alumni futures

Community Online: Is It You or the Platform?

Recently, Ryan Catherwood published an insightful article, The Problem with Alumni Network Platforms. As a follow up, Switchboard CEO and co-founder Mara Zepeda added some profoundly important observations in her article, When Alma Mater is Missing.

I also wanted to make a couple specific observations about this critical topic. After more than 25 years on the client side, and another four years consulting, I have spent the last six months working inside the platform provider's world. And in comparing all these viewpoints, I've noticed a few things about "alumni network platforms."

Is it Us or the Platform?

If alumni and students don’t coalesce online, there are several possibilities, which likely exist in various combinations and to various degrees:

1. There is no demand for the platform. You’re answering a question that nobody asked; or they asked, and their answer lies elsewhere online.
2. There is a demand, but your marketing is ineffective and you haven’t generated awareness and understanding. You answered a question that someone asked, but they didn’t hear your answer.
3. People tried out the platform and found it wanting. They heard your answer to their question, but they need a better answer. They are moving on. 

But before you declare success or failure, the first thing to ask is, “Are we helping people do something they actually need to do?”

 

[Community members don't want features – they want results]

 

Take "mentoring" as a current example. Everybody wants a mentoring program. But often there is no clear demand for it. Mentoring seems like it would be helpful, if only some people would ask for it! Kieran Hanrahan at Switchboard has treated this topic in some depth, so I won’t explore it here, but if you’re wrestling with the mentoring topic, I recommend you read his article about "the black box of mentoring."

People Want Benefits, Not Features

Back to helping people do things they actually need to do. You should answer these questions:

Are we helping them do it more easily, more accessibly and more effectively than some other, comparable resource?

Do they know you’re doing it? Did you get the word out?

Does it work? Are you measuring outcomes that represent success to your audience? 

To answer the last question, you must measure your success against community members’ needs. This is tough to do, but it’s important to try. If students join your site looking for internships, then the numbers of internships offered and accepted are the numbers to track. Having a lot of people offer internships, with few takers, is not success. Similarly, signing up mentors is good only if the mentoring leads to improved outcomes and satisfaction.

Alumni organizers should check whether alumni or students want the litany of digital features that some platforms offer. You thinking “that’s so cool!” should not be the selection criterion. Ryan lists some of these features - an alumni directory, photo galleries, job boards, mentoring, e-newsletters, groups and discussion forums. Some institutions will also have merchandise sales, membership dues collection, event registration and calendars. 

Some of these features do enable successful outcomes. But your community members don’t want features. They want results - jobs, housing, advice, referrals and sometimes, merchandise or services. Unfortunately, many software features are just bells or whistles that don’t help your audience members do what they really need to do.

Problems with LinkedIn

Ryan also mentioned that LinkedIn is “a better and more important tool” for “network-building and communicating with new contacts.” I was one of LinkedIn's very early users (about the 34,000th LinkedIn member out of the more than half a billion profiles now on LinkedIn. I joined in 2003!). My experience is that most LinkedIn users interact very little.

LinkedIn has great potential value, mostly because of its massive user base. However, LinkedIn is also infamous for its clunky communication interface, and for its cumbersome, hard to find, sparsely populated group discussions. LinkedIn makes it easy for individuals to sign up and fill out a profile. Everything else on LinkedIn is hard for the average user. If LinkedIn were truly effective, you might not want a third-party platform at all.

 

[This is a great time to ask, "What are stakeholders looking for,
and are we providing it?"]

 

LinkedIn is dropping the ball when it comes to alumni and students asking for help – or offering to help. Why? Because LinkedIn's communication tools are awkward and badly designed. Its alumni feature is difficult to locate, and its Groups have been hobbled and hidden as well.

So if alumni feel that LinkedIn really is "better and more important" than your own tools, you can definitely be doing more.

Building Awareness & Meeting Needs

Finally, back to marketing and building awareness. If you aren’t allocating resources to communicate the benefit of your platform, then the answer to Ryan’s original question is partly, “It’s you, not the platform.” But if community members do sign up only to find that your platform is hard to use, marginally beneficial and unpopulated – they will leave. Forever.

Yes, you have to market events and other activities, but increasingly, the opportunity cost of doing so is too high. This means every dollar or hour you spend promoting an event is at the cost of undermining your other efforts. Including your digital engagement. 

