For a long time, the word “alumni” referred only to graduates of schools and universities. Over time, however, we have increasingly used the term to describe individuals who share almost any specific past experience. Recently, I’ve been privileged to work on a project that revealed emerging practices in alumni engagement for charitable foundations, scholarly and artistic residency programs, fellowships, and other nonprofit organizations.
Funded by a grant from The Rockefeller Foundation, I led the creation of an alumni outreach strategy for the Bellagio Center in Italy. For decades, the Bellagio Center has hosted residents and conference participants in support of the Foundation’s mission: “to promote the well-being of humanity around the world.”
During this project, I interviewed Bellagio and Rockefeller Foundation staff members and alumni. I also spoke with representatives from nine other diverse organizations with non-traditional alumni communities. I am pleased to share the insights I gathered during that process in a white paper titled Engaging Alumni Outside Academia: Emerging Practices in Foundations, Fellowships and Other Nonprofit Organizations. I’ve highlighted some key takeaways below. (Click on the title of the paper to download a free copy from the GG+A website.)
Identifying “Non-Traditional” Alumni Communities
In crafting the Bellagio Center’s alumni strategy, we considered “traditional” alumni groups to be those at academic institutions, such universities and schools. There is a long history of alumni organizing to support their alma mater and each other, usually aided by professional staff members. In the white paper, I examine so-called “non-traditional” alumni communities, share some of the principles learned in traditional settings, and describe how these principles apply to non-academic institutions.
Applying Universal Alumni Engagement Principles
Certain alumni engagement principles apply almost universally, such as using a shared experience to drive a sense of identity that lasts beyond the experience itself. Other common principles include prioritizing ways to interact with alumni, creating a strong brand for the alumni organization, and providing alumni with information they cannot obtain elsewhere. In the paper, I focus on unique opportunities for organizations with diverse purposes and missions to apply these principles.
Adopting Beneficial Practices
This field is in its formative stages, and some practices are certainly beneficial. But it is not yet clear whether other practices are “best” or merely “prevailing” practices. The clearly beneficial practices include highlighting early on participants' lifelong connection to the organization, a special status that distinguishes them from other stakeholders. I also recommend specific ways to compensate for the short amount of time that alumni may have interacted directly with an organization.
Building a Community of Practice
In the future, organizations will adapt established practices and imagine new ones to engage these alumni. These same organizations will benefit from regularly sharing with each other their engagement strategies, as well as their successes and challenges. For this reason, I believe the time is right for establishing a more formal community of practice that enables them to learn from one another’s experiences.
To download a free copy of Engaging Alumni Outside Academia, click here.
Photo of Bellagio, Italy by @deensel via Creative Commons 2.0
I am thrilled to announce that on October 1 I will join Switchboard as Vice President. Switchboard is an award-winning online engagement platform based in Portland, Oregon that works with leading colleges, universities, and independent schools. I have been an advisor to Switchboard for four years, and believe strongly in their approach to community-building, and to student-alumni engagement in particular.
[On October 1 I will join Switchboard as Vice President]
My family and I will continue to make Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania our home.
I will continue limited work as an independent consultant for GG+A, with the title of Consulting Vice President. In my two-plus years there, I have been privileged to work with some three dozen diverse institutions across seven countries. Many times, I have seen potentially strong alumni communities under-perform, due to inadequate understanding of the outcomes that effective engagement can create. Working with Switchboard, I will help clients understand what they can achieve for their institutions when they enable alumni, students and families to support each other. I believe that tracking engagement outcomes is the future of alumni relations. And Switchboard is unique among engagement tools in its ability to track and report these outcomes, and their value to alma mater.
[Tracking engagement outcomes is the future of alumni relations]
As I complete my 29th year in advancement, I look forward to approaching the sector’s challenges from this new direction, and to enabling institutions to define, achieve and report their successes. Alumni relations is a wonderful profession, and I’m excited to continue my career in this new role.
The data reported in the recent Ross-CASE Survey on UK Fundraising for higher education doesn’t focus very much on alumni relations. The data around alumni programs is mostly about inputs – not outcomes. However, on a strategic level, the report can help to inform your alumni relations approach.
