alumni futures

CAE: 2009 Saw Drop in Giving to U.S. Higher Education

This is the time of year when the Council for Aid to Education (CAE) publishes its annual report on Voluntary Support of Education (VSE) – that is, financial donations to colleges and universities in the United States.

According to a New York Times article about the CAE's survey, 

Gifts to colleges and universities declined almost 12 percent in the 2009 fiscal year, to $27.85 billion...the steepest decline in the survey's 53-year history.

The article goes on to state that

• private liberal arts colleges saw the largest decline (18.3%);
  
• capital gifts (for endowment or buildings and property) dropped 25%;
• the last decade has seen an average 4.1% overall increase in giving each year.

Here are past Alumni Futures postings on this survey since 2007:

2007: Alumni Dollars Are Up, Participation Is Down (Again)

2008: CAE: Alumni Participation and Dollars Both Declined in 2007

2009: I did not report on the CAE survey last year, but here is a statement from CASE about the survey's results.

Here is the Chronicle of Higher Education's report on today's announcement of survey results.

The Bologna Process and Alumni Relations, Part II

[Updated 18 February, 2010: InsideHigherEd interview with Paul Gaston, author of The Challenge of Bologna: What United States Higher Education Has to Learn from Europe, and Why It Matters That We Learn It.]

Back in November of 2009, I looked at the Bologna Process of European higher education standardization and how it might affect alumni relations in Europe. In this second and final post on the topic, I'm sharing a few more comments from Dr. Daniel Guhr and Simon Lange of Illuminate Consulting Group. Illuminate's consulting practice focuses on international strategic development in higher education.*  

In this post Guhr and Lange address:

 

• Threats and challenges to alumni engagement under Bologna
• The prospects for alumni loyalty to a specific institution
• The most likely time frame for changes to appear

Will threats or challenges to engagement make it harder for institutions to maintain already tenuous connections with alumni?

Daniel Guhr: Yes, but this is independent of the Bologna Process. If institutions ignore alumni demand patterns, the alumni will walk away. Down the road, having effective alumni networks will be a recruiting benefit, and it already works this way for small, elite private institutions (primarily business schools). It will be more than three years before we see concrete examples emerge – once the first full cohort of Europe-wide "Bologna System" alumni leave universities.

 

 

How does this relate to traditional "study abroad" experiences?

 

Daniel Guhr: It will have a negative effect on intra-European mobility, as fewer students can move around. This is being hotly debated however.

Simon Lange: Dan is right. Though the process encourages mobility when obtaining your degree abroad, the reforms have significantly increased students' workloads, and introduced the element of time pressure. In the end, this discourages students from spending a desirable semester in Sevilla, or elsewhere.

 

 

Will alumni be likely to transfer their affinity or loyalty to a university, a country, an academic program or perhaps a host institution in their target country?

 

Daniel Guhr: I would ask this differently. What makes alumni more loyal in the European context? First, the presence of effective alumni relations to begin with. Second, the impact of the international experience on the alumnus's life. Third, the brand effect. You can create a matrix that displays these factors and put in the respective values. We'll see very different dynamics emerge. In short, we should ask, "What works for the alumni?"

Simon Lange: It is likely that the European Union's goal of fostering a European identity among future professionals will succeed. For scholarship recipients, loyalty to the donating country or organization, or to the EU, is likely to be higher. ICG recently conducted a nationwide survey of alumni from all eight universities in New Zealand, and found that non-New Zealand citizen alumni felt more closely connected to New Zealand if they received a New Zealand-sponsored scholarship. We compared their affiliation levels with those of alumni who received funding from other sources, and those who received no scholarship funds.

Based on both ICG's research and my personal experience in Europe, I'd say that students who go abroad feel a strong connection to their host institution, either for an exchange or for an entire program. For example, there are two Facebook groups for Erasmus students at the Universidad de Sevilla (Spain), each with more than 1,300 members. This is anecdotal evidence, but worth looking into more systematically. 

