I'm thrilled to announce that effective immediately, I am joining the consulting firm of Grenzebach Glier & Associates (GG+A) as Vice President.
As a consultant focused on alumni relations, I will advise a wide variety of institutions on alumni outreach, strategy, governance and programming. It is a pleasure to join GG+A's Chris Marshall in this effort. Chris has led GG+A's focus on alumni relations for more than two years. With GG+A's global footprint, I'll be able to reach and help many more institutions than I can as a solo consultant under the Alumni Futures banner.
I will phase out Alumni Futures as a consultancy, working part-time for GG+A at first, and ramping up to a full-time role in the coming months. However, I will continue to blog periodically from Alumni Futures, and will maintain the pages and resources available here. And of course I'll still be on Twitter as @alumnifutures.
About GG+A Founded in 1961, GG+A is a global firm with a focus on education, arts and culture, healthcare and the voluntary sector. Grounded in philanthropy advising, the firm is steadily expanding its work with alumni communities of all kinds. Given the challenges that alumni relations professionals face, this is a great time to increase and strengthen the guidance these communities receive from experienced experts.
[It's a great time to strengthen the guidance that alumni professionals receive from experienced experts]
And coming soon... Soon, I will also share with you another exciting project I'm pursuing, on the future of alumni relations. I'll be seeking your insight, feedback and thoughts on the coming second century of organized alumni relations.
A word of thanks This is also a great opportunity for me to express my sincere gratitude to the thousands of supportive subscribers, friends, clients, readers and followers of Alumni Futures since 2007. As I transition to my new role, the Alumni Futures Advisory Group will phase out its work. I offer my sincere gratitude and appreciation to all of them - Elizabeth Allen, Hanna Rodriguez-Farrar, Andrew Gossen, Paul Jamieson, Charlie Melichar, Jeff Schoenherr and Michael Tate – for their advice and wisdom over the years.
To discuss consulting of any kind, contact me via my GG+A email address: [email protected].
They rightly point out that in the eyes of students and alumni (especially recent ones), a university is not a cause. This helps explain why it's increasingly difficult to attract and retain these individuals as donors.
The folks at Achieve would agree with that, but I wonder whether their prescription for addressing this will be helpful in the long run. A key component of their advice is that universities should use "cause-type language" in messaging and solicitation.
The problem?
Sounding like a cause does not make you a cause. And donors know this.
Universities exist largely to enable the creation and dissemination of new knowledge. While that has the makings of something broad, societal and over-arching, to accomplish this goal universities are organizations first, and causes second – if at all. Therefore, they generally lack the immediate impact, broad appeal, and problem-solving identity that characterize social causes.
[Sounding like a cause does not make you a cause – and donors know this]
Donors know that a gift to alma mater is generally an indirect way to promote renewable energy, eradicate poverty, alleviate hunger, reduce violence, or decrease pollution.
Of course, universities must raise money! And Achieve's overall assessment is valid. But it can't address the underlying attitudes and expectations of the Millennial prospects that this advice targets.
Doing that will require:
a change in the student experience itself,
a change in the stated purpose of alumni organizations, and
a change in the way universities align their work with that of other world-changing organizations. (I will write much more about this last point in the near future.)
A university is not primarily a cause, it's an organization (or a group of organizations). But by connecting with other organizations and contributing part of the solution to global problems, a university's researchers, students and alumni can support outcomes that transcend the needs of a single institution.
And when they do, they will be much more relevant and engaging to their alumni and donors.
What do you think – is a university a cause? Leave a comment.
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:
my personal effort to generate discussion about new ideas and possible directions for our profession....I hope you'll participate by adding your own ideas and visions for where the field of alumni relations is heading. I expect we'll branch out to other areas in higher education and beyond.
That's exactly what we've done, with your help! I am grateful to all of you. Now, eight years later, Alumni Futures has generated 400,000 page views, over 400 blog posts, and more than 900 comments from readers!
Since 2014, I've also been posting each new article on LinkedIn as well, which (for better or worse) gets more visibility and generates more reader engagement. And it loops in people from outside of the advancement professions and the education sector.
I'm looking forward to writing more frequently this year, and I hope you'll come along for the ride. With more than 2,200 subscribers, there's a diversity of opinion and expertise that I am eager to tap into.
I have left my position as Associate Vice President at Carnegie Mellon University to return full time to consulting, speaking and writing about education, engagement, technology, communications and fundraising.
This gives me the opportunity to work with diverse organizations around the world, and to help others understand the trends affecting our professions. Five years ago I left another institutional role to pursue a similar path, and I found it tremendously rewarding.
I'm excited to be back in the marketplace of ideas as an independent consultant.
Want to discuss a possible project? Just email me: [email protected].
In the coming days I'll publish a full Consulting Services page with additional details, examples of past projects, and a past client list.
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On a personal note, I want to express my sincere appreciation to every member of my talented team in Alumni Relations & Annual Giving at CMU since 2011. I am privileged to have worked with real stars and I will miss them all very much!