First, let’s look at a chart that my colleagues at GG+Acompiled using data from the Ross-CASE report. It shows Total Advancement Cost per Alumnus and Cost per Donor (click image to enlarge):
The more invested per contactable alumnus, the less expensive it becomes per acquired or retained donor. (Source: Ross-CASE Survey 2016)
This chart shows, in pounds spent, two metrics:
The very short, blue columns represent total spending on fundraising and on alumni relations per individual graduate, by each cohort’s member institutions. We see measurable increases from the Fragile cohort onward, and then a quite large relative leap as we move from Established to Elite institutions, as defined in the Report.
Next, the taller gray columns show the institutional cost per donor obtained (for all kinds of donors, including alumni).
What does it tell us?
Acquiring and retaining donors does incur a cost. How much? The mean cost across all institutions in the survey is £440 per donor, and the median is even higher, at £608. This is a very useful metric for advancement professionals checking the targets their leaders expect them to achieve, against the resources allocated to achieve them.
Even though the more established programs are spending more on advancement per contactable alumnus of their university, their cost per donor becomes progressively lower.
In other words, as they invest more in advancement per alumnus, their fundraising efforts become more efficient.
[Alumni relations is not simply an expense, it is an investment, because it has a long-term return]
Many institutional leaders worry about rising costs and say, “We must control spending!” Thus they limit their allocation for alumni relations staff and activities. The report shows that outlays for alumni relations at Fragile institutions amount to only 0.07 percent of total institutional expenditures. As a percentage, this is just half of what the Established institutions are investing.
As a cost-containment measure, severely curtailing alumni relations spending makes sense if spending on alumni outreach is solely an expense. But it isn’t.
When pursued with long-term outcomes in mind, alumni relations is not simply an expense, it is an investment, because it has a long-term return.
The Total Advancement Cost Per Alumnus chart above suggests that if you make false economies in fundraising and in alumni relations, and if you do not invest adequately per contactable alumnus, your fundraising becomes extremely inefficient. This is true whatever the absolute results may be.
You are, in effect, deciding to spend much more, per each pound you raise from donors.
Alumni relations in general doesn’t usually show short-term ROI (financial or otherwise) so many decision makers believe that spending on alumni outreach is a waste of scarce funds. However, investment in alumni relations moves you off the starting line for fundraising with new donors and helps you overcome the resistance that often accompanies a fledgling engagement effort.
Building new relationships doesn’t typically show immediately visible results. These come over time, and mature advancement operations show this.
What kind of return can you expect in the short run when connecting alumni to one another and to their alma maters? Well, fortunately, alumni give in other ways, and these are visible, if not easily quantifiable in monetary terms:
Alumni who do not currently donate financially can participate by attending events, providing expertise to students and alumni, sharing access to their professional networks, and hosting or organizing alumni gatherings.
Behavioral researchers identify reciprocity as a key ingredient for positively influencing others . People are much more likely to respond to requests of any kind from those who have already provided us with something of benefit or value. Seen this way, alumni relations is not just a counterbalance to fundraising, but a prerequisite for fundraising as well.
A word about resources: Success doesn’t require that you spend as much or hire as many staff as large alumni offices in North America. Rather, it suggests pursuing relative increases in your own efforts, compared with your historical effort.
[Any reduction in uncertainty represents a form of measurement]
Finally, I want to encourage measurement and benchmarking in alumni work. You can benchmark alumni relations, although it is a little different from tracking philanthropic gifts. Below are two approaches to consider. They are not surgical in their precision, but they may offer more insight.
First, you can estimate alumni relationsexpenditure per contactable alumnus:
Take your alumni relations budget – staff plus programs – and divide by number of contactable alumni.
You can also estimate the number ofalumni per alumni relations staff position:
Divide the number of contactable alumni by the full-time equivalent (FTE) number of employees working on alumni relations.
The mean in the UK appears to be approximately 16,000 alumni per alumni relations staff member. The report’s Fragile and Emerging institutions, with about 25,000 alumni per staff member between them, are operating at 50 percent more alumni per staff member than the UK mean. This is not a viable formula for long-term success.
You can track your own investment over time (internal benchmarking) as well as your efforts compared with those of peer institutions (external benchmarking).