Over what time scale will changes play out?

Daniel Guhr: Some changes are already taking place. It will be three years or more before we have early examples to use as case studies. In 5 to 10 years we'll see major initiatives that will produce good results. Some will come earlier, but will likely not be well-conceived. It will be more than ten years however before mainstream European universities will see any benefits – and only if they commit to building alumni networks.

* I serve as a volunteer member of ICG's Academic Advisory Board.

 

Survey on Twitter in Educational Advancement

[Update: The survey is now closed. Thanks for all who participated! Watch this space for results later in February.]

One year ago today Alumni Futures published a white paper on Twitter's potential as a tool for alumni relations. We are updating that paper's findings and predictions and will publish the new white paper here during February.

As part of our research we are again conducting our short (12 question) survey to collect information on which kinds of institutions are using Twitter for which purposes. Even if you don't use Twitter (or even if you don't know what it is) please take the survey. For those who don't use Twitter there are just three survey questions. 

Click this link to complete the survey:

Brief survey on Twitter in educational advancement

Thanks for your help! 

Watch this space for the new white paper in February: Alumni Networks and Twitter –An Update.

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.

Alumni Achievement Metrics and University Rankings

What makes a college or university "great"?

We all debate endlessly university rankings or "league tables." And a recent e-mail exchange with colleagues from US and UK institutions started me thinking about how we determine an institution's quality. 

We readily refer to "elite" universities and if asked to list, say, the top 25 schools around the globe most of our lists would overlap significantly, if not completely. You and I might disagree about whether a particular school should be in the top 5 or not, but I bet we'd agree on 20 of the names we'd list in our top 25.

But how do we "know" which schools are great? Along with whatever appears on the cover of US News or Times Higher Education, some combination of faculty notoriety, research output (including technology transfer), and admissions competitiveness play a large part. 

And then of course there is the graduates' success. But while we can read the annual rankings, and measure research output, patents and citations, how do we assess alumni success? 

Dan Guhr of Illuminate Consulting Group has mentioned to me that he sees alumni outcomes as a likely (if not inevitable) component of university ranking systems in the future. Any metrics around this would have to provide a quantitative (or rank ordered) proxy for categories such as

• alumni achievement
• alumni influence
• alumni network value 

We can probably propose arbitrary benchmarks for these kinds of categories in the form of ranges and ratios. For example, if "PhD completion" is an achievement metric, then we can measure the approximate fraction of our alumni who have completed a PhD within some finite period after we granted their bachelor's degree. This is just an example off the top of my head.

One survey that has started down this road is the Professional Ranking of World Universities (PRWU), established by Mines Paris Tech (also known as the École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris). They've selected a single criterion for ranking the "professional effectiveness" of institutions: the number of alumni from a single school who are CEO (or equivalent) at the "500 leading worldwide companies" as measured by annual revenue. 

They also quickly acknowledge the limitations of this specific model, but claim it is the only practical one that they can currently apply. The authors further admit that there is no way to measure, say, successful entrepreneurship among alumni:

The creation of companies by graduates could also be a relevant criterion to be taken into account but, once again, the data on an international level do not exist, and achievements (companies actually created) are difficult to compare.

This single criterion for business is no more flawed than the Jiaotong University Shanghai rankings', [link opens two windows] which award points for alumni receiving the Nobel Prize or the Fields Medal. But saying "our survey is equally flawed, but in a new and different way" is hardly a defense of a system such as the PRWU. (A flaw of the Shanghai ranking is that they consider the total number of prizes won by a school's alumni – without accounting for the size of the alumni population. At tiny Caltech the chances that a particular grad has won a Nobel are about 1:1300; what's the ratio at other research institutions?)

So an obvious problem with the overall approach of using alumni achievement is that it will be extremely difficult to assess the prevalence of a particular outcome for an institution with poor data about its alumni. In the long run, however, this could exert pressure on institutions to invest in improved data collection, internal data sharing and data maintenance.

