alumni futures

Profile: Brant Ust and USA Baseball

Alumni communities serve critical roles in many kinds of organizations – not only in schools, colleges or universities. This article is the second in a series of short interviews with professionals from non-traditional alumni programs. Read the first profile here: Dean Dwigans of the Marshall European Center for Security Studies.

Profile: Brant Ust
Director of Alumni Relations and 18U National Baseball Team 
USA Baseball
(Durham, NC)

For much of the last year, I've had the pleasure of advising USA Baseball (the National Governing Body for the sport) on alumni relations. Below, Alumni Futures readers can learn about the organization's efforts under its first alumni director, Brant Ust.

A Notre Dame alumnus and two-time USA National Team player, Brant's career highlights include his selection as a 6th round draft pick of the Detroit Tigers, nine years of pro ball, including time in the Red Sox, Pirates and Mariners organizations, and a stint as assistant coach for the University of Michigan.  

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Alumni Futures: Brant, how does the concept of "alumni relations" fit into the strategy of a sports-focused organization like USA Baseball?

Brant Ust: Alumni Relations for USAB is focused on being a part of our athletes', coaches' and staff members' lives beyond the time they wear the Red, White and Blue. In other words, establishing a connection that starts from the first day they're a part of a USAB National Team experience, and that continues throughout their collegiate, professional and post-baseball lives.

AF: Before taking up alumni responsibilities, you were a professional ball player and a college coach. Did any of that prepare you for a role in alumni relations, and if so, in what ways? 

BU: Absolutely. My experiences as a player and coach have been key to establishing what we believe are useful ways to serve our alumni at various stages of their careers. I draw on experiences from my playing career when envisioning what we can do, and how we should be serving our alumni.

[The USA Baseball experience is powerful...
It creates a special, long lasting connection...]

AF: What are some of the obstacles you face in establishing your alumni program, and how do you plan to overcome them? 

BU: We have a broad spectrum of alumni, from our 14U National Team through our World Baseball Classic (Major League Baseball) alumni, and everything in between. It requires a lot of support from within the organization, following and updating our alums’ accomplishments and current ‘locations’ in baseball and in life.

We don't have the years of relationship that a university has with alumni, but the uniqueness of the USA Baseball experience – representing one’s country, playing in the Olympics – is powerful, and is often experienced at a crucial time during their overall baseball development. So it creates a special, lasting connection between USAB and the individual. 

Celebrating World Cup Gold, 2009. Photo courtesy of USA Baseball. Click to enlarge.

AF: You have more than 2,500 alumni, including players, coaches and staff. What resources do you have for serving this audience? 

BU: In 2011 we've been getting out to ‘reconnect’ with our alumni; Major League Baseball Spring Training visits, email correspondence, the creation of a USAB alumni–specific logo, an Alumni Edition of our USAB Magazine, reconnecting with our young alumni via the Minor Leagues, and a USAB Alumni presence on Twitter and Facebook. 

We also integrate our alumni into current USAB events, camps, and National Team schedules. For example, on our coaching staff we have Brooks Badeaux (Pro National Team, Baseball World Cup ’05). This coaching experience will connect him as an alumnus, as well as provide our players with quality instruction from someone who has been where they are, and where they are striving to be. 

We use input from a myriad of alumni relations sources, from traditional university examples to athletic groups to professional associations. We share the same challenges and goals while having a distinct alumni profile. We're proud that the bookends of our alumni database are prominent Major League players: Jim Abbott ’87–’88 and Ryan Zimmerman ‘05.

AF: One last question. Can you get me World Series tickets?

BU: Low man on the totem pole here……

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 Photo of pitcher Lindsay Horwitz, USA Women's National Baseball Team.
By Karl Fisher via Creative Commons.

Related resources

• USA Baseball website (usabaseball.com)
• Ust named Director of Alumni Relations (usabaseball.com)
• 198 Team USA alums on Opening Day rosters (joshfitzgerald.wordpress.com)
• USA Baseball Alumni – Complete list since 1984 (usabaseball.com)

7 Commonly Missed Opportunities in Alumni Relations

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?

Alumni Relations and Fundraising: The View from Twitter

This is a short work week in the United States, thanks to the annual Thanksgiving Holiday. So instead of laying a heavy trip on Alumni Futures' readers, I'll just share a few of the occasional alumni-related postings seen on Twitter. This isn't about "how to use Twitter for fundraising and alumni relations." It's just a couple of simple observations.

The theme connecting the tweets I have collected here is this: 

Students and alumni have a preconceived idea about what alumni associations do, and our actions often don't match those preconceptions.

For example, we often include students in alumni communication before they graduate. Students don't always expect (or want) to be invited to interact with alumni:

We help alumni and friends connect by forwarding contact requests (but not giving out contact info!). Alumni don't necessarily expect us to do this:

 

We email alumni with news, invitations, information and sometimes gift solicitations. They don't all have a warm, fuzzy feeling about alma mater:

We assume that our humanities grads are just as generous as our business or medicine grads, and so we ask them for money...especially if we have a championship basketball team!

