alumni futures

LinkedIn for Alumni Professionals at Technical Institutions

Many of us use LinkedIn to help alumni activate their networks for professional advancement. But do you use LinkedIn for your own benefit? LinkedIn has a Groups function which, though far from perfect, can be useful in many cases.

There is a CASE (Council for Advancement and Support of Education) Group on LinkedIn, and there are also a few subgroups. As of this writing, they include

• Independent Schools
  
• CASE District II
  
• Alumni Volunteers in India
  

and

• Alumni Professionals in Technical and Engineering Institutions.
  

I suggested this last group as one that would appeal to those of us whose alumni audience is heavily weighted toward engineers, scientists and other research professions. If this describes your own institution then check out the subgroup and post discussion items to share program ideas and to ask questions. Basic LinkedIn membership is free for individuals.

5 Alumni Social Networks You Never Heard Of

All we hear these days (in the United States at least) is "Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn." But over the last couple of years a number of almost unknown sites have tried connecting alumni across school lines. Like the original version of Facebook, theses sites have used alumni identity as the basis for personal profiles. Unlike Facebook, they have either failed, or at least failed to gain much traction.

According to the "About Us" page on each site, people would think your profile, your photos and your blog were so interesting that they would be compelled to "connect" with you. I wish I had kept a comprehensive list of these sites, because now that I am finally writing about them, most of them are gone. 

So to end the year, instead of going on ad nauseam about the sites we're tired of hearing about (and writing and talking about), here's a quick glance at some of the social networks you probably haven't heard of. A couple of them you'll never hear about again after reading this. So enjoy. 

thesquare.com
This site won't die. It's amazing. It started as a social network for Ivy League graduates (later spreading to "top colleges") and it quickly expanded in the pre-Facebook world. The other day I easily retrieved my password after not having visited the site for three or four years. The web design leaves a bit to be desired. Here are the schools whose students and alumni are invited to join, as listed on the home page. Click to view actual size:

 

After logging in I noticed a couple of odd things. My profile listed the wrong college graduation year, but a search for "classmates" did return a list of people who really were in my graduating class. The real sign that something was amiss came when I clicked the job postings for my home city. There are 3,800,000 people in Los Angeles; TheSquare has four job listings for the city. And all four are from 2007. Enough said.

Yahoo! Kickstart 
Yahoo! Kickstart never had a chance. During its brief lifetime (about eight months) it was plagued with downtime and error messages at every turn. Even if it had worked, Kickstart was a solution in search of a problem, a recruiting site masquerading as a social network. 

To attract members, Yahoo! offered a prize of $25,000 for the alumni association that could recruit the most Kickstart members. I recall hearing that Stanford signed up a paltry 300 soon-to-be-disappointed recruits and (reportedly) won the cash. From anything other than a marketing standpoint, it was a silly competition (except maybe for Stanford), since it rewarded absolute numbers of new members instead of proportional participation. No matter, Yahoo! killed the site a couple of months later, just as it killed Yahoo!Live, Yahoo!360 and Yahoo!Vibe. Kickstart's demise was so unimportant that today it's hard to find any mention of its closing. Meanwhile, maybe Yahoo! has finally figured it out by starting to integrate with Facebook.

bigsight.org
Bigsight bills itself as "the web's central people directory," which it is not. According to Quantcast, the site saw significantly decreasing traffic over the last two months, averaging 7,800 monthly uniques for the year (about 4.5 times the traffic of Alumni Futures). This doesn't qualify it as "the web's central people directory" – Facebook has about 130 million uniques per month. When I tried to use Bigsight last week, every click produced the following error message. I probably won't be going back. (Click image to view larger):

 

OnlyAlumni.com 
Despite a laudatory press release quoting a mysterious administrator of the site (known only as "Todd"), this site lasted about as long as a Yahoo! social network. The site's developer described it on her blog as "a social networking site with about 8,000 colleges, fraternities and sororities." It was pre-populated with rudimentary information about each school or organization, but lacked a unique role and had no buy-in from those institutions – in fact, they didn't even know they were members. Today, clicking the link for OnlyAlumni sends you to a site that sells bicycles. It's not a total loss, however; I am seriously thinking about getting the ABICI Granturismo Uomo Grigio. 

