alumni futures

Status Updates: The New Class Notes

A series of brief exchanges on the ALUMNI-L discussion list caught my attention a few months back. The topic? 

Class notes in printed alumni publications. 

The alumni director at a small U.S. public liberal arts college wrote,

Our institution is considering cutting Class Notes, births, weddings, engagements and death announcements from our print magazine, which goes out three times per year, and posting them on our online community only...If you are doing this how has it been received by alumni?

One response came from a small Canadian college:

Cut the Class Notes and you're basically saying to alumni: "this magazine is not about you, it's about us." You don't have to be wealthy, famous or fabulous to be in Class Notes, like you do to be in a feature story. You just have to be an alum...and you don't get any more inclusive than that.

A final answer to the original question came from the Director of Alumnae Relations at a U.S. women's college:

We have an alum section in our college magazine and it is the very first section that alums go to when they receive their magazine. Many of our older alums do not go online. We use this section to include as many alums as possible because classmates want to know as much about their classmates as possible.

My immediate reaction to the comments above was to agree with them. But after thinking it over, I was less sure. Regarding the commenter who said, "You don't get any more inclusive than that," I found myself thinking: Why bother being so inclusive? Aren't we confounding "what most alumni want" with "what most alumni who read class notes want"? The latter is a very small fraction of the total alumni population. On the other hand, they are an engaged population, so ultimately we should account for their interests.

As for alumni wanting "to know as much about their classmates as possible," it's true that only online alumni will see the constant status updates from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter that the rest of us consume. But online, the class note does seem to survive in the form of updates from these social network sites. 

Ten years ago most alumni directors thought that printed class notes would simply move online, but it didn't happen that way. Alumni web sites in general have never attracted a consistent flow of traffic, so maybe the problem wasn't with class notes, but with the overall effectiveness of alumni web sites.

Class notes themselves are not dead, it's just that the "class" your alumni are reading about now includes not only fellow alumni, but fellow co-workers, neighbors, family members and others. The magic of information being aggregated and distributed in a single channel is now accessible to any group with which alumni identify. Class notes have lost their special quality to those who socialize online because it's no longer universities or schools that monopolize the communication channel. We all have equal access now.

What do you think? 

Photo of the CalArts alumni magazine by Hearken Creative via Creative Commons.

A Revised Matrix of Social Network Effects on Alumni Relations

[Updated: The matrix of impacts now features 20 use cases, up from the original 5 posted below. See:

http://www.alumnifutures.com/2010/11/matrix-more-uses.html

for the newest version of the chart below.]

 

Back in February, web strategist Jeremiah Owyang blogged about "impacts to alumni organizations in a world of social networks." Part of his posting was a matrix that showed these impacts in five different use cases. His excellent summary was designed as a brief analysis of the risks and potential rewards for alumni organizations approaching online networks in various ways.

I found this matrix very useful, and well thought-out. As I read it, I found myself annotating it with additional points based on my own experience. Jeremiah encouraged me to blog a slightly expanded version, and I did. It appears below.

My additions and changes to Jeremiah's original version are written in italics in the matrix accompanying this blog post. I hope you can use it, and I hope you will add missing factors in the comments below, or point out aspects with which you disagree. 

Click image to enlarge:

 
Jeremiah embedded in his matrix a couple of links that are worth listing separately:

• Stanford's tagged directory of alumni-written blogs (opportunity to aggregate alumni voices)
• Jeremiah Owyang's checklist for developing advocacy for your program (ambassador/marketing opportunity)

Here's my original posting about the matrix.

Thanks to Jeremiah for encouraging me to build on his efforts.

Fundraising on Twitter: Anything New Here?

In late February Mashable's Melissa Jun Rowley published an article titled 10 Tips for Successful Twitter Fundraising. I was interested to see what Twitter-specific tactics might surface. But when I read the list, it seemed to me that every one of them was something that any non-profit fundraising professional should be doing anyway – and not just on Twitter. 

Examples of the non-Twitter-specific advice include

• Keep Track of Developing Relationships
  
• Recognize Volunteers and Donors
  

and

• State Your Purpose and Your Request Clearly
  

These are certainly critical components to successful fundraising – but they are not at all specific to Twitter. 

In the comments to the post Laurie Pringle voiced this exact point, saying:

This is basic fundraising 101. Very little of this is specific to Twitter - it's basic fundraising, sales, marketing and relationship building skills (and some might say just plain old good manners)...Every major non profit conference I go to, most of the philanthropy and charity websites, are full of articles, papers and educational offerings on just this topic – and have been for some time.

I agree. So my questions are

Are some of these "10 Tips" actually more true on Twitter than in any other fundraising channel?

and

Are there other tips that you can think of that really do apply more to Twitter than to any other channel?

Leave a comment. Or write a reply on Twitter: @alumnifutures.

New Staffing Models in Alumni Relations

[Alumni Futures is partnering with Charlie Melichar's Intermedia blog this week, to share some views on the changing landscape of institutional advancement in education. Read Charlie's interview with Andrew Gossen, Cornell University's new senior director for social media strategy as a companion posting to my comments below.]

I've been thinking a lot recently about something I heard on a SelectMinds webinar a couple of years ago. 

Ethan McCarty, program manager for Greater IBM (the corporate alumni community for current and former IBM employees worldwide) was discussing social media. He described how IBM was connecting the organization to its audience via its sprawling, worldwide LinkedIn Group (more than 46,000 members today). A webinar participant asked how IBM measures the return on investment for social tools. McCarty replied, "What's the ROI for your phone service?" 

In other words, online networks are part of the fabric now, they're what people do. They are as critical to many businesses as telephone service is. Online community is not an experiment or a half-measure to make up for the fact that people won't read your direct mail pieces.

Our work requires ever-increasing incorporation of online networks and so-called social media – these are tools for doing our work, not just "programs and services" that we offer. So what are the implications for alumni relations? One implication is that staffing models, organizational structure and professional roles must change, and change soon.

Cornell University (Ithaca, New York, USA) is adapting to these opportunities by creating permanent roles that embed these practices in the alumni relations effort. Their decisions raise the bar for how alumni offices incorporate social tools into traditional engagement. I asked Cornell's Associate Vice President for Alumni Relations, Chris Marshall, to comment on their rationale.

Chris told me,

I've hired most of our team members for their ability to motivate and manage volunteers, to develop deep relationships, to plan strategic events, and to work hand-in-hand with fundraisers. Asking staff with those specialized skills to also become experts in a rapidly-evolving field like social media, with its complicated task of collecting, synthesizing, and reporting metrics, simply won't get the job done. I believe we need dedicated staff in these areas for alumni affairs to succeed.

We’ve decided that social media is going to be the primary way we ‘touch’ most of our 215,000 alumni. We also believe it will help us advance our relationships with key donors and volunteer leaders. So we have to do it right, and have to show our results with data. That’s why we’ve hired Andrew Gossen as our Senior Director of Social Media Strategy, and given Jennifer Cunningham the title of Senior Director, Marketing Strategy and Business Analytics.

This doesn't mean that other staff members are off the hook and don't need to know or think about the newer tools that alumni are using. A new hire today should be familiar with social sites and comfortable using them for alumni engagement, in ways that make sense in their own organization. 

Other organizations, such as the Stanford Alumni Association, have also begun carving out these roles even in the face of limited resources. By measuring the results analytically, these front-runners will be able to show how our online efforts influence alumni relationships (with each other and with our institutions), and to what extent. This is the beginning of an important new direction for alumni relations, communications, and development staffing models.

Related postings: 

A post about Princeton's mobile-optimized reunion web site

Andrew's guest blog post about "an unusual online student-alumni interaction"

Andrew's guest blog post about social networking meeting philanthropy

White Paper: Alumni Networks and Twitter - An Update

Today I'm excited to announce the publication of a new white paper, co-authored with Elizabeth Allen. The paper is titled Alumni Networks and Twitter: An Update. It's a quick look back at changes since our January 2009 paper, which examined Twitter's potential to influence alumni relations and higher education advancement.

We repeated the non-scientific survey on Twitter awareness and usage in alumni relations, so there is now basic comparative data to show changes in Twitter's role in our professions. This year we also added questions about Twitter Lists to the survey.

To download the paper (PDF format), click on the link below and the document will be downloaded to your computer.

Download Alumni Networks and Twitter: An Update [713kb PDF]

Leave comments about the white paper below this posting. To notify your own Twitter followers about the white paper, click this link: 

Tweet This White Paper

Or use the "Tweet this White Paper" button on the second page of the PDF. 

Thanks for reading; we hope you find it useful!