Is that worth the risk? No! But what can you do? Well, start by doing fewer events (you're probably only attracting five percent of your audience to them anyway – at great cost in budget and staff time). Spend less on print. Segment communications more. Expect less from your legacy website. And re-write a team member's job description to include “network weaving” and brokering relationships, to build deeper (not just more) connections with stakeholders.

There's no silver bullet, but taking a cue from Ryan's questions, this is a great time to answer the questions, "What are stakeholders looking for, and are we providing it?"

Step Away from the Printed Directory – Once and For All

Note: This article originally appeared on the Switchboard Blog.

Back in the late 1990s, I worked at a large public research university. We sat through a sales presentation by a vendor of printed alumni directories, and when he left, we said to each other, “OK, but I guess this will be the last printed directory we ever do.” This was the dot com era, the CD-ROM was the latest and greatest way to store and access large amounts of information, and we believed that before long, the digital wave would submerge the printed alumni “phone book” at last.

Five years later I sat through a presentation by the same sales representative, at a different institution. When the salesman left, we looked at each other and said, “I don’t think so. Let’s just host it on the web.” A year later, Facebook was gaining traction and the phrase “social network” was rising in prominence. Alumni still weren’t ready for a digital-only directory landscape. So eventually we compiled, edited, and printed the directory in-house, as a benefit to dues-paying members of the Alumni Association.

Five years after that—now as Associate VP at another university—I got a call from the same sales rep, who told me the business model had changed. He acknowledged it was hard to get alumni to buy the directory outright, but he told me that they would provide the directory to alumni who contributed an agreed amount to the annual fund. I said, “No thanks.”

And finally, we didn’t do a printed directory.

I was not inundated with complaints from alumni expecting the book to arrive. I did not field a single question from curious alumni, wondering what could possibly have changed. The passing of the printed volume went unnoticed by all except the university staff members, whose time was now free to deliver benefits and services of more relevance and value to more alumni.

[I did not field a single question from curious alumni]

This point is critical. The idea of “opportunity cost” in business is important, and it applies here. Simply put, opportunity cost refers to what you give up by forgoing an opportunity to pursue an alternative.

In other words, every minute you spend handling the extensive details required to produce a printed alumni directory is a minute you cannot invest in a project with higher value to your audience and your institution. So even if the directory, for example, is of interest to some alumni, you should ask whether there’s a project of value to even more alumni (or of greater value to the same alumni).

In the past few months, I’ve spoken with alumni professionals and volunteers at four institutions who are planning to produce another printed alumni directory. Davidson College’s experience with this has been documented on this very blog. This continuation of the alumni directory business surprises me, as I see alumni leaders try to justify the effort they know it will take.

Why am I surprised? After all, the alumni relations landscape is crowded with “traditional” events and programs that institutions hesitate to discontinue. So why not a paper book sent through the mail?

Because today, ubiquitous internet access combines with powerful search to make most information instantly accessible to most people, anywhere in the world at any time. And the information you find online is likely to be more up to date than information captured in a static form at a specific point in the past. Since printed directories routinely take more than one year to initiate, compile, edit, format, publish and distribute, about 15% of the contact data is likely to be wrong by the time you send it to the few alumni who want it.

To learn what value remains in compiling and printing such a book, I asked for input from alumni professionals. Here are some of the responses, with my comments:

“I’m amazed that it’s still a business, but there’s still some money to be made. More complaints, more pain than ever, however.”

Some alumni will always complain. Knowing that you can’t satisfy everyone, and accounting for limits on your resources, you should actively decide who you can satisfy, how, and with what expected outcome.

“Alumni seem to expect it. The book in hand is a more tangible experience.”

Do they really expect it, or do they just “seem” to? Those are two different things – but you can check. You should at least find out how many alumni expect it and which alumni they are. If alumni do expect it, it is because we have trained them to expect it by repeatedly providing it.

[We have trained alumni to expect it by repeatedly providing it]

“I am building an advancement program with almost 60,000 alumni and no active database. I will take advantage of the directory company collecting current data...at no expense to my program. To be honest, I don't care how many (if any) books they sell.”

Ah, perhaps this is a good use case. Someone starting with “no active database” can find it useful to have a publisher gather data. But is there really “no expense” to your program? Yes, there is no cost to your budget to purchase the books or the service. However, we’ve already seen that there’s the opportunity cost (i.e. everything you cannot do because you’re busy with the directory). There’s also the time, attention and effort that goes into negotiating the contract, ensuring accuracy in the survey instrument, scripting the calls, handling inevitable customer complaints, checking the accuracy of data collection, shepherding the project through your advancement services team, and monitoring the production, distribution and (guaranteed) further complaints from people who were omitted or listed incorrectly (or included, when they had in fact opted out of being listed).