BrownGrad.com
I graduated from Brown University, so this would have been my site. This service quickly devolved from a social network to an email forwarding system "with flair." The flair part, they explain, is that the name of your school (or its mascot) becomes part of the domain name. 

So, why use my alumni.brown.edu email address when I can use browngrad.com? 

Summary
I haven't mentioned some of the more well-known sites (Friendster, MySpace, Friends Reunited, Classmates), or some of the slightly different ones. There are aggregators such as Regroup.com, or the grad-student focused inDegree. And then there's Academia.edu, a truly higher ed-focused network for graduate students, researchers and faculty members at colleges and universities worldwide. Plus there are the many, many sites built on the Ning engine, each focusing on a specialized group or interest.

How many of the remaining social networks will still be here at the end of 2010? What new ones will take their place? Maybe we'll check back in a year to find out.

Note: Alumni Futures will be on break until mid-January, 2010. Happy New Year to all, and thank you for your support and interest during 2009.

In-House Online Communities: Good Investment?

Over in the interesting comments to last week's posting about free speech and online venues, Peter Osborn asked

Why do you think an investment of resources in private-label social networks is a bad one and under what circumstances would you change your mind? Do you, for example, see any potential in LinkedIn alumni groups?

On the topic of LinkedIn Groups, my short answer is "Yes, I see potential." I've explained why in prior posts. Recently, for example, I wrote about using Group discussions on LinkedIn, and the second half of my posting about social network growth last July contains my latest views about making LinkedIn Groups useful to alumni associations. Last April, my colleague Elizabeth Allen guest blogged about managing Groups, and has written about social site group management on her own site as well (and plans to do so in the future). 

[Updated 31 October, 2009: Here's another posting from Liz Allen about using LinkedIn Groups effectively: LinkedIn Group Management: Are You Using the Tools?]

As for an alumni association building its own site, I was a little surprised CASE CURRENTS pursued this in the article I mentioned last week. The value of asking the single question ("Is it worth it to have a private label network site?") has decreased steadily with the rise of third-party sites such as Facebook. 

Instead of a single question, now there are several inter-related questions to answer, and the answers will vary from institution to institution.

• Can we provide alumni (and students) with content or services they can't get elsewhere? 
• Does our audience need this content, either because it helps them solve a problem or because it fulfills some desire for them? 
• How many alumni need to be active, for how long, and how frequently - and in which ways - before we can declare that our site is a "success"?
• Can portability address the issue of putting our brand in front of our alumni, without requiring them to visit our site?
• What do we measure to evaluate the service, and how do we compare our information to metrics from other venues (including third-party services and traditional, face to face interaction)?
• How about opportunity cost? Could time spent on our in-house community be better spent on traditional activities, third-party site community management, or new endeavors?

The point is, arguing for or against school-hosted and school-managed network sites is complicated, and will become more complex as commercial services (some of which are yet to be invented) provide additional utility to alumni. My initial feeling is that in the face of tight budgets, static or decreased staffing, and more external venues to monitor, only organizations with very generous resources can justify the commitment to designing, building, launching, marketing and maintaining a truly private in-house site. 

As for the other part of Peter's question (about "when I might change my mind"), I will do so when third-party sites are flexible and open enough to allow seamless integration with our own online communities. If alumni associations didn't have to think of social networks in terms of "public" or "private" and "open" or "closed" then this wouldn't be an issue. We would be talking about functionality and utility and not access. Meanwhile, it is very important to remember that LinkedIn and Facebook are not completely "open" networks – yes, anyone can join, but you can't connect with their members unless you join as well. They are "walled gardens" too – they're just vastly larger than our alumni-only walled gardens. 

