panelist alongside folks from Yahoo! and Intel (moderated very well by Stanford's Ian Hsu). I asked him if LinkedIn could provide a dashboard that provides data about our Group members' aggregate profile and their use of the site for networking.

Nash told me that a lot of information about schools' alumni populations on LinkedIn is available from the recently-enhanced advanced search functionality on the site. I intend to test that out, but my point was that I shouldn't have to go digging manually for basic information about my school's alumni – I want automated reports that push useful data out to me. I'm even willing to pay for the service. LinkedIn doesn't seem interested (partly for the reasons described above).

If I did get that data, I'd be much more effective at marketing LinkedIn to my institution's alumni, which is after all what LinkedIn wants, isn't it? LinkedIn gets more members, my school's Group grows, and alumni get plugged in to a meaningful subset of their own network. Everybody wins.

I'll comb my notes from this session and others to see if there are any other conference tidbits that caught my attention. If so, I'll post them as well.

Antioch Update: Alumni to Buy College

Quick update to the Antioch story. 

The University has agreed to transfer ownership of the campus to a group of alumni who hope to re-open the school in a couple of years. However, many hurdles remain before the financially troubled institution can be revived – not least of which is the school's run-down physical condition, as well as legal and financial steps involving bond holders and the Ohio state Attorney General's office.

These links provide background and updates:

Chronicle of Higher Ed: Update on Antioch

New York Times: Alumni Group to Buy College

Inside Higher Ed: A Deal to Revive Antioch

Prior coverage from Alumni Futures:

Antioch Alumni and the "Angry Wake"

Antioch College Will Close As Previously Planned

Antioch's Second Chance? Alumni Step Up

Clay Shirky on Groups, Media, Audiences and Organization

Here in Boston, where I'm speaking at the Whipple Hill User Conference, keynote speaker Clay Shirky made a splash Tuesday with his opening remarks. In a wide-ranging talk that incorporated many of his past threads, the internet observer made a few points worth thinking about.

Some will seem obvious, but Shirky's talent is for pointing out things that we should have realized or understood on our own – but, for whatever reason, did not realize or understand until we heard him explain them.

1. Online tools enable "changes in group action"

"Every url is now a latent community" says Shirky, "with additional potential value from organizing people to take action."

Large, traditional organizations once held an "information advantage." This old-fashioned advantage goes away when a single person shares information with a group that has a shared problem or concern re: that organization. 

His example: A bank reneges on a promotion and starts charging for something that was marketed as a "free service." A group of students shines a light on it with a call to action and mobilizes online. In the glare of publicity, and newly aware of the loss of its information monopoly, the bank reverts to its original deal.

2. The logic of media production has changed

Old model ("one to many"): You bought a TV and there was one more consumer, but the same number of producers. Making and transmitting television shows is expensive.

New model: You buy a computer and there is one more consumer. But there is also one more producer. The numbers of producers and consumers are in virtual equilibrium and are relatively equal. Almost anyone can publish commentary, video, photography, music...

Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, used blogging as an example too:

Old model: "Filter, then publish." A media outlet chose, sought, wrote, edited and published a story they thought people would find interesting. 

New model: "Publish, then filter." A teenager in Thailand publishes something she thinks is interesting, and lets the public filter it out; if they don't like it, they can stop reading her blog. Unlike old media, she doesn't need anyone to read it for it to stay in business. 

3. The logic of audiences has changed

Shirky told a story about fundraising organizations that immediately raised implications for volunteer development. The point? Simple:

"When any organization reaches a large group of people who don't work for it, the logic switches from controlling those people to convening them."

The organization must understand, and respect, people's reason for participating.

Finally, during Q & A, Shirky gave some pithy but quotable bits of advice:

When an organization commits to one big idea, it cannot afford to admit that it failed: 

"Find the person who has the vision – who knows the big change you need to make – then lock them out and bring them back when they have 100 small ideas...The effect of failure equals the likelihood of failing times the cost of failing. So we operate as if we have to avoid failing."

This appeals to me, but I wonder how it incorporates those of us managing large, long-standing activities that seem too big to abandon overnight, but too out of date to fix with "small ideas."

Finally, responding to a question about so-called "information overload," Shirky pointed out that we've always had a lot of info coming at us. We've just had good filters to help us avoid wasting time. We're not experiencing information overload, we're experiencing "filter failure."

"Dump a bookstore into the street and try to find the Auden. You won't find Auden, you'll find Chicken Soup for the Hoosier Soul. You can avoid that in the store because it's organized. Filters will become more social and will catch up with our need for organizing information."

Think about these ideas on information, organization, action and community and see if they apply to your institution or its audiences. Tell us if they do.

Photo of Clay Shirky's keynote by Travis Warren via Creative Commons