And with all these metrics, remember this useful definition of measurement, from author Douglas Hubbard: “Measurement is any reduction in uncertainty.”
You do not need to know everything quantitatively to improve your understanding of alumni engagement. You just need to know a little more than you knew before.
I am indebted to my colleague Adrian Salmon for contributions to the insights above.
This is a fundamentally important question for advancement professionals.
I'm sharing my comment to Daniel here as a standalone idea for further consideration. It's about the reasons for measuring the value of alumni outreach.
[There's a strange dynamic in almost every conversation about 'the value of alumni relations']
There's a strange dynamic in almost every conversation about "the value of alumni relations." This week marks my 27th year in the alumni profession, so I've been privy to thousands of these discussions over the decades.
Almost every one of these conversations begins with the assumption that alumni engagement at institution X certainly has enough value to warrant further investment, and that the alumni team's role is to prove that to their colleagues.
We should recognize that in the eyes of their audiences, not every alumni team delivers real value to its respective organizations and communities. For underperforming teams, perhaps the focus should shift from "proving our value" to "improving our effectiveness." It's risky to start by assuming:
that alumni love the program,
that your job is to prove that, and
that you will inevitably prove your value, if only you sift through the data for long enough.
[Perhaps the focus should shift from "proving our value" to "improving our effectiveness"]
This matters, because the opportunity cost of tracking, recording, reporting and analyzing data can be relatively high, especially in small shops. You must also improve outreach, enhance your engagement targeting and customize your communications and interaction.
You need a balance, and some teams don't update or improve outdated offerings, but instead use the increased availability of data to select measurements that will influence leadership to provide continued or additional resources.
Daniel asks what you'll say when, going around the leadership table, it's your turn to "make the case" for investment in alumni engagement. "If you have no data," he points out, "it is very difficult to justify your value."
That's right. Having no data is a big problem. But if you have the data, and they say you're failing, you have a bigger problem.
Establishing a benchmark for your effectiveness is not only for proving how good you are. It's for improving how good you are too.
There may be a reliable methodology for determining such a ranking, to some approximation. But The Economist's method isn't it. Their methodology is simple. To quote them:
Each year, The Economist asks students to rate their school's network.
So what's wrong with this system?
[There may be a reliable way to find the 'most useful' alumni, but The Economist's method isn't it]
Simply put, it is in the direct interest of every student surveyed for others to believe that the student attended an influential and successful institution. This confers the maximum perceived value to their degree.
For that reason, every student asked to rate their own school's network should rate it as highly as possible.
In this survey, that would be a 5 out of a possible 5. The students at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business seemed to understand this: they ranked their network 4.98 out of 5.
It's surprising that the ratings of the top 10 schools dip as low as 4.71. Maybe the schools should offer more marketing courses to their MBA candidates?
Thank you to John Arboleda for sharing the Economist article with his network on LinkedIn, where I first saw it.
On March 31, 2015 I joined host Andrew Gossen on Higher Ed Live, an online discussion specifically for professionals in alumni relations, development and marketing.
The discussion lasted one hour and is available as a free streaming archive on the Higher Ed Live website:
JT's email, blog post, and linked document[PDF] are in the same vein as the ideas I shared last week, but are more practical and specific to alumni relations. He and fellow members of the Council of Alumni Association Executives (CAAE), propose that alumni relations needs "a unifying definition and taxonomy of alumni engagement that reflects the diverse and vibrant tapestry of alumni relations work."
The goal: to establish a shared language around engagement. "With a strong foundation of core concepts in place," they write, "innovation and professional practice will grow and thrive."
Grateful to JT for his request for feedback, I am sharing my initial thoughts here. JT and his colleagues encourage additional feedback and comments on this work.
[Does alumni relations need a unifying definition of engagement? A typology that describes its common principles?]
5 Comments on a Framework for Alumni Relations
The rationale is strong Why do this at all? I agree with the draft's premise: "A shared definition of alumni engagement...provides the foundation for assessment, growth, and innovation in our field. Without these in place, we will struggle to...adapt and evolve."