We have many other challenges in the meantime: understanding changes in regional club or chapter behavior, partnering with career offices in a weak jobs environment, the evolving integration of printed and online "publications," the relationship with fundraising activity – the list is long. Even if you are lucky enough to have the resources for staffing an in-house community online, you still have to address how our audiences expect and need us to participate in third-party sites. For almost all of us, the answer is still difficult to see clearly – we are still in the early stages of true online community.

I am interested to hear examples of how both internal and external services are helping your program, or harming it. Leave a comment.

Your School: A Flatland for Students

You may be familiar with Flatland: A Romance in Many Dimensions by 19th century author Edwin Abbott. Flatland is a two-dimensional land populated by polygons, and the story satirizes Victorian England's hierarchical social structure. Of equal interest to many readers is the book's clear articulation of the mathematical ideas behind different dimensions.

The narrator, named A Square, sees A Sphere (a visitor from a three-dimensional place called Spaceland) move through Flatland. But A Square doesn't recognize the visitor as a sphere, because he has no knowledge of the three-dimensional world the sphere inhabits. From A Square's vantage point as a flat observer, the sphere passing through the plane he inhabits looks like a single point that grows into a line. It then shrinks to a point again before disappearing magically (click the illustration from the book to view full size). A three-dimensional object is unrecognizable, and is beyond comprehension to a two-dimensional being. But if he could be lifted up above the plane he inhabits, A Square would see the relationship between the sphere and the plane. 

I think that A Square's plight is analogous to that of many current undergraduate students when they interact with alumni. The students' perceptions are limited in time and space by the very nature of their experience; when an older, experienced alumnus passes through the student's world, context limits their ability to recognize the graduate for what he or she really is: a rich resource, a person with experience and insight that the student could use, if only the student could rise above the Flatland of the insulated student environment and gaze upon it from Spaceland.

Students who thrive in "real world" situations are those who rise up and seek a three-dimensional look at the world outside their campus. This isn't a criticism of students, nor is it applicable to all undergraduates. But as I chatted about Flatland with a colleague recently, it occurred to me that Edwin Abbott's ordering of the various dimensions could be compared to the relative amount of time students and alumni have spent in the wider world. Experience away from campus and from traditional student life expands the viewer's awareness of the world and provides depth that allows him to recognize and understand unfamiliar people and things.

Is this too much of a stretch? Does the analogy make sense?

Related: In July 2008 I asked "do science students really learn science" - or something more?


Illustration from chapter 16 of Flatland: A Romance in Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott. In the public domain. Find the book in a library near you using WorldCat.

We Should Learn About Network Science

 

Last week I spoke at two events in Europe. First, Illuminate Consulting Group (I'm on their academic advisory board) and the Chronicle of Higher Education teamed up to deliver a day-long seminar for senior university leaders from the UK, Australia, Canada and other countries. Imperial College London hosted the program, titled How the Global Economic Crisis is Shaping Competitiveness Ten Years Out: International Recruiting, Research and Relationships.

 

Second, with Illuminate's founder, Dan Guhr, I spoke at the annual meeting of the European Association for International Education (EAIE) in Madrid. I first spoke at that meeting in 2007. The topic this time was technology's role in changing international student recruiting and alumni relations.

 

 

The presentations generated thoughtful discussion and useful insights (for me, anyway). Here's a brief general treatment of one specific idea for readers of Alumni Futures. 

 

It's Time We Learned About Network Science

Both meetings last week consisted of multiple presentations stitched together by a single thread: how networks behave. Many of the discussions were built almost entirely on the idea of the many networks that hold together the educational disciplines: alumni networks, student networks, academic networks, research networks, business or professional networks – and of course, social networks.

 

This theme occurs more and more frequently in our professions, and that's one reason I write about it here. But mostly, I think it can help us be more effective at maintaining a useful role in the lives of alumni. (I also just think it's interesting.)