To ensure a quality product, there is absolutely a considerable and real cost.

I emphasize that the “quality product” is not just the printed book. It also comprises customer service and interaction with the publisher’s callers, the printed survey or update form they mail, and most important, the integrity of the data itself. If you’re going to spend a year or more trying to get an upload for your advancement database, you need to be certain that the data you’re adding is correct, and is more accurate than the data you already have in there.

A final comment from a colleague:

“Just did one this past year. It will likely be our last, primarily because our vendor experienced terrible delays (and didn't always share info about them in a timely fashion), which in turn impacted our credibility with the alumni who participated. We did a get a lot of interest in the print directory from our 1960s and 1970s alumni.”

“A lot of interest” perhaps. But how much interest did the alumni team miss out on by spending the effort and time to handle the delays, and to repair the damaged credibility she mentions? And what about the opportunity to engage more effectively across generations who are not so thrilled by the alumni directory?

Before you decide that the printed directory is a prudent investment of your organization’s scarce resources, weigh it against the actual need and ask yourself which of your strategic goals it helps you to achieve. And – as with any existing program or activity that you repeat because “alumni expect it” –  think about what the project will prevent you from doing that could be advancing your mission more effectively.

My New Role: Switchboard

 

I am thrilled to announce that on October 1 I will join Switchboard as Vice President. Switchboard is an award-winning online engagement platform based in Portland, Oregon that works with leading colleges, universities, and independent schools. I have been an advisor to Switchboard for four years, and believe strongly in their approach to community-building, and to student-alumni engagement in particular.

[On October 1 I will join Switchboard as Vice President]

My family and I will continue to make Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania our home.

 

I will continue limited work as an independent consultant for GG+A, with the title of Consulting Vice President. In my two-plus years there, I have been privileged to work with some three dozen diverse institutions across seven countries. Many times, I have seen potentially strong alumni communities under-perform, due to inadequate understanding of the outcomes that effective engagement can create. Working with Switchboard, I will help clients understand what they can achieve for their institutions when they enable alumni, students and families to support each other. I believe that tracking engagement outcomes is the future of alumni relations. And Switchboard is unique among engagement tools in its ability to track and report these outcomes, and their value to alma mater.

[Tracking engagement outcomes is the future of alumni relations]

As I complete my 29th year in advancement, I look forward to approaching the sector’s challenges from this new direction, and to enabling institutions to define, achieve and report their successes. Alumni relations is a wonderful profession, and I’m excited to continue my career in this new role.

 

Read Switchboard's announcement of this news on their blog.

Emerging Opportunities in Advancement: An Online Discussion

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:

A Conversation on Emerging Opportunities in Advancement

The topics we covered included these, among others:

• Emerging opportunities for our profession
• External changes affecting our work
• How one might design a new advancement shop from the ground up
• The never-ending questions about "return on investment"
• The growing role of digital outreach 
• Changing attitudes among students and alumni about their relationship with alma mater

Thanks to Andrew for hosting me on the show.

Please leave a comment below if you have anything to add to the conversation!

Volunteer-Led Fundraising: SSE Riga's "Beat Stanford" Campaign

Before reading this article, take a little less than three minutes to view a video that explains part of the effort discussed below:

    Click the following link to view the video: SSE Riga's "Let's Beat Stanford" Fundraising effort

[Update, 27 October, 2014: New York Times article about this topic, quoting Raimonds Kulbergs and me: Using Social Media to Shake Up College Fund-raising.]

 

§§§

'There will always be more people who want to have fun, than people who care about the cause."

This is how the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga (Latvia) introduces its approach to annual fundraising.

The business school is relatively small, new, and outside of Europe, not that well-known. Their recent "Let's Beat Stanford" effort – to increase alumni giving – took a behavioral approach to participation in financial support. SSE Riga alumnus Raimonds Kulbergs is driving this aggressive effort. Their goal was to defeat Stanford's Graduate School of Business, as measured by alumni participation in giving, since Stanford is seen as the most effective university fundraising machine in the world. 

Much of what Kulbergs and his colleagues accomplished has been done elsewhere, but there are lessons in Kulbergs' approach. He created an online experience to engage people more fully than many alumni programs do. And SSE's "Let's Beat Stanford" campaign has just earned them a presitigious European advertising honor, an Effie Award. The Effies (so named because they recognize advertising effectiveness) "recognize any and all forms of marketing communication that contribute to a brand's success." SSE Riga won a Gold Effie in the "Product or Service Launch" category.