We need a typology, not a taxonomy A typology is more theoretical (and arbitrary) than a taxonomy, but also more flexible. A taxonomy tends to be set, and examples that come along after it is established must fit a pre-established hierarchy. A typology can be updated along the way, and lends itself to a rapidly changing field like alumni relations. [For a more in depth comparison of typology versus taxonomy, see Dave Snowden's comments on the subject.]
Several of the domains overlap JT's draft recognizes this, and it's another reason a typology makes sense. For example, "global and international outreach" happens most often in the presence of "alumni community development." I.e., your institution is more likely to host an overseas event in a city with an active alumni club. This isn't bad; we just need to acknowledge the degree to which these domains overlap, mix and intermingle.
We just need to come close We don't need a perfect, finished product. JT's draft might be enough to get us started using the descriptions we'd want to characterize our work.
Characterizing existing programming is the next step One immediate use for the typology would be assessing how different advancement teams deploy the domains. What percentage of our effort is devoted to volunteer management? To clubs and chapters? Career programs? Do outcomes show that a particular distribution of effort, or a consistent set of priorities lead to more success? Do they correlate to organization type or scale?
[A definition and typology for alumni engagment will help us articulate our purpose and whether we are achieving it]
5 Challenges We Face Next In addition to fine-tuning the descriptions of each program area (domain), we should address the following:
We should agree on what "engagement" includes To study and classify something, we must agree on what it is. At the very least, we should address "active" versus "passive" engagement. Often, alumni feel engaged who merely read the magazine and follow us on Twitter. By our definition, they aren't engaged, and we might be under-valuing them.
Profession-wide trends are cyclical New waves of interest wash over the profession until people are accustomed to hearing about something. After a few conference keynotes and a CASE Currents cover story, we shift our attention to a new topic. We should make rapid progress on this particular challenge before practitioners are tired of hearing about it. (I predict that analytics will be the next hot thing, and it should be.)
Advancement will resist "classification" The variety of models within our profession guarantees that no typology will be complete enough to stand on its own. There will be multiple versions of the definitions, for different markets, advancement cultures, and types of institutions. Advancement relies on human behavior, which defies global, standardized models.
We should not rely entirely on predictive models I've mentioned that we need to reserve a spot for professional judgment alongside our increased understanding of data modeling. We can increase our overall effectiveness by using analytics and big data. But decisions about how to engage a particular volunteer or when to ask for a large gift depend more on our human understanding of an individual's motivation than on a quantitative analysis of "people who are like that person." So far – in my experience – data-driven suggestion engines (like Amazon or Netflix) are still wrong more often than they are right. They can also prevent users from exploring unconventional solutions to current problems.
Innovation helps and hinders classification Our society is obsessed with fostering a culture of innovation. And every new tool that helps us solve a problem also makes new outcomes possible. We will need to update our typology constantly to account for newly-desired desired outcomes (and newly-created problems).
Today's financially constrained and increasingly business-like environment in advancement means we are ever-more focused on return on investment. I agree that we will benefit eventually from a more systematic and consistent approach to our profession. By itself, a definition and typology for alumni engagement can't solve our dilemmas. But it will help us articulate more effectively – especially to those elsewhere in the institution – what our purpose is, and how we know whether we are achieving it.
"Institutional advancement" is the euphemism for the collected professions of fundraisers, communicators, and alumni specialists in education. In 2011, an interesting discussion with my colleague Philip Lehman led us to wonder: could there be such a thing as "advancement theory"?
If it could exist, how might we characterize it for others to build on?
Complexity and Unifying Theories In her book Complexity: A Guided Tour, Melanie Mitchell explores whether her own field, called "complexity science," might benefit from synthesizing its varied threads. Complexity theory has its roots in chaos theory, theoretical physics, and abstract math. So...not much connection to alumni relations or fundraising. However, her exploration of complexity's framework made me ponder a systematic look into advancement.
Mitchell asks, is it worth seeking "general principles or a 'unified theory' covering all complex systems?" I wonder, are there structured ideas within advancement rigorous enough to be considered "theories"? If so, should we gather, evaluate, and organize those ideas in relation to each other?
[What is the "stuff" of advancement? What are its building blocks?]