 

But only one of the presenters I heard explicitly acknowledged that we were talking about the formal aspect of how members of networks behave, influence each other, and relate. Of course, for decades (centuries, I suppose) we have known that we belong to networks – families, companies, towns, sororities, sports teams, graduating classes, political parties, religious groups, and more. But only recently have the structure, behavior and characteristics of networks under different conditions become a systematic scientific pursuit.

 

The mathematics behind network science is beyond me (which won't surprise anyone familiar with my academic achievements in that field). However, there is a wealth of accessible literature that explains in understandable ways what we do know about networks, and it is past the time for fundraising and other advancement professionals to learn about the simple ideas that underpin network science. Learning about scale-free networks, power law distributions, Metcalfe's and Reed's Laws, and more has completely changed my understanding of what alumni and student networks are, and what their members can do with them.

 

We constantly talk about "the alumni network" but I don't think we have a very good idea what a network really is, how it works, what its potential value is, and how networks evolve. Even common sense observations seem to be beyond some (otherwise sensible) people's ability to understand. For example, people often blame the network when they don't get results – in a job search, a business deal, or a simple referral. I've heard this from people who had recently joined LinkedIn, expecting job offers to appear with no effort on their part. One speaker in London said, "Networks don't fail. Network members fail." With a few specific exceptions, I think this is generally true.

 

Below are links to some general resources that you can use to get started thinking about networks. If you have your own favorite sources of information on this topic, or constructive criticism of the ones I've listed, please share links or citations in the comments.

• Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What it Means by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
• How to Build Your Network by Brian Uzzi (Harvard Business Review)
• Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan Watts

In future postings I'll mention a few other ideas I absorbed at last week's interesting meetings. And I'll also talk about what might influence the success or failure of alumni networks in particular.

 

 

Photo from the EAIE meeting in Madrid by Andy Shaindlin, all rights reserved.

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?

University of Colorado: Mandatory Student Fee for Alumni Dues

On June 8, the Chronicle of Higher Education [subscription required] carried a story about plans at the University of Colorado to implement a new funding scheme to support alumni activities. 

Starting with this fall's freshman class, the university system's alumni association will be requiring students to pay a lifetime-membership fee of $70 when they enroll. Under the association's previous model, [alumni] were asked for $45 annually only after they graduated. 

The story is quite brief and doesn't clearly explain how administrators arrived at this model. Obviously, charging students one more fee, using existing billing and payment systems, is an easy way to generate cash without the overhead of a dues program. Collecting association dues ordinarily requires staff members to track annual payments, generate renewal notices, and monitor the administration of benefits.

The alumni association's interim director, Ron Stump is quoted as saying that "students can know they won't be solicited for the rest of their lives." Maybe, but this assumes that it would ever occur to a student that they'd have to pay dues in the first place. I'm not sure it will feel like a favor when the fee gets tagged on to the tuition, the room, and the board plan. Most students may not even know they've "joined" anything – because they haven't.

Also, most students and many alumni don't know the difference between an alumni association and a development office or foundation. So there's some chance that alumni who thought they wouldn't be solicited "for the rest of their lives" may be confused (or even resentful) when they are asked to donate to the university later on.

Stump meanwhile says that the alumni association will work with the career center on campus "to help place students in jobs and internships with alumni." That's good, but that's also something every association should try to do, regardless of dues structure. 

100% of the money will go to the association, and they can increase the amount in future years. So how much cash are we talking about? According to the school's web site, in 2007, 5,555 first year undergraduates enrolled. Under the new scheme, the association would garner almost $390,000 in "dues" with that size freshman class. 

On its way to the bank, the association should be careful not to think they've solved the alumni network problem. They'll have generated cash flow, which is no mean feat in days of disappearing affinity revenues and shrinking support from general budgets and investment income. But I would dispute the claim by a student leader who says that this approach "builds a community." He further explains, 

When you're setting foot on this campus, you're part of a huge alumni network. We're all Buffaloes together.