And SSE Riga wasn't competing against other annual funds. They were in a program that recognizes the advertising success of firms such as Audi, Sony, Lexus and Coca-Cola. 

["There will always be more people who want to have fun,
than people who care about the cause"]

So what did they launch?
A creative way to improve fundraising results. Kulberg told me about his efforts a couple of years ago, after a dramatic rise in alumni giving, from 0% to 11% in four years. SSE then tried their new approach and leapt to 33% in the first year of Kulbergs' experimentation. I said to him at the time, "That's great, but unless you retain donors and maintain that level of support, your approach is not a viable long-term strategy." 

He contacted me again recently and said "We've retained donors and we reached 35% in 2013." So I took a closer look at what they've done.

Kulbergs' common sense approach uses the basic building blocks of behavioral influence, with an emphasis on how people interact online. In Kulbergs' words, "We bet it all on the assumption that we can significantly change the giving behavior of alumni by addressing their human needs, like recognition, playing and being social."

Specifically,

1) SSE Riga published nostalgic photos online to remind alumni about SEE Riga, their student experience and the community of alumni.

2) They gamified the donation process with:

    - competitive elements
    - infographics that change in real-time to show fundraising activity
    - reasonably priced naming opportunities (e.g., naming a classroom seat for 200 Euros) and
    - social media integration, of course.

3) They brought it to life with a face-to-face social event at the institution. 

[SSE Riga gamified the donation process with competition, infographics, naming opportunities and social media integration]

The infographics deserve a slightly closer look
They are simple, yet not often deployed on other giving sites I've seen. For example, a circle representing a graduation class grows as the total of its donations increases, relative to other class cohorts. This is just a variation on the "progress thermometer" which has been around for years, but animated online it takes on new life. Similar graphics expand nations on a map, in proportion to the giving from alumni in each country. And firms' employees can compete with fellow alumni working at their industry competitors. Finally, individuals are listed – and ranked – for their giving on separate donor honor rolls.

The campaign's creators more or less invented a school mascot (a unique creature named Hardy Rock) based on an architectural element of the institution's building. They then deployed imagery of the mascot "defeating" the mascots of universities with higher percentages of alumni giving, along the way to the top spot, occupied by Stanford. Stanford is represented here by its tree mascot, being defeated by Hardy Rock, who has laser beams coming out of his eyes – which is awesome:

 
But what about that goal of challenging Stanford?
In 2011, Stanford's business alumni were giving at a rate of 34% and SSE made that their goal. No European business school at the time had a participation rate anywhere near this, and SSE's own alumni were giving at 11%. But as noted above, in 2013, SSE Riga hit 35% participation – a percentage point higher than Stanford's.

Raimonds calls this a "David versus Goliath story," but I am not sure that's the case. Stanford's business school is much bigger than SSE, but a larger alumni population doesn't necessarily lead to a higher participation rate. In fact, smaller networks tend to be more densely connected, which can drive higher results than one would see in a larger population. In a small network, like SSE Riga's, any two members are more likely to know each other than in a larger network. Targeting about 1,500 alumni worldwide meant a scalable effort that didn't require a large insitutional investment in a professional fundraising operation. Stanford GSB claims 28,190 living alumni by comparison - almost 20 times as many as SSE Riga targeted with their campaign. 

Another noteworthy aspect of SSE RIga's results is that it is volunteer-driven. Raimonds says,

We formed a volunteer team with experise in business, IT, and design. Alumni working at ad agency DDB volunteered some of the creative capacity for this project – making nice-looking visuals and witty text for social media. They set out to reimagine the donation process and built a platform with game elements, integrated with social media, where alumni were given control over the donation campaign, and progress was fully transparent to the alumni in real time.

I think that their "outsider" perspective allowed the volunteers to see things with fresh eyes, something hard to do when you are immersed in the traditional every day machinery most of us work with in annual giving and alumni relations. 

A final lesson
This effort incorporates the building blocks of crowdfunding, which other educational institutions are adopting for small projects among their larger fundraising efforts. Without the background of a giant campaign to build endowment, or an army of gift officers securing large pledges, this crowdfunding approach becomes the core of a small institution's fundraising persona. It will be interesting to see if it drives the growth of a more traditional development office over time – a kind of reverse evolution of the fundraising office.  