Mitchell points out that some sciences are almost ready for unification, others are not. Physics for example is "conceptually way ahead." It is 2,000 years old, and has identified the two kinds of "stuff" that things are made of (energy and matter). Physics has related energy and matter to each other (E=mc2), and has unified three of the supposed four forces of nature. Complexity, on the other hand, hasn't identified anything in its realm comparable to forces or "stuff."
There are steps to evolving a theory and using it. First you have to articulate the theories, and account for their conceptual building blocks. Then you can establish the likely relationships among these building blocks, so the model describes the way the discipline behaves in the real world. Then and only then can you start to unify related theories into an overarching description of an entire branch of knowledge (or practice).
Advancement: Hardly Scientific What is the "stuff" of advancement – its building blocks? The practice of fundraising, communications, and alumni relations? We need specific, detailed descriptions of what our work includes.
A first step would be to articulate common advancement principles that apply to all institutions. Further description of these principles would then follow, with practitioners trading, and improving on generalizations that grow from specific instances that represent the underlying principles.
This is how highly structured fields prune and shape their theoretical foundations. Can advancement do this? Should we bother? Or is advancement too unstructured, too diverse, and too unscientific to be crafted into a conceptual framework that would be of any use?
First Steps JT Forbes at Indiana University and other members of the Council of Alumni Association Executives have drafted some definitions and descriptions that get alumni relations started in this direction.
The business school is relatively small, new, and outside of Europe, not that well-known. Their recent "Let's Beat Stanford" effort – to increase alumni giving – took a behavioral approach to participation in financial support. SSE Riga alumnus Raimonds Kulbergs is driving this aggressive effort. Their goal was to defeat Stanford's Graduate School of Business, as measured by alumni participation in giving, since Stanford is seen as the most effective university fundraising machine in the world.
Much of what Kulbergs and his colleagues accomplished has been done elsewhere, but there are lessons in Kulbergs' approach. He created an online experience to engage people more fully than many alumni programs do. And SSE's "Let's Beat Stanford" campaign has just earned them a presitigious European advertising honor, an Effie Award. The Effies (so named because they recognize advertising effectiveness) "recognize any and all forms of marketing communication that contribute to a brand's success." SSE Riga won a Gold Effie in the "Product or Service Launch" category.
And SSE Riga wasn't competing against other annual funds. They were in a program that recognizes the advertising success of firms such as Audi, Sony, Lexus and Coca-Cola.
["There will always be more people who want to have fun, than people who care about the cause"]
So what did they launch? A creative way to improve fundraising results. Kulberg told me about his efforts a couple of years ago, after a dramatic rise in alumni giving, from 0% to 11% in four years. SSE then tried their new approach and leapt to 33% in the first year of Kulbergs' experimentation. I said to him at the time, "That's great, but unless you retain donors and maintain that level of support, your approach is not a viable long-term strategy."
He contacted me again recently and said "We've retained donors and we reached 35% in 2013." So I took a closer look at what they've done.
Kulbergs' common sense approach uses the basic building blocks of behavioral influence, with an emphasis on how people interact online. In Kulbergs' words, "We bet it all on the assumption that we can significantly change the giving behavior of alumni by addressing their human needs, like recognition, playing and being social."
Specifically,
1) SSE Riga published nostalgic photos online to remind alumni about SEE Riga, their student experience and the community of alumni.
2) They gamified the donation process with:
- competitive elements - infographics that change in real-time to show fundraising activity - reasonably priced naming opportunities (e.g., naming a classroom seat for 200 Euros) and - social media integration, of course.
3) They brought it to life with a face-to-face social event at the institution.
[SSE Riga gamified the donation process with competition, infographics, naming opportunities and social media integration]
The infographics deserve a slightly closer look They are simple, yet not often deployed on other giving sites I've seen. For example, a circle representing a graduation class grows as the total of its donations increases, relative to other class cohorts. This is just a variation on the "progress thermometer" which has been around for years, but animated online it takes on new life. Similar graphics expand nations on a map, in proportion to the giving from alumni in each country. And firms' employees can compete with fellow alumni working at their industry competitors. Finally, individuals are listed – and ranked – for their giving on separate donor honor rolls.