Every large institution has "a huge alumni network." What matters isn't whether it exists. What matters is whether alumni can activate the network and access its resources to fulfill their needs and solve their problems. And it takes more than dues money to accomplish that.

I'm curious to hear others' thoughts about this approach to funding alumni activities. Do the pros outweigh the cons?

University of Colorado Alumni Membership page

Guest Blogger Elizabeth Allen: Managing LinkedIn Alumni Groups

[Updated 24 October 2009: Liz Allen is blogging about "managing communciations, technology, and social media at Adaptivate.] 

[Updated 13 July 2009: The "Notes" feature mentioned below on 15 May has been broken for a while. Adding a note to a member's record reproduces that same note for other group members, over-writing your own previous annotation.]

[Updated 15 May 2009: Liz Allen notes that LinkedIn has added a "Notes" feature to the queue for pending group membership approvals, something she proposed to LinkedIn a long time ago. "You can put in a note about an individual pending request," says Liz, "and the other group managers can see it. This will be useful for groups that have more than one person approving group requests, and for managing work flow."]

[Updated 28 April 2009: link to Liz Allen's guest posting on the LinkedIn Blog.]

This post is written by Elizabeth Allen, associate director of alumni relations at the California Institute of Technology. You can follow her on Twitter @lizallen and read her thoughts at Adaptivate.

I have managed the Caltech Alumni Association's LinkedIn Group since its launch in May 2005. Every week we receive from 50 to 100 requests to join. And yes, I check every single request against the names in our alumni database. This is time consuming and not so fun, but I do it 1) to maintain the integrity of the group itself (no recruiters, thank you) and 2) to check alumni email addresses against our records.

LinkedIn's admin tools have remained relatively unchanged for the last four years. Some cosmetic differences, maybe. But recently LinkedIn did make some changes to the group administrative capabilities – some good, some not so good.

The Good:

• Group managers can post RSS feeds to the group. The feeds are in addition to individual articles and news stories posted by members of the group. You can also post more than one feed. 


• Via LinkedIn, you can send an email blast to the members of your group, though the formatting leaves something to be desired. From what I can see, the messaging feature essentially automates a process you could have done by hand in the past: instead of downloading a list of group member email addresses and sending the message yourself, LinkedIn will do it for you.

Which leads me to 

The Bad:

Group admins still have access to the individual addresses while a member's request is pending. But as admins, we've lost the ability to retrieve a list of all group members' email addresses. Once in the group, members' email addresses are hidden from the admin (unless you happen to be directly connected to the individual group member), and are no longer exportable en masse.

No more email addresses means one more barrier between an organization and data about its group members. Having access to that information – email addresses, as well as other user data that aren't downloadable by admins – would be really helpful. Are most of my group members located in urban areas? Foreign countries? How many are currently looking for work? How many have participated in a group discussion, or posted a job? How about the average number of connections? And the number of connections within the group? Crunching these numbers would help us as group managers determine the real value our alumni get from LinkedIn.

To accomplish this, I'd like access to a Google Analytics/Group Management hybrid: a dashboard where group admins can access data (like the kind I mentioned above) about their group and its members. Andy Shaindlin proposed a Group Manager's dashboard here in 2007.

The updated groups features for LinkedIn admins do add tools that make it easier for individuals to disseminate information. And communication and connectivity among group members are key reasons to have a group in the first place. Tools like this add value to the group member experience, and I have no doubt that our LinkedIn group is a useful resource for alumni. I'd just like something more than anecdotal evidence to prove it.

*

Note: Speaking of LinkedIn Groups, the group Alumni Nets will serve professionals using LinkedIn for alumni groups. If you manage a LinkedIn alumni group, or want to discuss online alumni communities, you can join Alumni Nets.

Are Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter Converging?

[Updated 24 March 2009 with link to Interfolio, "credential, dossier and online portfolio service."]

[Updated 23 March 2009 with link to Andrew Careaga's post that brings newspapers and journalism into this thread.]