Incidentally, Kulbergs recognized that the tactics they employed on behalf of SSE Riga could potentially aid any institution trying to engage more people more effectively in support of alma mater. So Kulbergs and his current colleagues quit their prior fulltime jobs and created a company called Funderful. They are already working with other European institutions to bring their approach to more universities, including this simple approach for Nyenrode Business University in the Netherlands. 

In case you skipped it up above, here again is the short (2 minutes 45 seconds) video about the overall approach and results from SSE Riga's award winning effort. This video is worth watching, to get a better sense of the game and social elements incorporated into the project:

Video: https://www.itsfunderful.com/sseriga_case

Also, visit SSE RIga's Alumni Giving page: https://donate.alumni.lv

 

Related link

Advancement Live: Raimonds Kulberg & Kristaps Silins of @itsfunderful

International Education: Using Social Media to Shake Up College Fund-Raising

Automation Undermines Relationship Building

LinkedIn long ago automated the "connection" process. Asking someone to connect is as easy as clicking a button. Accepting a request is just as easy. And therein lies a problem.

Making and accepting requests is so easy that it now seems commonplace for people to connect even though they don't really want to.

How?

Earlier today I received a LinkedIn connection request from someone I don't know, and whose company was unfamiliar to me. This happens all the time.

At a glance I saw that he and I shared three mutual LinkedIn connections (made clear by the How You're Connected display in the right margin of his profile). I sent a quick email to each of the three mutual contacts (people I do know).

My note said, "I see you're connected to So-and-So. What does his company do? Should I connect with him?"

"I messed up. I accepted his LinkedIn invitation  
thinking he was someone I know."

All three connections wrote back within a few minutes.

The first reply:

I accepted it too fast lol! I saw his connection to [his past employer] and thought they were looking for people ha! Don't accept, I'll be sacrificial lamb and when he tries to talk me into something I'll tell you what it is.

A moment later, this answer from the second mutual contact:

I messed up. I accepted his LinkedIn invitation yesterday thinking he was someone I know with a similar name, but then realized I didn’t know him. I know nothing about him or about [his company]. Sorry.

The third and final reply:

Oops! I had a bunch of requests pending and I must have clicked through them all too fast. I don't actually know him. 

Notice a pattern? 

By automating the connection process, we risk ignoring what we already know about establishing relationships. I’ve done the same thing myself, more than once. In the last month or so, I’ve done the “company with a similar name” thing, and the “salesperson with the same name as a volunteer” thing.

Luckily, it's easy to sever an undesired connection on LinkedIn: mouse over the downward arrow beside the "Endorse" button in the person's profile. The bottom-most menu item is "Remove connection."

I have said that LinkedIn could help us build stronger networks by making it harder to send an invitation (See: The Problem Sentence: How LinkedIn Hinders Effective Networking). But the burden is on us too. We need to slow down as we view connection requests, read the name, the company, and the message, and then view the sender's profile. 

Thinking before clicking will help ensure that our connections link us to people to whom we actually want to connect. And this in turn will make for more trusted, more valuable networks. 

Understanding Alumni Networks (and How LinkedIn Can Help)

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.

§

My last blog post talked about predicting the future of alumni relations, which relates directly to LinkedIn.

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.

• Tolstoy wrote about The Death of Ivan Ilich, who could keep his "professional life discrete from his actual life," disentangling his social and his business networks when needed.

• 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:

"Think of all the people I know who know people."

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.

Is it a fair trade off?  

The Future (Part III): Can We Predict the Future of Alumni Relations?

This is the third and final article adapted from my alumni relations keynote at CASE V in Chicago (December 2013), Alumni Relations & Advancement's Future: 3 Questions.

§§

"My interest is in the future,
because I am going to spend the rest of my life there."
–Charles Kettering 1946

§§

In the first article in this series, I discussed fundraising's relationship with alumni relations, followed by a look at how the changing student experience will affect alumni relations. 

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.

Related articles

The Future (Part I): Fundraising's Relationship to Alumni Relations

The Future (Part II): The Changing Student Experience & Alumni Relations

R.I.P. ALUMNI-L: CASE Rolls Out New Online Communities

[Updated December 17, 2013: CASE's archive of ALUMNI-L messages will not be available after December 31, 2013, according to CASE.]

For 25 years the software called Listserv has powered millions of e-mail based discussion groups. CASE has relied on the software to host a number of specialized discussion topics since the late 1990s.

