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
One cliché about alumni networks is that they are hotbeds of power in government and business. The "old boys'" network has been all too real for a long time.
But why should alumni networks be strongest among those who need them the least? Members of elite alumni networks (you know the ones I mean), by and large, already have relatively privileged access to jobs, capital and influence.
Arguably, the people who benefit the most from alumni support are students in ordinary or in under-privileged communities around the globe. Public or government-funded high schools with few financial resources other than the local tax base don't have official alumni networks, budgets or staff. More fundamentally, their students are largely unaware of the existence of an alumni network.
But that is starting to change.
[Why should alumni networks be strongest among those who need them the least?]
Late last year I gladly accepted an invitation to join the Alumni Advisory Group of a UK-based non-profit organization called Future First Global. Their work is directly in line with many of the principles and ideas I try to incorporate into my work with consulting clients around the world.
Future First Global (FFG) has a unique purpose: they work with "governments, schools, teachers and NGOs to support the growth of high school alumni networks globally," to ensure that students gain skills and experience that enable them to get a job.
The founders of Future First Global realized that alumni networks can benefit "ordinary" people too. Now, at long last, alumni networks are helping the people who probably need them the most: high school students and graduates from ordinary secondary schools, and especially those in underprivileged or lower socio-economic communities.
In a pilot program, FFG partnered with 15 schools in Kenya, to "build, maintain and mobilise alumni networks that support current students." For alumni professionals, this may not sound so innovative: supporting students is, after all, something that effective alumni communities commonly do.
But Future First Global helps schools without the history, infrastructure and culture of alma mater that many of us take for granted. By connecting successful graduates of rural or under-funded schools with those schools' current students, Future First will be able to show just how important alumni can be. For a school where few students will go on to further education, and where new graduates won't have many jobs to choose from, alumni connections, experience and wisdom could be the crucial difference for many new graduates.
[Future First Global helps schools without the culture of alma mater that many of us take for granted]
I'm excited to see awareness of alumni networks take root in ordinary communities. The elite Old Boys would hardly recognize most of these schools' alumni as "successful" by the standards they grew up with.
But that's exactly the point. “Alumni success” isn't absolute. It's relative to the expectations and opportunities in place at the start. This is how alumni achievement is measured.
With that as the backdrop, even the smallest victories will have an enormous positive impact on these communities.
§
Do you have questions, comments or ideas for Future First Global? Send an email to Abi Nokes, Research & Programme Manager: [email protected].
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.
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?
§
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 second of three articles that I have adapted from my alumni relations keynote at CASE V in Chicago, in December 2013. The title of my talk there was Alumni Relations & Advancement's Future: 3 Questions.
How will the changing student experience affect alumni relationships?
Observers are buzzing about several so-called disruptive factors in education. Some of these factors influence the student experience, which in turn affects alumni attitudes and engagement. Here are four that we must think about:
1. MOOCs Massive open online courses, known as MOOCs, are widely touted to be changing the face of traditional education. They are certainly a departure from the traditional face-to-face classroom: students enroll, usually for free or almost free, and pursue their chosen topic alongside 50,000 or 100,000 other learners. And they do it from the comfort of their laptop or their iPad.
MOOCs' short-term impact on the traditional degree is probably overstated, but their evolution is certain to influence our field.
So far, these online students are not earning degree credit. In fact, according to one recent survey, about 80% of MOOC students already have a traditional degree. And MOOCs are being criticized for their students' low completion rates. But MOOCs are a waypoint en route to some more robust future online educational experience. As the successors of MOOCs become the norm for students enrolled in post-secondary education, the students' sense of loyalty, community, or gratitude to a particular institution is going to diminish – or even disappear. So those of us whose work depends heavily on the residential campus experience must anticipate this challenge.
How do we connect meaningfully with alumni whose education took place online – in their office, in a coffee shop, or on an airplane?
[How do we connect with alumni whose education took place in a coffee shop?]
2. The Changing Student Profile Second, the typical student's profile is changing. No longer are the majority of university-goers fresh-faced twenty-year olds. Mid-career changers, single parents attending part time, and those just looking for intellectual enrichment may consider themselves alumni of whichever online platform delivered their favorite lectures. In fact, they may consider themselves alumni of the platform itself, and not a particular institution. Will this diverse body of learners want an alumni organization to connect them with job opportunities, with other learners, or with additional instruction? If so, the traditional affinity model of alumni relations has to evolve, or students will abandon it.
As the student profile changes so must our profession change. Among the services alumni organizations currently provide, career services and access to specialized networks will be the ones most relevant to alumni of non-residential programs. And they are already proving to be among the most relevant services for alumni of traditional institutions.