The email exchange that started me thinking about alumni achievement as a ranking criterion did indeed move on to a discussion of internal data processes and the lack of will that many staff members exhibit when presented with a chance to reveal meaningful truths about alumni by sharing and analyzing data. Perhaps that will provide me with a topic for a future blog post.

Do you think alumni outcomes can and should be measured as a proxy for institutional success? What should we measure, and how?

Also: Wikipedia article about rankings with links to a number of such schemes and outlets

Image of university rankings from Flickr user Mathieu Thouvenin via Creative Commons.

White Paper Available: Activating Alumni Networks with Twitter

[Updated 30 January, 2009 with link to comparison of Twitter directories.]

[Updated 2 June, 2009 with link to updated research on Twitter users and usage patterns.]

I am pleased to announce the publication of a free white paper on using the "micro-blogging" service Twitter to activate alumni networks. My colleague Elizabeth Allen and I have tried to capture a snapshot of Twitter, and explore its potential for higher education advancement.

About the White Paper
The main purposes of the white paper are to inform readers about what Twitter is, and suggest ways it might enhance relationship-building and alumni interaction. We did not intend to list the "right" and "wrong" ways to use Twitter, but we do share our opinions on what uses might prove effective. 

Twitter's development, role and uses are evolving so quickly that any description will soon be out of date. So we offer a look at Twitter's current status, with the hope that this serves as a departure point for your own efforts and ideas.

Don't know what Twitter is? Haven't used it? No problem; the first sections of the white paper give a crash course in what Twitter does and how it's used. The next section asks, What is Twitter's Potential for Alumni Relations?

And if you've been sitting back, wondering what to do with Twitter, we've included a short list of simple ideas to serve as a way to get started. We'll update this list periodically and I'll post new information on the blog, as warranted.

We close with links to potentially useful resources, including the names of other web-based communication platforms that you might want to explore.

Finally, we have included an Appendix with results of our recent informal survey on Twitter usage in higher ed. Our survey showed, among other things, that

• 20% of respondents had either never heard of Twitter or had heard of it but didn't know what it was;
• more than one-third of respondents are currently using Twitter; and
• about one-third know what it is, but haven't tried it. 

Which category are you in? I hope you'll leave your comments about the white paper, and about Twitter on the Alumni Futures web site.

Click the link below to download the white paper:

White Paper: Activating Alumni Networks with Twitter  [2.2mb PDF]

Note: Fans of Alumni Futures on Facebook always get a sneak peek at white papers before others. After we sent out a link to the white paper on Friday, we received our first reviews – appropriately enough, via Twitter:

 

And the folks at MrTweet sent a thumbs up as well:

A Brief Survey About Twitter for Higher Ed Advancement

[Updated 30 January, 2009: The results of this survey are incorporated into the Appendix of a white paper which is available for free download here:

Activating Alumni Networks with Twitter]

Before diving in to a new year of all-out blogging, I invite you to participate in a short, anonymous survey about Twitter. [Survey is Closed.]

Even if you don't know what Twitter is – or you do know what it is, but you do not use it – I'd appreciate your participation (awareness is one of the things we're trying to measure).

In a week or so I'll stop collecting data and see what kind of information the survey delivers (it will close at 5 pm PST on Tuesday, 13 January). Then I'll incorporate that information into a brief upcoming white paper about possible uses of Twitter in higher education advancement.

Feel free to leave a general comment about Twitter on this blog post as well.

Click here to take the short, anonymous survey

Also: click here to read an earlier posting about Twitter

Alumni Futures on Twitter (@alumnifutures)

Features or Benefits? What the Alumni Tribe Wants

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that alumni don't want the features of social networking sites – they want the benefits of connecting with other people.