 

We make people opt out:

 

And we ask for donations from recent grads, to encourage the "habit of giving," but many alumni equate student debt with immunity from requests for donations:

 

Like it or not, we get painted with a broad brush. Students and alumni won't necessarily understand why we do what we do, and more to the point, even if they do understand, they won't automatically care. 

What we do must have value and relevance to their needs and to their interests. If we don't convey this clearly, they'll echo sentiments like this one:

Remember: perception matters.

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?

Facebook: Pages & Friend Lists. Are You A Fan?

Maybe you're aware that Facebook has never allowed organizations to have their own Profiles on the site - only individuals could. Recently they added a feature they call Pages, which provides companies, bands, teams and other organizations (like schools, for example) to have their own presence outside of the Facebook Groups.

People who want to show their support or affinity can click the "Become a Fan" link on an organization's Page in Facebook. So if you're a fan of, say, the Los Angeles Times, you can visit their page and "become a fan." People looking at your Profile in Facebook can see what you are a fan of, and if they are interested they can click through from there and view the organization's Page as well (and maybe become fans themselves).

I was trying to get my brain around the differences and similarities between Pages and Groups, and between Pages and individuals' Profiles in Facebook. And there's the question of who, if anyone, should create and maintain an institutional Facebook Page for your school, and whether you want alumni to become fans of their alumni association. More about that in a future posting.

Meanwhile, I decided the best way to figure it out was to try it. I created a Facebook Page for the Alumni Futures blog. I encourage anyone interested in exploring Facebook's Pages function to take a look; the feed from this blog is posted there as well (using the RSS import feature of the Facebook Notes application*). I would like visitors to post their ideas for topics and ideas worth exploring on the blog. (And of course I'd love for them to become fans.)

The verdict is still out over whether Pages are actually useful, and of course there was a huge popular backlash against Facebook's collection of data via its Beacon system, which delivered info about purchasing habits of individuals using third-party commerce sites. But I'm not participating in Beacon, so you can be a fan of Alumni Futures without having to worry about Facebook stomping on your privacy (any more than they already might).

Here's a link to my Page, plus some others, to give you an idea:

Alumni Futures Page on Facebook

University of Rochester Insitutional Page on Facebook

Villanova University Alumni Association Page on Facebook

By the way, Facebook has introduced Friend Lists, so you can separate your friends into categories - work, school, family, and so on. As Mashable points out, though, there's a missing piece of the puzzle. You guessed it: Privacy. In the words of Download Squad, you should be able to...

...control what information is available from your profile. For example - do you really want your co-workers seeing those drunken photos from the party you had last weekend? We thought so.

It's also important to realize that these groupings don't show up in your profile; it's just for your own management of (and communications with) your Facebook connections.

Other coverage of this new feature:

From the Inside Facebook blog

From Download Squad

*[Updated December 24, 2007: I am now using the Simply RSS Facebook application to import postings from the blog. Thanks to Dylan Easley for the tip!]

"Brand Community" in Alumni Relations

Do you know what "brand community" is? I had never heard the phrase until I read an article in the International Journal of Educational Advancement (IJEA) (vol. 6, no. 2). The article (linked at the end of this post) is called Building Relationships of Brand Community in Higher Education: A Strategic Framework for University Advancement and was co-written by three business and marketing professors.

So what is "brand community"? It is

the product of social relationships among users of a brand, regardless of their geographical location, who recognize their commonality and who share rituals, traditions, and a sense of responsibility toward the brand.

In other words, a group of people who are so into something (such as a company, a band, a TV show, a product or - yes - a university) that they make it part of their identity and imbue its presence in their daily lives with great importance. The authors say that "once we accept the idea of the university as the steward of a brand, the implications of a brand community are especially intriguing."

Implications for alumni relations? The authors suggest:

• increasing investment in logos, mascots, student activities, and facilities;
• exceeding student, alumnus, and donor expectations;
• promoting the "foundations of affiliation" (class year, school/college, dorm/Greek organization);
• measuring the effect of "the brand community" on "loyalty-related outcomes" (annual giving, association membership, reunion attendance, and so on).

Connecting all these dots, the authors say, can increase giving, boost admissions referrals, and engage more alumni. Alumni programs that "neglect the diverse connections that form a university brand community may be shortsighted and result in lost opportunities."

Admittedly this is bordering on the obvious for an alumni professional, but thinking about these activities in the "brand community" context shines a different light on what we may take for granted. And the last bullet point is promising - in a future posting here we'll look at efforts to measure what we do in alumni relations.

Check the list of Other Useful Sites on the Alumni Futures web page. U Brander and mStoner Blog in particular have content related to marketing and brand in education, as does College Web Editor (with an online focus) so click through and explore. 

Is your alumni body a "brand community"? Does it matter? You decide. Here's the article [PDF format]:

Building Relationships of Brand Community in Higher Education

Since 2003 the IJEA has published other research-oriented articles on branding in higher education so check out their Archive.