I’ve given presentations here and there around Canada and the U.S., but I’ve never travelled THIS far. On Aug. 24, I will present a workshop in Sydney, Australia — a one-day master class for CASE Asia-Pacific on using data to measuring alumni engagement. My wife and I will be taking some time to see some of that beautiful country, leaving in just a few days.
The workshop attendees will be alumni relations professionals from institutions large and small, and in the interest of keeping the audience’s needs in mind, I hope to convince them that measuring engagement is worth doing by talking about what’s in it for them.
This will be the easy part. Figuring out how to quantify engagement will allow them to demonstrate the value of their teams’ activity to the university, using language their senior leadership understands. Scoring can also help alumni teams better target segments based on varying levels of engagement, evaluate current alumni programming, and focus on activities that yield the greatest boost in engagement.
There is a related but larger context for this discussion, however. I am not certain that everyone will be keen to hear about it.
Here’s the situation. Everything in alumni relations is changing. Alumni populations are growing, the number of donors is decreasing, and traditional engagement methods are less effective. Friend-raising and “one size fits all” approaches to engagement are increasingly seen as unsustainable wastes of resources. (A Washington, DC based consultancy, the Education Advisory Board, makes this point very well in this excerpt of a report which you can download here: The Strategic Alumni Relations Enterprise.)
I don’t know so much about the Asia-Pacific region, but in North America university leaders are questioning the very purpose and value of typical alumni relations activities. In this scenario, engagement measurement is intended for more than producing a merely informational report or having something to brag about: Engagement measurement is really a tool that enables alumni relations to better align itself with the Advancement mission.
In place of “one size fits all,” alumni relations teams are under pressure to understand how to interact with alumni at different levels of engagement. Alumni who are somewhat engaged should be targeted with relevant programs and messages to bring them to the next level, while alumni who are at the lowest levels of engagement should not have significant resources directed at them.
Alumni at high levels of engagement, however, require special and customized treatment. They’re looking for deeper and more fulfilling experiences that involve furthering the mission of the institution itself. Think of guest lecturing, student recruitment, advisory board roles, and mentorship, career development and networking for students and new grads. Low-impact activities such as pub nights and other social events are a waste of the potential of this group and will fail to move them to continue contributing their time and money.
Think of what providing these quality experiences will entail. For one, alumni relations staff will have to collaborate with their colleagues in development, as well as in other offices across campus — enrolment management, career services, and academic offices. This will be a new thing, and perhaps not an easy thing, for alumni relations teams stuck in traditional friend-raising mode and working in isolation.
But it’s exactly through these strategic partnerships that alumni relations can prove its value to the whole institution and attract additional resources even in an environment where leaders are demanding to know the ROI of everything.
Along with better integration, a key element of this evolution will be robust engagement scoring. According to research conducted by the Education Advisory Board, alumni relations does the poorest job of any office on campus in providing hard data on its real contribution to the university’s mission. Too many of us are still stuck on tracking our activities instead of the results of those activities.
It doesn’t have to be that way, if the alumni team can effectively partner with other units in Advancement. For those of us on the data, reporting, and analysis side of the house, get ready: The alumni team is coming.
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