This week I was going over the notes I took during the excellent annual meeting of the Canadian Council for the Advancement of Education (CCAE), last summer. One of the presenters was Stanford's Jerold Pearson, Director of Market Research for their alumni association. Jerold said the same thing, and gave a simple example to clarify the point.

When you're promoting your association's programs or services, focus on the benefits, not the features. In a car, "a powerful engine" is a feature. But "speed and acceleration" are the benefits. So, a LinkedIn alumni group is a feature, but jobs and information are the benefits.

It sounds simple when you hear it, but it's surprisingly easy to forget this difference.

And on a related note, this same topic surfaced this week as I read blogging star Seth Godin's posting on "tribe management," along with the slim book that amplifies his arguments. He says, in part,

...what people really want is the ability to connect to each other, not to companies. So the permission is used to build a tribe, to build people who want to hear from the company because it helps them connect, it helps them find each other, it gives them a story to tell and something to talk about.

Get it? In our version of Godin's scenario the institution – and its alumni association – are "the company."

And the alumni are the tribe.

...what people really want is the ability to connect to each other, not to companies. So the permission is used to build a tribe, to build people who want to hear from the company because it helps them connect, it helps them find each other, it gives them a story to tell and something to talk about.

Get it? In our version of Godin's scenario the institution – and its alumni association – are "the company."

And the alumni are the tribe.

Guest Blogger Ray Satterthwaite: How Do I Engage Thee?

[This week I asked Ray Satterthwaite to comment on assessing alumni engagement. A former alumni director at McGill University, and Director of Development and Associate VP for Advancement at Queen's University, Ray recently started an independent consulting company that specializes in the measurement of alumni engagement. Ray served on the CASE Alumni Commission, and will be presenting some of his research at the CASE District II conference in March.]

Emotion 401
As a psychology major at McGill University in Montreal, I remember a course called Emotion 401 — The exploration of human emotion. The professor asked us what seemed like a very simple question, “What is love?” In my mind love was simply what I was looking for when I chose a program with a 50:1 female to male ratio. We spent the next several months looking at love from every possible angle. The experience formed in me, years later, a desire to define and measure the work I was doing in alumni relations and fundraising.

We had fun and no one got hurt
When I began in alumni relations, only accountants had computers, and the idea of measuring and quantifying alumni relations was almost unknown. Relationships were built for their own sake. We measured the effectiveness of our programs as follows: We made it through, it didn’t go over budget, people showed up, they had a good time, and no one got hurt! That covered the post-mortem held in the hotel lobby after the event. OK, next event!

There are still alumni offices where the idea of measuring programs’ impact is foreign, and even worse, staff fight against quantifying their programs. It must be difficult to justify budget requests with little empirical evidence of program impact.

Feed the database, it is hungry
Then along came the PC. We now store massive amounts of data, collect registrations online and connect data across platforms. It began with logging event attendance and volunteer roles. The problem was the amount of time required to ensure that everything that could be collected was collected. We were so busy planning and executing our programs that success was measured by overall attendance. The goal was higher numbers, not better engagement.

Another challenge was the number of databases — academic affairs, student clubs, athletics, residences, alumni relations, and alumni giving. All this valuable information was stored separately. "What about event surveys?" you ask. In most cases, the results never made it past the Alumni Officer’s desk. Time spent compiling results was needed to plan more events.

Many schools now annually measure event attendance, emails opened, and publications mailed. Over the last five years or so, a number of benchmarking programs and scoring systems have been introduced by organizations like CASE or communities of practice like PCUAD, in an attempt to standardize what we count and how we count it.

In my effort to quantify alumni relationships I did some data mining. The scores proved to be highly connected to giving. The CASE Commission on Alumni Relations encouraged me to broaden the study to include multiple schools. With the Commission’s assistance, I contacted 70 schools; only seven could provide sample data. Most either had not kept the information or had only recently begun keeping it. Often the information was on a different platform or they were in a dreaded “conversion.” Our results were valuable, but the message was clear. Detailed data was not available at many schools. 