I recently mentioned in one of my online status updates that my personal and professional networks seem to be converging online. (Did I mention this on Twitter? Facebook? LinkedIn? I can't remember...and that's sort of the point.) 

Specifically, a large majority of people I know are active on Facebook and/or LinkedIn. Facebook started out as my "personal" network and LinkedIn started out as my "professional" network. I'd find someone from high school on Facebook. Panelists at a conference would find me on LinkedIn. This was neat and easy.

Now, it's a big jumble. LinkedIn suggests that you "may know" your spouse and recommends you connect with him to grow your network. Facebook tells you...well Facebook tells you that someone you know took a dumb quiz. And now Twitter tells us what LinkedIn and Facebook are telling our contacts to tell us. 

So are these services overlapping, are they simply connected, or are they converging? Will we end up with a single place to connect with people and share "updates," or will the sites' functionality continue on more or less parallel paths? 

When I asked this in a status update last week, I received a few interesting reactions:

Charlie O'Donnell from recently-launched career site Path101, wrote about behavior and experience: 

Behavior on these networks is vastly different. I could have all the same contacts in each (which I purposely do not) and they wouldn't be anywhere near the same experiences. Facebook has so many more ways to communicate...Messages, wall posts, pokes, comments...It's "live". Facebook is the quad, while LinkedIn is the rolodex that sits on my desk. LinkedIn is not an engaging, social place. It is an effective tool. What will prevent LinkedIn from becoming more social and more communicative is that throttling and controlling communication is how they make money.

Sherry Main (who works at the University of California–Irvine) mentioned the portfolio approach to marketing oneself. Profiles on network sites are not enough anymore:  

I'd throw in a VisualCV type of tool in too. Particularly since college graduates are coming out with all kinds of portfolios these days, ranging from dance majors to computer science majors.

And Princeton's Andrew Gossen made several related points (including a similar one about portfolios; see Interfolio for another example of this service). Among them:

• LinkedIn will become more like Facebook; not the other way around. 
• Profiles should appear one way to personal friends and another way to actual and prospective professional contacts and the filtering process should be automated. Enter your info once, and have the system display what's relevant to different categories of people (after you've assigned them to a contact type). 
• Some way to sync evolving professional and personal networks with smartphones or PDAs would be incredibly valuable. 
• To a large extent, status updates are a game of one-upsmanship. But you'd brag very differently to a professional audience than to a personal audience. As the two types of networks converge, different channels for these two types of communication must evolve. 

These are great insights and ideas and bear watching. I personally believe we're moving toward the incorporation of network tools (including Twitter) into the OS or desktop; we won't need to "log in" to a site or service. The functions will be "always on" and therefore, so will the network.

What are your ideas or observations about the ways in which our networks are coalescing – or resisting integration? 

Leave a comment.

Photo of converging, connected lines via Creative Commons from Flickr user Bill Frazzetto.

 

The Student-Alumni Boundary Breaks Down

"Students are alumni are students."

So says international analyst and consultant Dan Guhr. He recently commented that the boundary between student and alumnus is gradually dissolving. "Traditional, rigid concepts of student and alumnus are breaking down," he says.

Why is this happening? Dan cites several reasons.

• A weakening of the student–alumni boundary reflects students' need to connect into a network earlier in their education.
• Similarly, early talent acquisition brings alumni and students into the recruiting game, either directly (interviewing) or indirectly (as part of online communities).
• The trend also reflects alumni with professional needs looking for talented students.
• Life-long learning opportunities (and therefore repeat educational experiences) are increasingly prevalent. "Alumnus = student" says Dan.

So what's the likely result of these trends?

Dealing with alumni will become increasingly free-flowing, with individuals moving and connecting according to their preferences, and not according to an institution's organizational design.

In other words, says Dan, we will see the breakdown of internal silos, which have structured higher education's responses to the outside world for a long time. In their place? An externally-focused model based on acquiring and processing information from the alumni network — instead of the other way around.