CASE president John Lippincott recently asked alumni relations professionals for their thoughts on "common mistakes in alumni relations." His upcoming column on this topic will be a welcome follow-up to his pieces on common mistakes in advancement communications and fundraising.
I sent along my own thoughts, but they may not be among those published in CURRENTS Magazine. So, in the spirit of John's request, here are seven commonly missed opportunities in alumni relations.
In no particular order:
Failing to balance institutional needs with alumni needs Your institution needs engaged, loyal, generous alumni. Your alumni need a supportive, communicative, responsive alumni organization.
Ignoring the academic side of the institution Guest blogger Scott Mory wrote about this for Alumni Futures, and his article remains one of the more visited ones on the site. I like to ask alumni directors, "When you walk across campus, do the professors you pass know you're the alumni executive? If they do, do they know what you do? Would they say you do it well?"
Not partnering with other administrative units Career services, admissions, the libraries, academic departments (or schools and colleges), athletics, student life, tech transfer, public events...the list is endless. These are all potential partners for your programs and services to alumni and to the campus.
Not engaging students early enough Many alumni organizations, it seems, still wait until students are in their final year before they pay any attention to undergraduates at all. You have to build awareness from day one. They'll be students for a few years, but alumni forever.
Wasting valuable volunteer resources Your board, committees, and regional volunteers are a formidable force for work and change. Don't just let them show up, get a free dinner, and leave without harnessing their affinity, experience, and energy on behalf of alumni and the school. This goes for "virtual volunteers" too – the alumni who help manage your Facebook content, reunion class pages, and LinkedIn Groups.
Not seeing oneself as part of the fundraising team Some alumni professionals still cling to the idea that something called "friendraising" exists independently of fundraising. It doesn't. Any successful fundraiser is a "friendraiser" too, whatever that might mean. Alumni relations, executed successfully, enhances front line gift officers' ability to raise the financial support your institution needs. Alumni relations is part of fundraising – an important part, if done right.
Not seeking true innovation Many alumni offices define "innovation" as "implementing something that has already worked elsewhere." Sure, it's new to your institution, but it's not a new idea. There are limitless opportunities to experiment with programs and services that nobody has tried before.
What would you add to the list? Do you disagree with anything above?
The link above is to the first in a series of Alumni Futures "Snapshots in Advancement," very brief overviews of how particular social technologies relate to institutional advancement. The article that follows, below, offers a more detailed commentary on the same topic: Quora.com.
If not, here's a little background. Quora.com describes itself as "a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it." Their About page goes on to say:
The most important thing is to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question.
...[T]hink of it is as a cache for the research that people do looking things up on the web and asking other people. Eventually, when you see a link to a question page on Quora, your feeling should be: "Oh, great! That's going to have all the information I want about that."
The Bad News If Quora continues its current rapid growth, then colleges, universities and schools will want to monitor it. This means that there may be "one more thing to monitor" when it comes to tracking social media. It also means you'll need to watch for errors of fact or misrepresentations about your organizations.
Another problem is that some users apparently don't understand that Quora was created as a thorough, comprehensive repository for reference information – not as a channel for publishing opinions. Bloggers, hotheads, egoists, and blowhards will have a field day until Quora either founders from its own weight or becomes too boring for pundits and flame-war fans.
The Good News If you can find the staff time to keep an eye on Quora as it relates to your organization's programs and services, you will have yet another channel for insight into how some of your audience perceives you and your work. This is a basic principle of effective community management: scanning user-generated content to assess audience interest and sentiment.
This is an important point for organizations: The existing principles of community management – "listen and watch most of the time, contribute occasionally" – apply to Quora.
Case in point: The partial screenshot accompanying this article shows a question asked by a young alum who wanted to know why s/he should join the Stanford Alumni Association. [Click the thumbnail image above to enlarge it.] Two general answers about networking came (apparently) from at-large users. One predictably upbeat answer came from a membership manager at the organization itself.