Now the professional organization is moving its members' online discussion to an entirely web-based platform, and today, the alumni relations discussion moves there. The home page for all of CASE's new online discussions (for CASE members) is here:

CASE Communities Home Page

I created ALUMNI-L back in the early 1990s while working at Brown University ("L" in the name stands for the "list" of members receiving each other's emails on relevant topics). A few people from the annual Ivy Plus alumni relations conference wanted to communicate year-round, and I volunteered to create a way for them to do that. Listserv made it easy. The group started with perhaps eight members, and over time we invited our co-workers to join. Soon, people from other institutions were asking to participate, and in under a year we had an international discussion going.

[I created ALUMNI-L with eight members in the early 1990s...
Today it has more than 2,000 members]

In 1998 I asked CASE to take over ALUMNI-L, and they agreed. The list had more than 1,300 members at that time, and today, as CASE retires the list, it has more than 2,000. Before CASE took over, ALUMNI-L was even the subject of a dissertation written by a University of South Carolina doctoral student!

Today ALUMNI-L goes away, and list members (and others whom CASE expects will find the content relevant) have received their welcome message via the new system. CASE expects the new web-based alumni relations discussion to be available to approximately 9,500 individuals worldwide.

Despite the wording of CASE's message about the transition, every message on ALUMNI-L since August of 1998, when CASE took over, is easily searchable on CASE's own servers. But they also point out that the new system supports document sharing and other features not available before. The new system has site-wide search; member profiles, and more intuitive control over how and when one receives messages.

[Today CASE replaces ALUMNI-L with a new online community] 

Using the System
Many of the same "best practices" for using ALUMNI-L apply to this (and any) online discussion forum too. To get the most out of it, keep in mind the following suggestions:

1. If you ask for links or referrals, instruct others to send them to your email address, not to the entire list. Promise to compile and share what you learn. Later you can send a brief summary of your findings to the entire list. This is how you repay other members' generous information sharing, and it will dramatically decrease the number of messages others need to scan and wade through every day.
   
   
2. Never post a message that says (in effect), "Me too." If someone asks for information, everyone else will see the response when it's eventually posted. 

Good luck to CASE with its new format for discussion, and sincere thanks to everyone who gave ALUMNI-L an unexpected 19-year run as the central forum for global discussions about alumni relations.

Related Link

• Welcome message to new community (CASE member login required)

Innovation Is Not About Technology

The craze for "innovation" seems insatiable. Blog posts, interviews, books, magazine articles – "Innovation" is an even hotter buzzword than "disruption." On Amazon.com, a search for "innovation" among technology books returns 2,654 results of various kinds.

What is innovation's role in the evolution of institutional advancement?

Here are two thoughts to consider:

1. Innovation isn't about technology

Most observers equate "innovation" with "applying technology." But innovating simply means being inventive and creative in problem-solving.

Technology is one outcome of innovation, not a necessary ingredient. Sometimes innovation delivers new ways of doing things that have absolutely nothing to do with technology. For example, changing your staff structure or board recruitment process doesn't require technology, but can incorporate innovative ideas.

The Economist says it this way:

"Innovation and technology, though talked of almost interchangeably, are not the same thing. Innovation is what people newly know how to do. Technology is what they are actually doing..."

[We don't need an app, a web page, or a device
to improve our effectiveness]

Or more succinctly, as design executive Kelsey Ruger puts it:

"[W]hen it comes to innovation, technology is an artifact."

In other words, new technologies are one outcome of some innovative processes. Not all innovation involves technology, either as an enabler or as a result.

The relationship between innovation and technology is probably more cyclical than these linear descriptions suggest. But the larger point is:

We usually don't need an app, a fancier web page, or a device to improve our effectiveness.

 

2. Innovation's impact is generally over-rated

Innovation matters, because without new ideas, we just copy something that others have been doing for years – and our programs stop evolving and improving. They become unresponsive to new needs and to new opportunities. Risk-taking leads to discovery, which drives continual improvement.

In reality, though, almost all change in our well-established field is incremental. Evolution, not revolution, delivers the majority of the improvement.

[It's rare that an innovation has widespread impact]

In short, it's very rare that an innovation has widespread impact. Most innovation is barely noticeable. 

Most, but not all. So of course, we still need to pursue change and hunt for improvements that will make a big improvement in effectiveness, however we measure it.

But relentlessly focusing on the revolutionary importance of innovation may undersell the cumulative impact of the many small, and otherwise unremarkable improvements that make us better, more relevant, and more effective.

 

Related articles

Has the ideas machine broken down?

Innovation: Not just about technology