The multivariate nature of Engagement
The event is not the goal; increased engagement is the goal. So why measure only event attendance or specific event satisfaction? That’s like measuring how one date went and then saying you are ready to get married. Vegas here we come. It is best to measure the whole relationship, one which changes over time.

Research has shown that an alumnus’s pride in his school is greatest on the day he is admitted. It’s all downhill from there. Not getting the choice residence, failing a class, no treadmills at the gym; you would be surprised at the things that can affect engagement. Life issues can also impact engagement, such as having children or “my kid didn’t get in.” I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that one.

To truly measure engagement, you need to measure the perceptions and feelings of your alumni. Many things affect engagement: their experiences from the time they were students, the current reputation of the school, their involvement and their awareness of — and interest in supporting — the priorities of the school. The only way to get at these perceptions is to ask the alumni. 

So don’t stop tracking the “butts in the seats,” but by all means add to this some form of market research on how your alumni feel.

Accountability Trends and Alumni Relations

"Accountability" is a hot topic in education, at least in the United States. For example, the federal government's 2002 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act mandates quantitative standards for schools, with scores based on testing. Legislators who voted the act into law said it would make primary and secondary schools more accountable to the public.

At the heart of accountability is measurement. The so-called NCLB Dashboard of accountability is meant to show whether individual states are reaching the federal government's arbitrary standards. Many feel that the NCLB goals represent an unfunded mandate, others say that the goals are overly simplistic, and still others criticize the metrics for focusing heavily on standardized test results. But even many of NCLB's critics believe that an asset as important as public education will benefit from more accountability of some kind. And the sheer volume of data generated around benchmarking schools' performance is a gold mine for analysts and researchers.

Encouraged by increased scrutiny of public schools, critics of post-secondary education are asking, "Shouldn't we hold colleges and universities to quantitative standards as well? What about assessment? How do we know whether colleges and universities are succeeding?"

Researchers and policy analysts have deployed a variety of metrics in the past to measure college and university effectiveness. Some focus on the long-term monetary benefit to the student, others on learning outcomes or career-preparedness.

However, critics of uniform standards for higher ed say that education is not an assembly line and that students are not widgets that can be manufactured to some arbitrary level of conformity. It's OK, critics say, if we have a general feel for how higher ed is faring; the inputs and outputs are too varied and diverse to submit for standardized scrutiny.

What does this have to do with alumni relations?
There's a parallel between this question ("Should we hold universities accountable in the same way we do primary and secondary education?") and the debate about measuring the effectiveness of alumni programming ("Can we hold alumni relations to numerical goals, as we do with development?').

For a long time, alumni professionals have bemoaned the lack of objective assessment measures for the profession (beyond tracking event attendance). Our fundraising colleagues produce the ubiquitous "progress toward goal" line graphs and "donations by source" pie charts. And recently, we have finally seen efforts meant to help alumni officers gauge the effectiveness of their programs and compare their progress.

As I noted above, those who resist making higher ed accountable say "Learners are not widgets. It's OK if we don't have numerical assessment. Student achievement is too hard to measure with a quantitative value."

So I wonder, what if maybe — just maybe — it's OK if we don't have strict quantitative measurements in alumni relations? The pressure to "prove" our worth is partly an outcome of the accountability trend within advancement itself. If we resisted it, the campus finance office would not know whether we were providing a reasonable "return on investment." But who else would care? And would we be doing a worse job if we didn't measure? Would our institutions — or the alumni — be worse off?

I'm not sure, and I'm not arguing against metrics. But it's worth asking these questions periodically to make sure we're using our time effectively to improve future operations.

Inside HigherEd: Private Colleges and Assessment

Collegiate Learning Assessment Consortium

Chronicle Article on Europe's Example for America [subscription required]

Prior Alumni Futures Benchmarking Discussion