alumni futures

The Future (Part II): The Changing Student Experience & Alumni Relations

This is the second of three articles that I have adapted from my alumni relations keynote at CASE V in Chicago, in December 2013. The title of my talk there was Alumni Relations & Advancement's Future: 3 Questions.

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In the first article in this series, I discussed fundraising's relationship with alumni relations. The final article looks at predicting the future of alumni relations. Here in part II we ask: 

How will the changing student experience
affect alumni relationships? 

Observers are buzzing about several so-called disruptive factors in education. Some of these factors influence the student experience, which in turn affects alumni attitudes and engagement. Here are four that we must think about:

1. MOOCs
Massive open online courses, known as MOOCs, are widely touted to be changing the face of traditional education. They are certainly a departure from the traditional face-to-face classroom: students enroll, usually for free or almost free, and pursue their chosen topic alongside 50,000 or 100,000 other learners. And they do it from the comfort of their laptop or their iPad.

MOOCs' short-term impact on the traditional degree is probably overstated, but their evolution is certain to influence our field.

So far, these online students are not earning degree credit. In fact, according to one recent survey, about 80% of MOOC students already have a traditional degree. And MOOCs are being criticized for their students' low completion rates. But MOOCs are a waypoint en route to some more robust future online educational experience. As the successors of MOOCs become the norm for students enrolled in post-secondary education, the students' sense of loyalty, community, or gratitude to a particular institution is going to diminish – or even disappear. So those of us whose work depends heavily on the residential campus experience must anticipate this challenge.

How do we connect meaningfully with alumni whose education took place online – in their office, in a coffee shop, or on an airplane?

[How do we connect with alumni whose
education took place in a coffee shop?]

2. The Changing Student Profile
Second, the typical student's profile is changing. No longer are the majority of university-goers fresh-faced twenty-year olds. Mid-career changers, single parents attending part time, and those just looking for intellectual enrichment may consider themselves alumni of whichever online platform delivered their favorite lectures. In fact, they may consider themselves alumni of the platform itself, and not a particular institution. Will this diverse body of learners want an alumni organization to connect them with job opportunities, with other learners, or with additional instruction? If so, the traditional affinity model of alumni relations has to evolve, or students will abandon it. 

As the student profile changes so must our profession change. Among the services alumni organizations currently provide, career services and access to specialized networks will be the ones most relevant to alumni of non-residential programs. And they are already proving to be among the most relevant services for alumni of traditional institutions.

3. Expectations of Employment
Criticism of higher education is increasing. The most strident voices are those that reject the rising price tag of a college education.

But another group of critics may cause more stress and challenge for alumni professionals. Those are the people who increasingly want our institutions to somehow ensure jobs for graduates. And those people include the parents of many current undergraduates. The parents are footing much of the bill, assuming debt, and staking their family reputations on the extent to which their sons and daughters turn an expensive and time consuming college degree into a lucrative career.

The root of these complaints is an assumption made before a student even selects a university: that the purpose of a college degree is to help the graduate obtain "a good job" that pays well. Increasingly, this is the definition of alumni success, and increasingly it forms the backbone of numerous rankings and reports, which compare college outcomes on how much a new graduate can expect to earn. We hear little about rankings based on a graduate's inherent satisfaction with a college education, or on the extent to which the college experience turns a young and impressionable student into a contributor to her community. (Notably, the Gallup-Purdue Index will combine the "jobs" factor with the "life satisfaction" factor, measuring "great careers and lives that matter.")

If the student's primary concern is with compensation, alumni satisfaction will be at the mercy of the marketplace. However, the sheer number of students enrolled in fields that do not promise lucrative job offers suggests that the humanities, the liberal and fine arts, and the social sciences are not going away soon. And the passion those students have for their topics will continue for many years to give alumni offices the raw material they need to shape newly minted alumni into passionate and generous supporters of our institutions.

[If the student's concern is compensation,
alumni satisfaction is at the mercy of the marketplace]

4. Internationalization
Finally, a fourth dynamic is influencing the future of alumni relations: the diverse national backgrounds of students.

As students find it more appealing and easier to enroll across borders, the student body becomes ever more international. At my institution (all locations), almost 40% of enrolled students came from outside the United States in 2012. Many overseas students in North America have English as a second language, and their language proficiency heavily influences their student experience. They are in an unfamiliar land with strange customs and unexpected influences. In this situation, most of us would prefer the company of classmates whose language, backgrounds, and cultural references match our own.

These students often travel back to their home country as new alumni, without having truly joined our institutions' broader community. As alumni, they are much less likely to respond to the same messages and images that generate engagement with so many "traditional" alumni.

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The challenges and changes I've listed here are only a few of the forces guiding the evolution of alumni relations. Other trends, such as the demographics of younger generations, will add additional fuel and data to future discussios.

Many of us may not feel like we have time to think about the futures these trends are creating. But observing the profiles and experiences of current students may determine our success at engaging the attention and enjoying the support of these students during their lives as alumni.

 

The third and final part of this series will ask, "Can we predict the future of alumni relations?"

Related articles

The Future (Part I): Fundraising's Relationship to Alumni Relations

Alumni as Volunteer Course Facilitators: 7 Reasons it Makes Sense

The future of MOOCs

The Future (Part I): Fundraising's Relationship to Alumni Relations

This is the first of three articles that I have adapted from my remarks as the alumni relations keynote speaker at CASE V in Chicago, in December 2013. The title of my talk there was Alumni Relations & Advancement's Future: 3 Questions.