An anonymous user recently asked the following question on the "answer site" Quora.com:
What are some innovations in the way that universities are handling their alumni relations?
My answers might be "trends" instead of "innovations," but it's clear that these changes are underway or well-established.
We've seen the following in the last decade or so:
Increased connections between the alumni office and fundraising (e.g., combining alumni staff with annual fund staff; including the alumni association in campaign plans).
More emphasis on career services, networking help, and professional success for alumni. More coordination with the campus career center.
Educating students more intentionally about their future as alumni, well before they graduate and become alumni themselves.
Steadily evolving regional structures. The traditional "chapter" or "club" with a board, a newsletter, regular meetings, and bylaws is evolving into a less structured, adaptable and responsive "network."
Using social media and other digital channels as "listening posts" to learn what alumni care about and what they need. Less of the old fashioned broadcasting of institutional news.
Increasing reliance on third-party digital tools to deliver content and services online. More companies with apps and platforms designed to drive alumni engagement.
These trends are not universal, nor are they growing uniformly. However, they represent the overall shift that alumni programs must make as alumni themselves do more things on their own that had been the sole province of the alumni office or association (e.g., broadcast communication; event planning; fundraising; finding former classmates).
What other innovations do you see, and how are you incorporating them? Leave a comment.
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.
Recently, LinkedIn's university evangelist John Hill invited me to speak informally to members of the LinkedIn education products team at the company's Silicon Valley headquarters. I was grateful for the opportunity, and I enjoyed the discussion. My main point can be summed up this way:
If alumni offices are going to help alumni, we must be able to use LinkedIn to its greatest possible extent. And to do that, we need to understand what a network is (and isn't) and what makes it work.
How can LinkedIn help alumni organizations? First, LinkedIn can lower the cost of sharing information across networks, helping alumni organizations to connect members with the resources they need to solve problems.
A second role for LinkedIn is to reveal relationships. I mean "relationships" in two ways: 1) how two or more people are connected, and 2) causal relationships between inputs and outcomes.
For example, say LinkedIn helps an alumni organization activate a network of experienced entrepreneurs to help less experienced entrepreneurs. Can it predict the most likely, measurable outcomes? Can I understand why those things happened? Can I recreate that outcome in a different setting, for example in a network of non-profit professionals, or alumni living overseas?
I believe the future success of alumni organizations will require understanding our networks, deploying them, and measuring the results.
[the success of alumni organizations requires understanding networks, deploying them, and measuring the results]
Do we understand networks? There are small, dense networks (e.g., rugby players from the class of '86). There are big, loose networks (law school alumni). This mental model is fundamental to knowing what could happen when you seek information from, or insert information into your network. We should build alumni relations on this simple understanding, yet almost nobody I talk to in advancement is familiar with the basics of network science.
Once we understand some fundamentals of network dynamics, LinkedIn – potentially – can shrink the gap between what we know and what we need to know to be relevant to our alumni.
And understanding networks doesn't mean reading a textbook. Insight into networking can come from literary classics, such as these examples that I have quoted on AlumnI Futures in the past.
In Cats Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut's protagonist finds himself chatting with two other Cornell University alumni. But they have nothing else in common, prompting Vonnegut to coin the term granfalloon, which is "a seeming team that is meaningless" – a category that apparently includes alumni groups.
Finally, Truman Capote gives us Breakfast at Tiffany's. Holly Golightly says she is going to help Paul Varjak, her neighbor, land a Hollywood script deal. How? Well, she says:
Then she explains why she wants to help Paul: because he looks like her brother, Fred.
So on the spot Holly invented a network that exists solely because its members look alike. It's a granfalloon.
[anyone can form any group they want and if it fails, there is almost no cost]
Why is this relevant? On the surface, forming a business network based on how people look is nonsense. Capote wants to show that Holly is naive and doesn't know how to connect in the real world. You need a real reason for forming a network, a reason that others recognize as legitimate.
That was true in 1958, when he published his novella. But today, it's no longer true. It is so easy for groups to form, thanks to low transaction costs, that today anyone can form any group they want and if it fails, there is almost no cost.
Why does group formation matter? Because of Reed's Law. In a nutshell, Reed says that as a network grows, its value increases exponentially because it allows subgroups to form. Joining a 20,000 member LinkedIn group is OK. But for an individual, joining a smaller, more personally relevant subgroup holds the greatest potential value.
To your institution, the utility of one particular subgroup may be very small. But a large number of small groups can unlock the value in your community's online network. Remember the long tail?
Why are we not exploiting this function on LinkedIn? Is LinkedIn doing everything it can to unlock the power of small, densely connected networks?
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I hope these thoughts provoke discussion about the pros and cons of outsourcing our alumni community-building and network valuation to the LinkedIn platform. With its little known, but very useful Alumni tool, LinkedIn can help school, college and university alumni scale up their network-building efforts. But to participate in that process, alumni organizations must abandon their traditional concepts of "ownership" of the alumni community.
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.
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"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.