The campaign's creators more or less invented a school mascot (a unique creature named Hardy Rock) based on an architectural element of the institution's building. They then deployed imagery of the mascot "defeating" the mascots of universities with higher percentages of alumni giving, along the way to the top spot, occupied by Stanford. Stanford is represented here by its tree mascot, being defeated by Hardy Rock, who has laser beams coming out of his eyes – which is awesome:
But what about that goal of challenging Stanford? In 2011, Stanford's business alumni were giving at a rate of 34% and SSE made that their goal. No European business school at the time had a participation rate anywhere near this, and SSE's own alumni were giving at 11%. But as noted above, in 2013, SSE Riga hit 35% participation – a percentage point higher than Stanford's.
Raimonds calls this a "David versus Goliath story," but I am not sure that's the case. Stanford's business school is much bigger than SSE, but a larger alumni population doesn't necessarily lead to a higher participation rate. In fact, smaller networks tend to be more densely connected, which can drive higher results than one would see in a larger population. In a small network, like SSE Riga's, any two members are more likely to know each other than in a larger network. Targeting about 1,500 alumni worldwide meant a scalable effort that didn't require a large insitutional investment in a professional fundraising operation. Stanford GSB claims 28,190 living alumni by comparison - almost 20 times as many as SSE Riga targeted with their campaign.
Another noteworthy aspect of SSE RIga's results is that it is volunteer-driven. Raimonds says,
We formed a volunteer team with experise in business, IT, and design. Alumni working at ad agency DDB volunteered some of the creative capacity for this project – making nice-looking visuals and witty text for social media. They set out to reimagine the donation process and built a platform with game elements, integrated with social media, where alumni were given control over the donation campaign, and progress was fully transparent to the alumni in real time.
I think that their "outsider" perspective allowed the volunteers to see things with fresh eyes, something hard to do when you are immersed in the traditional every day machinery most of us work with in annual giving and alumni relations.
A final lesson This effort incorporates the building blocks of crowdfunding, which other educational institutions are adopting for small projects among their larger fundraising efforts. Without the background of a giant campaign to build endowment, or an army of gift officers securing large pledges, this crowdfunding approach becomes the core of a small institution's fundraising persona. It will be interesting to see if it drives the growth of a more traditional development office over time – a kind of reverse evolution of the fundraising office.
Incidentally, Kulbergs recognized that the tactics they employed on behalf of SSE Riga could potentially aid any institution trying to engage more people more effectively in support of alma mater. So Kulbergs and his current colleagues quit their prior fulltime jobs and created a company called Funderful. They are already working with other European institutions to bring their approach to more universities, including this simple approach for Nyenrode Business University in the Netherlands.
In case you skipped it up above, here again is the short (2 minutes 45 seconds) video about the overall approach and results from SSE Riga's award winning effort. This video is worth watching, to get a better sense of the game and social elements incorporated into the project:
This is the third and final article adapted from my alumni relations keynote at CASE V in Chicago (December 2013), Alumni Relations & Advancement's Future: 3 Questions.
§§
"My interest is in the future, because I am going to spend the rest of my life there." –Charles Kettering 1946
My final question about the future is about prediction itself:
Can we predict future changes in alumni relations?
Where We Go Wrong Our profession has an uneven track record for anticipating change. Even after a transition is underway, assessing its outcome is difficult. This may sound obvious. But some examples from advancement have surprised me.
Around 1999 a company called zUniversity promoted the premise that "alumni portals" were the future of the Internet. Online retailing did grow explosively in the dotcom era, but we quickly learned that almost nobody would buy books, CDs, or other merchandise by passing through an alumni website on their way to a retailer's site.
Why did many experienced alumni professionals believe that alumni would see their alma mater as a source for everyday retail purchases?
Another example is the massive time, attention, and money that institutions lavished on so-called online communities to compete with Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, LinkedIn and others. Today, all of us have more alumni on Facebook and LinkedIn than we ever had in branded online alumni communities.