3. Expectations of Employment Criticism of higher education is increasing. The most strident voices are those that reject the rising price tag of a college education.
But another group of critics may cause more stress and challenge for alumni professionals. Those are the people who increasingly want our institutions to somehow ensure jobs for graduates. And those people include the parents of many current undergraduates. The parents are footing much of the bill, assuming debt, and staking their family reputations on the extent to which their sons and daughters turn an expensive and time consuming college degree into a lucrative career.
The root of these complaints is an assumption made before a student even selects a university: that the purpose of a college degree is to help the graduate obtain "a good job" that pays well. Increasingly, this is the definition of alumni success, and increasingly it forms the backbone of numerous rankings and reports, which compare college outcomes on how much a new graduate can expect to earn. We hear little about rankings based on a graduate's inherent satisfaction with a college education, or on the extent to which the college experience turns a young and impressionable student into a contributor to her community. (Notably, the Gallup-Purdue Index will combine the "jobs" factor with the "life satisfaction" factor, measuring "great careers and lives that matter.")
If the student's primary concern is with compensation, alumni satisfaction will be at the mercy of the marketplace. However, the sheer number of students enrolled in fields that do not promise lucrative job offers suggests that the humanities, the liberal and fine arts, and the social sciences are not going away soon. And the passion those students have for their topics will continue for many years to give alumni offices the raw material they need to shape newly minted alumni into passionate and generous supporters of our institutions.
[If the student's concern is compensation, alumni satisfaction is at the mercy of the marketplace]
4. Internationalization Finally, a fourth dynamic is influencing the future of alumni relations: the diverse national backgrounds of students.
As students find it more appealing and easier to enroll across borders, the student body becomes ever more international. At my institution (all locations), almost 40% of enrolled students came from outside the United States in 2012. Many overseas students in North America have English as a second language, and their language proficiency heavily influences their student experience. They are in an unfamiliar land with strange customs and unexpected influences. In this situation, most of us would prefer the company of classmates whose language, backgrounds, and cultural references match our own.
These students often travel back to their home country as new alumni, without having truly joined our institutions' broader community. As alumni, they are much less likely to respond to the same messages and images that generate engagement with so many "traditional" alumni.
§§
The challenges and changes I've listed here are only a few of the forces guiding the evolution of alumni relations. Other trends, such as the demographics of younger generations, will add additional fuel and data to future discussios.
Many of us may not feel like we have time to think about the futures these trends are creating. But observing the profiles and experiences of current students may determine our success at engaging the attention and enjoying the support of these students during their lives as alumni.
The third and final part of this series will ask, "Can we predict the future of alumni relations?"
Last week we heard that Harvard University is recruiting alumni of a popular humanities course (The Ancient Greek Hero) to serve as volunteer mentors and discussion leaders for the MOOC-scale, online version of the class. No sooner had the Chronicle of Higher Education reported on this than a disillusioned reader commented,
Sure, we won't actually compensate you helping supervise this BS "class", but think of it as "service" to your alma mater.
Good grief... this is truly scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Another sarcastic and bitter soul opined,
Good news for adjuncts who thought they were at the bottom of the academic barrel! Harvard has come up with an even lower category.
I'll assume for the moment that Harvard isn't proposing the alumni component as a way to further demean adjuncts, nor to trick alumni into doing something they ought not to. So then a question worth asking is why would Harvard ask alumni to serve in this capacity? Who benefits, and how?
[Why ask alumni to serve in this capacity? Who benefits, and how?]
A few reasons come to mind...
It makes the online course more functional Content facilitators can make any course more functional, especially a humanities course where the educational currency is discussion. And it's even more true in a course with 27,000 enrolled students (as reported by the New York Times).
It connects alumni to students and to each other through volunteerism This is volunteerism on mutual terms. Instead of just saying "you need to help us because we don't have enough staff," they're saying, "you can put your education to work in a new way."
It may attract alumni who wouldn't volunteer in other ways Many alumni are uninterested in socializing at mixers, or attending weeknight talks about the capital campaign. Many alumni are interested in the classics, in literature, and in the humanities. For them, this is a unique way to exercise that interest.
It adds to degree equity indirectly If my alma mater runs open courses and those courses have high quality instruction, the quality of my own degree is maintained or even slightly increased as a result.
[Compared with handing out name tags... this is directly connected to the graduate's educational experience]
It can connect volunteers more deeply than a generic activity can This is a role that not just any graduate can fulfill effectively. Compared with handing out name tags, staffing the registration table, or setting up chairs and tables, this is directly connected to the graduate's educational experience.