Its founders designed Quora to be self-balancing, by allowing readers to vote individual answers "up" or "down" depending on the answers' perceived value. While not perfect, this is a potentially valid way to maintain balance in the eco-system.
Bottom Line For now, Quora is a "hot commodity" with some fans and some detractors. One aspect that has garnered media attention is the fact that high-profile individuals may well be the ones who answer your question. The CEO of Netflix famously answered a question about how much Netflix spends on postage. But this aspect is over-rated, because its value is limited to questions that are best answered by CEOs or other prominent individuals. And most of the questions you're going to ask don't fit that description. And most CEOs aren't going to read Quora.
It remains to be seen whether there is a structured way for organizations to participate formally in Quora. For now, advancement offices should "follow" the topics on Quora that include their institution's name or related topics (for example, look at the topics in light blue assigned to the question in the Stanford screenshot).
A final noteworthy aspect of Quora is the fact that users can edit each other's submissions, and in fact, can even edit the original questions. This is fraught with opportunities for "gaming" the Q & A to bolster one's own organization or views, or to sabotage others'. However, edits are logged and the system may provide the same self-correcting aspect that most online communities enjoy.
That, in turn, depends on Quora turning out to be a true community, and it's not yet clear that this will happen.
Today marks the 4th anniversary of my first article on Alumni Futures. As on past birthdays of Alumni Futures, I'm stopping to check and (happily) reaffirm the goals I originally set for the site, when it was just a blog:
To generate discussion about new ideas and directions for the advancement professions;
To help education professionals learn from information exchanged here;
To encourage readers to add their own ideas and visions for advancement.
Here's the annual peek at some numbers:
There have been more than 174,000 page views in four years; 58,000 in the last year.
About 1,800 individuals subscribe, and receive new materials from Alumni Futures every week. 400 of them signed on in the last year.
I've published an average of 1.3 articles per week over four years.
Best of all, Alumni Futures readers have contributed almost 600 comments to date, and as I always say, that's what makes the site work as a community for exchanging ideas.
Also in the last year, I added the Alumni Futures Jobs Page:
You can reach a highly targeted professional audience of advancement professionals with your job posting, which stays at the top of the list for 60 days. I also tweet new jobs to 1,177 followers of @alumnifutures on Twitter, and publish the job posting to the News Feed of the 415 folks who "like" Alumni Futures on Facebook.
One other service I introduced this past year (in addition to newly published original white papers), is the Twitter list of Alumni Associations, which includes the Twitter streams of 191 alumni organizations of various types as of February 2011.
Alumni Futures, the Business: Everything above is about the web site. The last 11 months, for me, are about Alumni Futures as a full time business. I've enjoyed that time as an independent freelance consultant, speaker, trainer and author. 2011 is already packed with speaking and teaching engagements, but there's always room for a little more.
Finally, I owe thanks to my expert advisory group, and most of all, thanks to all the clients, subscribers, fans, readers and followers of Alumni Futures. I look forward to whatever else comes to Alumni Futures in 2011 and beyond.
New in 2011: Profiles Alumni communities serve critical roles in many kinds of organizations – not only in schools, colleges or universities. This year I'll post short interviews with professionals from some non-traditional alumni programs.
Last year, while teaching a workshop for the European Association for International Education in Paris, I met Capt. Dean Dwigans, U.S. Navy. In addition to his career as a military Judge Advocate, Dean (now retired from the Navy after a 25 year career) took on the role of alumni executive at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies.
I interviewed Dean to learn more about how his work at the Marshall Center compares with traditional alumni programs.
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Alumni Futures:Dean, you spent your career in the U.S. Navy, focused on legal practice and more recently, teaching international law. How have you managed the transition to alumni relations work?