[All of us have more alumni on Facebook and LinkedIn than we ever had in our online communities]
Flaws in our ideas can seem more obvious with hindsight. The approaches I mentioned above drew some criticism at the time, but some of us criticized Amazon, eBay, and the iTunes Store too, and they turned out to be wildly successful. Credit is due to those who are willing to innovate, and take risks on new ideas. Regardless of the eventual outcome, risk-taking grows from speculation about the future.
Is It Bad to Be Wrong? These kinds of mistakes can be valuable, because they reveal weak spots in our planning and decision-making. And in most cases, these kinds of predictive miscues are rarely fatal.
So how do we learn from our experience?
And how do we predict the future?
Two Prediction Models
1) Ask Relevant Questions An author I've mentioned elsewhere on this blog, Clay Shirky, provides a lesson here. In Here Comes Everybody, Shirky described how journalists failed to see the threat to their profession from bloggers. "Blogs," said the news professionals, "are not a legitimate place for journalism. We are credentialed, experienced, and recognized. Bloggers aren't."
But Shirky points out that instead of asking, "Are blogs a legitimate place for journalism?" they should have asked, "Are blogs an alternative to journalism itself?"
The journalists asked the wrong question. They thought they were in the "news" business, but they are really in the communication business – and so are bloggers.
[Are online platforms an alternative to alumni associations themselves?]
This applies directly to our experience online. For years we asked, "Are Facebook and LinkedIn viable places for alumni organizations to work?" But the question to ask is: "Are online platforms an alternative to alumni associations themselves?"
Instead of asking, "How should we do alumni relations?" perhaps we should ask, "What business are we in? And who are we competing with?"
Our experience with online social networks suggests that we're not in the alumni business. We're in the community business. And our competition is...everyone. This should inform our vision of the future of our alumni relationships.
It also connects to the prime example from our second prediction model:
2) Find the Transaction Costs in Advancement
Nobel Prize economist Ronald Coase provided another useful framework.
Coase, who passed away recently at the age of 102, explored the idea of transaction cost in business. This is not "cost" in the sense of buying and selling, but cost in the sense of the inefficiency of exchanging resources (including information).
Over time, obstacles to the efficient transmission of information tend to decrease and often, to disappear. Any middleman in this process must either become more effective, or eventually be cut out.
A case study is the effect of powerful Internet search on alumni organizations in the last decade.
[Evolution toward efficiency foreshadows the disappearance of the online alumni directory]
The tendency toward efficiency foreshadowed the imminent disappearance of the printed alumni directory and its online cousins. Although still a middleman, Google is dramatically more efficient than an online alumni directory. Why? Because Google returns search results from an alumna's entire world – not just the alumni network – with no additional effort, and no additional "transaction cost."
Similarly, used as a directory, LinkedIn can tell you who is in the network. But LinkedIn can also tell you how you're connected to each member of the network, making the "cost" of connecting with them (in time and effort) significantly lower.
The alumni office can find your old roommate for you. Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook can find almost anyone – in ten seconds. The alumni organization was previously an aid to interaction. But with our offices, as Shirky has said of many organizations, what was once a service has become a bottleneck.
What It Means This erosion of transaction costs suggests that most of the services we now provide to alumni will eventually go the way of the printed directory. Matching students with alumni for internships, recruiting applicants for admission, connecting job seekers with employers, and hosting events that connect alumni to their alma mater – all these processes will become more streamlined and eventually the alumni office middleman will be cut out. The question is, over what timeframe will all this happen?
Are we at the beginning of a long, slow effort to maintain our relevance? Or will the rate of change continue to increase, resulting in a total loss of our traditional roles in the near future?
[Are we at the beginning of a long slow effort to maintain our relevance?]
Not All Doom and Gloom My goal here is not to sound the death knell for alumni organizations. My goal is to stimulate more wide-ranging, and more future-focused thoughts about our organizations. The changes I mentioned in the first two articles in this series will shape our institutions, but will also result in new roles, new jobs, and new challenges for us – including many that we will fail to predict.
Learning from our past misperceptions can help us read advancement's road map into the future. There will always be changes that we can't anticipate, and developments that catch even "experts" by surprise, as we saw in the first 100 years of the alumni relations profession.
But with common sense, an eye for history, and an appreciation for the unexpected, we may be able to re-invent our profession so that it lasts for another hundred years and more.