It incorporates the academic and teaching mission of the institution It goes beyond professional needs of alumni, and beyond the fundraising needs of the institution.
It reflects something unique to the institution You can't take this particular class just anywhere, and you can't take it online from anyplace else. At least, not yet.
Agree or disagree? Did I leave something out? Is there a downside to this effort? Would it work in face to face classrooms, as well as online?
Andrew Gossen (@agossen) is Senior Director for Social Media
Strategy in Cornell’s Division of Alumni Affairs & Development, and is a member
of the Alumni Futures advisory group.
§
Have times ever been better for advancement in higher
education? Stanford University recently wrapped up a $6.23 billion campaign.
Princeton’s Aspire Campaign raised $1.88 billion. At
Cornell, in the midst of the $4.75 billion Cornell Now
campaign, we have just completed the most successful year
of fundraising in the university’s history.
But an undercurrent of anxiety runs
through higher education; the world is changing rapidly in ways that
may make the status quo unsustainable. Can an advancement organization position
itself to succeed in an ambiguous future? Cornell’s Division of Alumni Affairs
and Development (AA&D) recently embarked on an experiment that we called
the Skunkworks, in recognition of the history and spirit of Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development
Programs organization.
Vice President for Alumni Affairs and Development Charlie
Phlegar convened the Skunkworks in Spring 2011. The group included 14 staff
from across the Advancement Office – from Major Gifts to Advancement Services;
veterans mixed with newcomers. Our charge? Take
a broad look at the challenges, opportunities, and trends that will influence
institutional advancement in higher education over the next twenty years. We
were given complete freedom to explore in whatever manner we chose.
The group met regularly for a full
year. Members took turns leading discussions on many topics, such as:
The Digital Life of Alumni
Rethinking the Endowment
Storytelling and the Institutional Website
Crowdfunding and Microfinance
Young Alumni Giving
The Psychology of Happiness in Fundraising, and
Women and Philanthropy
By the end of the year, our conversations revolved
around three main themes.
1. Increasing competition for the
attention of our audience. It is more difficult to connect our audience to
Cornell meaningfully. There is rising competition from other non-profits, rapid
and dramatic change in communications, and an imbalance between sharing our
message and listening to our audience.
2. Changes in the philanthropic environment. The
demographics and behaviors of our audience are making traditional programs and
approaches less effective. For instance, women are assuming a greater
leadership role in philanthropic decisions. Different generations display
different attitudes towards giving. Direct mail and phonathons will become less
effective as technology and habits change. Keeping accurate contact information for alumni has always
been a challenge, and will get harder as people abandon land line phones and answer
fewer calls, thanks to caller ID and mobile technologies.
3. Organizational agility. Traditional fundraising
and engagement programs have served our institution well over the years, and we
are organized to sustain and improve them deliberately and incrementally.
However, the world is changing so fast that this deliberate pace is no longer as
effective, especially with competition from the “new and nimble” non-profits
that are making inroads into our audience and threatening our donor pipeline.
Overall, we concluded that broad
one-size-fits-all fundraising, engagement, and communications strategies will
become less and less effective. We need to focus on user experience,
personalizing and customizing interactions in ways that meet the audience
expectations shaped by companies like Amazon and organizations such as
Kiva.org. We must also segment our audience beyond their giving history, and account for generational differences, gender,
ethnicity, and other variables that may affect capacity and inclination to
engage.
And changing the way that we think
about our audience is only one piece of the puzzle. Equally important is
adopting an experimental mindset. The only way you will know if something works
is to test it. Some experiments will fail and that’s ok, because that’s how you
learn. Organizational culture must evolve toward pilot projects and rigorous
data analysis, and away from the risk aversion and conservatism that characterizes
so much of higher ed advancement.
Our final report to the Vice
President recommended a list of pilot projects designed to test specific
hypotheses that emerged from our discussion. Among them are experiments with
crowdfunding, developing advancement strategies focused on professional cohorts
of female alumni, gamification, and enhanced presentation skills training for
faculty, senior administrators, and advancement officers. The organization has
already incorporated elements of these into broader efforts to raise annual
giving participation.
The Skunkworks approach demonstrates
that an advancement office faced with change and uncertainty can position
itself for the future by mobilizing talent already present in the organization.
Skunk Works logo via Wikimedia. Copyright Lockheed-Martin
[Updated 25 November, 2011 with link to "Networking" article from Toronto Globe and Mail.]
Alumni communities serve critical roles in many kinds of organizations – not only in schools, colleges or universities.
This article is the third in a series of short interviews with professionals from non-traditional alumni programs.