For part II of this series see my article about the changing student experience and its effect on alumni relations. Part III is about predicting the future of alumni relations.

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In 2013, we celebrated the centennial of alumni relations as an organized profession. While the profession has evolved extensively over the last century, we still work with our predecessors' original goals in mind: forging and nurturing meaningful bonds between alumni and alma mater.

The first 85 years of organized alumni relations (from about 1913 to 1998) was stable, with mostly incremental change. But the last 15 years have been revolutionary. The rapid rate of change in our profession suggests that the alumni office of 100 years from now – if alumni programming exists at all – would be virtually unrecognizable to us. 

Recent changes fall into two interdependent categories: technological change and human (social) change. First, digital communication, online social networks, and powerful search continue to have enormous impact. Directories, event management, research, and fundraising have all changed dramatically in the last decade, thanks mostly to the effect of new tools.

But it's not only technology that has changed our profession. Alumni and students also have evolving attitudes toward the role of organizations. (Andrew Careaga mentioned this recently - see topic #1 in this recent blog post.) Author Clay Shirky says that when it comes to many organizations, "What was once a service has become a bottleneck" from members' viewpoints.

With this in mind, I offer the first of three questions for alumni professionals to ask themselves and each other. Discussing and answering these questions will help us prepare for our graduates' and our institutions' future needs:

 What will the relationship be between
alumni relations and fundraising in the future?

A few alumni relations traditionalists still maintain that they are "friendraisers," not "fundraisers." But things have changed. 

In alumni relations, we are certainly in the relationship business – if it can be called a business. It's even in the name of our profession. And we talk a lot about our institutions' community, history, and current needs, the projects we're funding, the students we're supporting, and the buildings we're building. 

But organizations can't just "tell stories" about projects. More than ever, we need to focus on our cause, not our activities. But our cause isn't always clear. Education? Research? Not as clear as other causes that mobilize broad support. Think about political campaigns. However you feel about the tenor of political rhetoric these days, election campaigns achieve enormous fundraising results from the public at large. And it's not because of proposed legislation – it's because parties and their candidates seem to many to stand for ideals and ideas. 

For a university, it's the difference between describing a laboratory building versus describing the world-changing research that will take place inside that building. It's the old sales truism: "Don't describe the features, describe the benefits."

The passion that drives support for big ideas can be difficult for us to channel. We're so accustomed to describing our organizations that it's difficult for us to talk about the effect our organizations have on the world. Done right, educational fundraising is not in the service of an organization. It's in the service of an ideal that is broadly shared across a vast swath of our audience. That focus, that dream, that message about what really matters – it can no longer be conveyed with a mass mailing and an appeal code.

That passion comes from the heart, not from the Office of Donor Relations. 

[What really matters can no longer be conveyed
with a mass solicitation and an appeal code]

We do try hard to be sincere, to tell genuine stories that matter, and often we succeed. But increasingly, we are talking to strangers. We have an audience that we invite to events, but maybe 5% of them actually turn up in the course of a year. And if 20% of our alumni were donors last year, then 80% may not really know us. They aren't paying attention to our needs, and in our appeals they don't recognize a relevant cause. So, many of them are out of touch. Disengaged.

Their commitment to our cause pales in comparison to a family member's commitment to a niece or nephew's personal pursuit. Passion drives support, which helps make the crowdfunding movement so powerful. And nothing invokes passion quite like a cause. Think about political campaign advertisements that have angered you; human rights movements that expose shocking abuses; and social justice efforts that succeeded because they stopped at nothing short of obtaining what is right for people who have been wronged. True causes, the kind that inspire passion, drive people to give up their day jobs, to protest until they get arrested, even to lay down their lives.

For or better or worse, nobody ever went to jail or died trying to get the annual fund participation rate to 30%.

So where might alumni relations and fundraising cross paths most effectively in the short run?

The most obvious place for alumni relations and development to combine efforts is in annual giving. Alumni officers and annual giving staff are talking to the same audiences: students, their parents, and alumni. Why put a generous donor on hold while you transfer their call to the development office, because you aren't sure about how to handle a year-end gift? 

[Friendraising is dead]

Furthermore, we have long given alumni the impression that asking graduates for donations is the institution's sole (or at least primary) purpose. Many alumni assume that the envelope or email from the alumni association is a fundraising solicitation. And we reinforce the delicacy of asking for donations by relying on euphemisms, "development" and "advancement" being the most common ones.

We need alumni to understand that their financial support is critical, but we also need our institutional leaders to understand the value alumni relations can bring to advancement. At institutions that bring alumni relations and annual giving into closer proximity, alumni will be better educated about how their donations will be used, and will be comfortable knowing that financial support for the institution and its people is an expectation. And eventually, they might respect us more, for our honesty.

It's very important to note that giving is not the sole obligation we should convey to alumni. We also want our graduates to volunteer their time and expertise, to attend events (either face to face or virtual), and to be proud brand ambassadors for alma mater. But we can and should mention donations in the same breath with these other forms of support without having to blush or lower our voices.

Friendraising is dead. Alumni relations and development are, I believe, destined to be ever more interwoven, and that's a good thing, for our donors and for our institutions.

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In part 2 of this series I'll ask, How will the changing student experience affect alumni relationships?