Dean Dwigans: I really enjoy the alumni business, especially in the international environment. I get to apply creativity and energy to developing meaningful and lasting relationships with, and among our 8,000 graduates from more than 100 nations. I'm in the government end of it, but I hope to stay engaged in general alumni relations discussions and training, which I find very useful. I brought back many ideas from the EAIE workshop in Paris, for example.
AF: You and I exchanged some thoughts about the "magic formula" for successful alumni work. I said, "Relevance + Access = Engagement." Do you think that's true in your organization?
DD: As long as the definition of "relevance" includes being meaningful and responsive to alumni needs, I think it's a valid short-hand for success.
The Marshall Center has unique focus: building a network of security professionals to create a more stable security environment. We advance democratic institutions, promote active and peaceful security cooperation, and enhance partnerships among nations in North America, Europe, and Eurasia. This is instead of, say, fundraising, marketing our programs, or other more traditional alumni association roles.
But I also see how we're similar to traditional programs. When I look at communications from some civilian alma maters, I'm sometimes put off by the emphasis on fundraising in almost every contact. At the Marshall Center, we have to offer our graduates something useful that applies directly to them or they'll tune us out, and I think civilian institutions should do the same. We promise our graduates that we'll stay in contact, continue to help them grow professionally, and provide a forum for their ideas.
AF:What kinds of activities and programs do you have in place?
DD: We get to know each student while they're in residence. We then work hard to stay in contact from the moment they leave, offer programs "in country" at least once a year, and invite some alumni back each year for professional training, and for contact with other alumni and with faculty. We have a new, improved web presence coming online this year to make collaboration and distance education easier – helping us stay in contact with alumni worldwide.
Our magazine, per Concordiam, is devoted to alumni research and writing. Our "communities of interest" track the subject matter of our resident programs, and we have conferences several times a year for small groups of distinguished alumni. They serve in important, visible roles – ambassadors, defense ministers, and parliamentarians. Our goal is to have contact with each of our 8,000 alumni twice a year, even if it's just to update their contact information.
I'm now trying to put this all into a strategic plan, to focus and coordinate our efforts, and help me explain our program to senior leadership.
AF:What resources do you have to deliver on these goals?
DD: I have a staff of eight, with five devoted to specific regions where they're responsible for maintaining the relationship and knowing the graduates' needs. Three staff members are devoted to alumni events. The Marshall Center is a U.S.–German partnership, and we teach in three languages – English, Russian and German. So our regional representatives speak multiple languages to communicate with alumni. We also benefit from very supportive and involved leadership, which is vital to any alumni program.
AF:What are your biggest challenges, and where do you see the greatest opportunity?
DD: We have a relatively narrow educational mission, compared with a liberal arts college for example. But the challenges that governments face now are so varied and complex that we have to expand our educational efforts. Cybersecurity, crime and corruption, immigration, disaster relief, negotiation and mediation, border security, the environment, religion, trade issues, international law – the list is endless. We keep alumni up to date with lectures, resident courses, and conferences on these topics. The quarterly alumni magazine focuses 80% of its content on one of these topics, and a mix of the other topics for the remaining 20%. We also try to maximize the use of technology and virtual interaction.
We get our students involved very early. I'm one of the first people they hear from. I welcome them before they arrive, and ask them to join the Alumni Knowledge Portal. On the Portal we provide travel information, area info, class schedules and other information they need for settling in. We meet with them when they arrive, introduce them more thoroughly to the Portal, invite them for private or country meetings, host field trips, and talk to them all again before they depart. We see many of them every day while they're here, and they become not only alumni, but our good friends as well. But I learn more from them than they do from me, especially when I visit them after they've returned home. They've opened my mind to new perspectives, and they reinforce how we're all committed to the same goal – a peaceful, productive existence for our families and nations.
After all this interaction, they know who we are, and we in turn have a very good idea of their needs. That's one of the keys to our ultimate success.
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Photos by Karlheinz Wedhorn. Top: Woerner Hall at the Marshall European Center. Below: Interior of the large plenary at the Marshall Center.