Profile: Krista Slade Director of Advancement The Rhodes Trust Oxford, UK
Krista Slade oversees alumni, development, and communications supporting the Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford University in the UK. Krista joined the Trust in 2010, after three years as the first executive director of the Singapore-based Asia-Pacific office of the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE). With more than 20 years' experience in global advancement, she's worked in Hong Kong, Australia, Singapore, her native Canada and now the UK. In 2010 she was honored with CASE's Crystal Apple award for outstanding teaching.
¶¶¶
Alumni Futures: Krista, what is the Rhodes Trust, and how does institutional advancement fit with its mission?
Krista Slade: The Rhodes Trust administers the Rhodes Scholarships, established in 1903 from the estate of Cecil Rhodes, who had the vision to create the first international scholarship program. His generosity has educated more than 7,000 Rhodes Scholars to date. Alumni include Nobel Laureates, Olympians, government leaders, judges, teachers, and business people. Scholars come from all corners of the globe, and share exceptional intellect and a commitment to service. We have about 4,400 living Scholars in more than 70 countries.
[Rhodes was funded by a remarkably visionary act of philanthropy, yet doesn't have a tradition of fundraising]
Our core mission is to operate the world's preeminent scholarship program, and ensure that we have the resources to do this in perpetuity. Our office is responsible for communicating our values, attracting the best scholarship applicants, and supporting our volunteer and fundraising infrastructure. Connecting the global Rhodes community and keeping them involved is the cornerstone of all we do.
AF: Your educational advancement background is extensive. Which aspects of your current work are most similar to traditional alumni and development, and in what ways are your current roles different?
KS: Rhodes was funded by a remarkably visionary act of philanthropy, yet it doesn't have a tradition of fundraising. So my role is all about building a sustainable, integrated development effort from scratch. This means establishing a database, understanding different countries' tax laws, hiring, writing – what you would find in any start-up operation. We have outstanding support from leadership and a great development board. We don't have a problem identifying prospective donors; the challenge is building the infrastructure to follow up on the opportunities. It's a nice problem to have.
AF: In the future, will Rhodes benefit from following traditional advancement models, or will you need to invent new ways of engaging your audience in order to succeed?
KS: Most of what we do follows practices used in other institutions. One aspect that differentiates Rhodes is the global and mobile nature of our alumni community. Fortunately, Scholars have an established tradition of keeping in touch with Rhodes House, dating back to the earliest days. We have a great opportunity to connect with our constituents at the grassroots level. The Warden of Rhodes House, our CEO, has met with more than half of the living Rhodes Scholars in the last two years – a remarkable, empowering feat. It also requires a huge amount of follow-up and responsiveness.
This broad consultation process is fundamental to future success, and has already created tangible outcomes. For example, we have started distributing the bios of our Scholars when they leave Oxford. This is the most-clicked item in our electronic communications. Interest in the current and future generations drives much of our philanthropy.
AF: What are you doing now that shows promise for future success? What additional resources will you need for the program to reach its full potential?
KS: Two Scholars from the class of 2009 approached me about starting a graduating class gift campaign. They secured 85% participation from the global class. The gifts were modest, but the enthusiastic response was heartening for our Trustees and alumni. Our message about why support matters is filtering out to all segments of our community. Creating this culture of asking and giving is a long-term project, but it will pay big dividends in coming years.
[Our CEO has met with more than half of the living Rhodes Scholars in the last two years]
Another unique aspect of Rhodes is that we have a strong reputation in some markets (especially the U.S. and Canada), but are less well-known elsewhere, even in the U.K. Building a domestic donor base for the Scholarships is an area with strong potential.
The biggest operational challenge right now is recruiting and training staff members to deliver the support and infrastructure our volunteers need and deserve. We have the budget, but not the bodies. Watch this space!
Over the past year I've delivered, participated in, or facilitated dozens of workshops, keynotes, conference talks, and panel discussions. All of them included at least a passing mention of social media, web-based community, or digital communication. Many of them focused exclusively on virtual interaction.
One well-established message, central to online interaction, surfaced again again, and it bears repeating.
The Problem
Many people fret about "keeping up with technology." Software, websites and digital tools are constantly evolving, and new ones crop up all the time. People want to know how to identify and select the "right" online tools in the midst of continual upheaval.
The Advice
Don't worry so much about picking the "right" technology or the "best" tool.
Instead, pay attention to what kind of interaction the tools enable or magnify.
Pay attention to human behavior.
[Pay attention to behavior, not technology]
The Message
Your audience – as a community – depends on human interaction and healthy relationships. That was true before the Internet, and it will be true post-Internet.
So focus on community, not technology. Or, as surfing legend Duke Kahanamoku said:
